Grub Street: The Origins of the British Press is a book more concerned with its subtitle than title. The notion of Grub Street, the name given to the ranks of poor writers who formed the first generation of people writing for money, is only mentioned in the introduction. The rest of the book is far more interested in how newsgatherers and newspapers developed during the factionalism running up to the English Civil War and beyond. It’s far more about these broader patterns and the struggle between speech and censorship than it is about that peculiar explosion of invention in the streets of London in the early eighteenth century.
The first 100 pages of this 250 page book are about how news was gathered and disseminated in the years prior to the eighteenth century. Rich people in the country could sign up to a newsletter, a service providing a private, handwritten letter containing news and views. There were attempts to create a more public facing service, with a number of papers calling themselves Merculius, giving information pro or anti King Charles, depending on their political leanings. Herman writes a lot about how governments censored the proto-press, whether that was through the Star Chamber, or through various licensing bodies. She shows how these bodies could be extremely heavy handed, putting people in pillories, branding them or slitting ears and noses, but these acts of aggression ultimately didn’t work, people wanted news.
The era after James II was deposed were ones of great political factions that cohered into two parties over the course of the century, even if those parties were frequently split amongst themselves. This, of course, led to great outpourings of print, especially on hot-button topics like the sermon of Sacheverell. These were fought in election, in pamphlet and in ballad, with a population, mostly unenfranchised, who were nonetheless desperately interested in news. It was a peculiarity of the British people that many visitors noticed, that the people were news junkies and all had opinions on topics that people of their class would not in other places.
There’s a section about women’s periodicals, many of them written by men. It’s interesting that she cites The Female Tatler as written by a man, where my copy confidently attributes some of its run to Delarivier Manley, a woman that Herman writes a lot about as one of the political players along with Swift and Defoe. It’s interesting that she deals mainly with these writers, rather than the lesser known or less comfortable writers. She talks about John Dunton’s Athenaeum as being one of the sources of notes and queries content without mentioning that the whole learned committee who answered the questions was just John Dunton in various imaginary wigs.
One of the best chapters was about advertising. She remarks how much of the advertising space was dedicated to very dubious medicines, obviously showing how uncertain people were about their health - it reminds me of when I went to America and discovered their television is 20% pill adverts. As well as medicine, there were adverts for clothes, theatre and new books. (I was hoping there’d be a discussion of ‘Orator’ Henley’s Hype Doctor adverts which seem to pioneer a kind of confusion/ragebait/clickbait, but he wasn’t mentioned).
The very best chapter was about local news outlets. She traces how early local papers, like the Stamford Mercury, simply stole things from the London newspapers and then had a local advertising section. Even as these papers were more established, they didn’t particularly deal much with the local area, unless it was election time, then there were often two or more newspapers backing different candidates. It reminded me of fighting newspapers in the Eatenswill elections in Pickwick Papers. The Ludlow Postman seemed like a great rag though, pity it only lasted a year.
There’s a chapter about the South Sea Bubble, how it was initially boosted by the papers before being lambasted by them. They fed the flames of speculation and then tried to feed the flames of revenge. Certainly, a number of Grub Street figures did poorly in the speculation, I know Defoe did, but that’s not mentioned much.
This book is a veery good history of the combative history of the early British press, of how they fought for their right to opinion and then blasted that opinion in every direction. It’s an interesting way of looking at the papers we have now, who all have their own political slant but many are too cowed to express it. It’s a great book about the origins of Fleet Street, I’m not so convinced in it as a book about Grub Street.
Grub Street was about more than news, it was also the nascent novel, the literary review, the dictionary, the pop-history, pop-economics, pop-theology. It was the alive, slightly slimy soup that fostered (and festered) talents like Johnson and nutters like Henley. It brought forth all kinds of stuff, cookbooks, school stories, self-help and improvement. With this book focusing on news and newspapers it seems to miss some of the sheer multitude of stuff that Grub Street was. It’s also irritatingly general at times, informing us of ‘harsh punishments’ or ‘cruel invective’ without giving us much of it, that’s why the best chapters were the advertisement and local news ones, they gave us glimpses of that genuine Grub Street voice.
The most Grub Street-y sounding part of the book comes in the introduction, where a man called talks about setting himself up as a writer for hire with a sign on his door reading, ‘Here Liveth Humphry Scribblewit, Who writeth all sorts of Pamphlets, Letters of Controversies, Answers and Replies, Poems, Satires, Libels, Lampoons, Songs, Ballads, Essays, Travels, Voyages, Novels and Romances and reasonable rated: Enquire Within’. Now that’s the sheer range of Grub Street. Unfortunately she simply describes it as a 1720s work and there are no footnotes so I had to google it and it comes from A Letter from a Student in Grub-Street, to a Reverend High-Priest and Head of a College in Oxford by Nicholas Amhurst.
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