Abstract
Edward Villiers Rippingille’s The Post Office (1819) depicts the busy heart of an English country town.1 The post has arrived, letters, parcels and newspapers have been delivered, customers dropped off and others collected. In the distance there is a commotion as the post coach with travellers on board leaves the town, the guard at the back blowing his horn to signal their departure. Street sellers, attracted by the crowds, peddle their wares. Men and women chat while queuing expectantly for their post. Others, already in possession of letters, have hurriedly opened them and read the latest from friends and family, business associates, patrons and others. One woman sets down her basket to make conversation. In the centre of the piece, a gentleman holds a news paper and converses with others, while a tradesman in his overalls seeks to peer closer at the front page. In this busy scene, social and material interactions connect local inhabitants with one another and with those in the world beyond by letter and in print, much aided by eighteenth-century innovations in press, post and roads that provided faster and more regular communication than ever before.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
F. Knight Hunt (1850) The Fourth Estate: Contributions Towards a History of Newspapers, and the Liberty of the Press (London);
A. Andrews (1859) The History of British Journalism (2 vols., London);
H. R. Fox Bourne (1887) English Newspapers: Chapters in the History of Journalism (2 vols., London);
Arthur Aspinall (1949) Politics and the Press, c.1780–1850 (London).
G. R. Cranfield (1962) The Provincial Newspaper, 1700–1760 (London);
R. M. Wiles (1965) Freshest Advices: Early Provincial Newspapers in England (Ohio).
H. Barker (1998) Newspapers, Politics and Public Opinion (Oxford);
H. Barker (2000) Newspapers, Politics and English Society, 1695–1855 (Harlow);
J. Black (2001) The English Press, 1621–1861 (Stroud);
J. Black (1987) The English Press in the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia);
C. Y. Ferdinand (1997) Benjamin Collins and the Provincial Newspaper Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford);
B. Harris (1996) Politics and the Rise of the Press: Britain and France, 1620–1800 (London and New York);
K. Wilson (1995) Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England 1715–1785 (Cambridge), esp. pp. 37–47, 108–14, 348–50.
T. Bickham (2009) Making Headlines: The American Revolution as Seen through the British Press (DeKalb, IL);
U. Heyd (2012) Reading Newspapers: Press and Public in Eighteenth-Century Britain and America (Oxford).
J. Raymond (2012) ‘Newspapers: A National or International Phenomenon?’ Media History, XVIII, 249–57.
H. Barker and S. Burrows (2002) ‘Introduction’, Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America 1760–1820 (Cambridge), p. 1.
L. Brockliss and D. Eastwood (eds) (1997) A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles c. 1750-c. 1850 (Manchester);
Neville Kirk (ed.) (2000) Northern Identities: Historical Interpretations of ‘the North’ and ‘Northerness’ (Aldershot).
Studies on individual proprietors and regions include: Ferdinand, Benjamin Collins; G. Bergel (2004) ‘William Dicey and Eighteenth-Century Print Culture’ (London Univ., Ph.D. thesis);
I. Jackson (2003) ‘Print in Provincial England: Reading and Northampton, 1720–1800’ (Oxford Univ., Ph.D. thesis);
J. D. Andrew (1954) ‘The Derbyshire Press, 1720–1855’ (Reading Univ., MA thesis);
K. G. Burton (1954) The Early Newspaper Press in Berkshire (Reading);
D. Clare (1960) ‘The Growth and Importance of the Newspaper Press in Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield and Leeds Between 1780 and 1800’ (Manchester Univ., MA thesis);
D. F. Gallop (1952) ‘Chapters in the History of the Provincial Newspaper Press, 1700–1855’ (Reading Univ., MA thesis).
Criticisms and revisions of Habermas are of course numerous: B. Robbins (1993) ‘Introduction: The Public as a Phantom’, in B. Robbins (ed.) The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis), pp. vii–xxvi;
G. Eley (1992) ‘Nations, Publics and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century’, in C. Calhoun (ed.) Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA), pp. 289–339 and even more radically of counterpublics (Warner, 2002).
J. Nerone (2006) ‘The Future of Communication History’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 23, 254–62 p. 259).
On the middling ranks, family strategies and enterprise: L. Davidoff and C. Hall (1987) Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London), esp. pt 2;
R. Grassby (2001) Kinship and Capitalism: Marriage, Family, and Business in the English-Speaking World, 1580–1740 (New York and Cambridge);
M. Hunt (1996) The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family in England, 1680–1780 (London and Berkeley);
R. J. Morris (1990) Class, Sect and Party: The Making of the British Middle Class: Leeds, 1820–50 (Manchester);
R. J. Morris (2005) Men, Women and Property in England, 1780–1870: A Social and Economic History of Family Strategies amongst the Leeds Middle Classes (Cambridge).
R. Darnton (1982) ‘What Is the History of Books?’, Daedalus, CXI, 65–83.
H. French (2000) ‘Social Status, Localism and the “Middle Sort of People” in England 1620–1750’, Past and Present, CLXVI, 66–99 p. 87).
S. D’Cruze (1994) ‘The Middling Sort in Eighteenth-Century Colchester: Independence, Social Relations and the Community Broker’, in J. Barry and C. Brooks (eds) The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550–1800 (Basingstoke), pp. 181–207.
J. Brewer (1976) Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge); Barker, Newspapers, Politics and Public Opinion; Wilson, Sense of the People.
Christopher Reid (2012) Imprison’d Wranglers: The Rhetorical Culture of the House of Commons 1760–1800 (Oxford).
N. McKendrick, J. Brewer and J. H. Plumb (1982) The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth Century England (London); J. Brewer and R. Porter (eds) Consumption and the World of Goods (London);
B. Fine and E. Leopold (1993) The World of Consumption (London).
On advertisements and consumer society: C. Y. Ferdinand, ‘Selling It to the Provinces: News and Commerce around Eighteenth-Century Salisbury’, in Brewer and R. Porter (eds) (1994) Consumption and the World of Goods (London).
J. C. D. Clark (1985) English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice During the Ancien Regime (Cambridge);
L. Colley (1992) Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven).
B. Hilton (2008) Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know? England, 1783–1846 (Oxford).
On tensions within the historiography of the eighteenth-century press and the search for a middle ground: K. Schweizer (2006) ‘Introduction: Parliament and the Press: A Case for Synergy’, Parliamentary History, XXV, 1–8.
L. Brown (1985) Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford);
A. J. Lee (1976) The Origins of the Popular Press in England 1855–1914 (London);
J. H. Wiener (1969) The War of the Unstamped: The Movement to Repeal the British Newspaper Tax, 1830–1836 (London);
K. Gilmartin (1996) Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge);
M. Hewitt (2013) The Dawn of the Cheap Press in Victorian Britain: The End of the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’, 1849–1869 (London);
S. Koss (1990) The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain, Volume 1: The Nineteenth Century (London);
A. Jones (1996) Powers of the Press: Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth-Century England (Aldershot).
Richard R. John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb (2015) The Making of News … Should also Add E. P. Thompson (Oxford).
Professionals’ should be studied within the context of period: S. Nenadic (2012) ‘Architect-Builders in London and Edinburgh, c. 1750–1800, and the Market for Expertise’, Historical Journal, LV, 597–617 p. 601);
R. O’Day (2000) The Professions in Early Modern England, 1450–1600 (Abingdon), ch. 1.
R. Pearson and D. Richardson (2001) ‘Business Networking in the Industrial Revolution’, Economic History Review, LIV, 657–79;
Sheryllyne Haggerty (2012) ‘Merely for Money?’: Business Culture in the British Atlantic, 1750–1815 (Liverpool), esp. ch. 6.
Craig Muldrew (1998) The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke);
Margot Finn (2003) The Character of Credit. Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge); Haggerty, ‘Merely for Money?’
D. Gambetta (1988) ‘Can We Trust Trust?’, in D. Gambetta (ed.) Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations (Oxford), pp. 213–37;
R. C. Mayer, J. H. Davis and F. D. Schoorman (1995) ‘An Integrative Model of Organisational Trust’, Academy of Management Review, XX, 709–34 p. 712).
A. Giddens (1990) The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge).
Ferdinand Töennies (1887) Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, trans. Charles P. Loomis (1957), Community and Society (London).
R. Putnam (2001) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of an American Community (New York).
E. Muir (2008) ‘In Some Neighbours We Trust: On the Exclusion of Women from the Public in Renaissance Italy’, in D. E. Bornstein and D. S. Peterson (eds) Florence and Beyond: Culture, Society and Politics in Renaissance Italy: Essays in Honour of John Najemy (Toronto).
C. Muldrew (1998) The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (London).
M. Finn (2003) The Character of Credit. Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge).
On the tensions between these interpretations: K. Tawny Paul (2011) ‘Credit and Social Relations amongst Artisans and Tradesmen in Edinburgh and Philadelphia, c. 1710–1770’ (Edinburgh Univ., PhD thesis), introduction.
John Smail (2003) ‘The Culture of Credit in Eighteenth Century Commerce: The English Textile Industry’, Enterprise and Society, IV, 299–325.
S. P. Shapiro (1987) ‘The Social Control of Impersonal Trust’, American Journal of Sociology, XCIII, 623–58;
L. Zucker (1986) ‘Production of Trust: Institutional Sources of Economic Structure, 1840–1920’, in S. Bacherach (ed.) Research in Organizational Behavior (Greenwich, CT), pp. 54–60.
H. Barker (2009) ‘Medical Advertising and Trust in Late-Georgian England’, Urban History, XXXVI, 379–98.
A. Johns (2000) The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago).
N. Luhmann (1998) ‘Familiarity, Confidence, Trust: Problems and Alternatives’, in D. Gambetta (ed.) Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations (Oxford), pp. 94–107.
Copyright information
© 2016 Victoria E. M. Gardner
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gardner, V.E.M. (2016). Introduction. In: The Business of News in England, 1760–1820. Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137336392_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137336392_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-57447-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-33639-2
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)