Review: Grub Street: The Origins of the British Press by Ruth Herman

 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.

Review: Eighteenth Century Vignettes (Third Series) by Austin Dobson

 Eighteenth Century Vignettes (Third Series) by Austin Dobson is right up my alley. It’s a miscellaneous collection of short essays dealing with various side roads of eighteenth century culture, often from a bookish angle. It’s told in an easy and readable manner and is generally full of charm and interest. As Dobson says in the introduction (in verse), he wishes to take a detailed peek at some obscure detail and to ‘arabesque’ with it. 

The first vignette is about David Garrick’s last performances, which roles he took and reports of the audiences who saw them. They all seem in agreement, that he gave his all in those last performances, reminding his audiences what had made him so celebrated in his profession. Elizabeth Carter was particularly rapturous, and all those who wrote about him remarked on the rapid changes of expressions and micro expressions in his face, and the way he delivered lines as if they’d come to him spontaneously. As Johnson remarked, it was no wonder his face seemed more worn than his years, he’d used it more than most people.

There are a number of vignettes about people’s libraries… Dobson seems to enjoy rooting through old auction papers and accounts to find out exactly what a person had got. I learned about Dr Mead, an extremely successful doctor whose house became the initial home of Great Ormond Street Hospital. He had over ten thousand books and was a rare collector, in that he was a generous lender as well as a hoarder. He was also known as a happy person, with Johnson saying he lived in “the broad sunshine of life more than any man”. I’d not heard of him but was very pleased to meet him. (Though I’ve just looked him up on wikipedia to confirm Johnson’s quote and he may have also been a sex pest, lampooned by Sterne as ‘Dr Kunastrokius’ - so maybe not a completely clean figure).

Another library Dobson explores is Henry Fielding’s. Fielding had almost no novels, not even his own. It’s very possible that a person who wrote one of my favourite novels read fewer in his life than I typically do in a month. What he did have was law books (he was a lawyer after all) and books in Latin. He’s been accused of faking his classicist credentials but his book collection heavily imply that he really did mostly read them.

There’s a vignette on Hogarth’s Peregrination, a little trip the feisty painter took with a group of friends, and of which I have a facsimile of the group’s memorial account. One about Walpole’s press at Strawberry Hill and the kind of thing he printed for himself (including his Hieroglyphic Tales), one about Matthew Arnold, a rather sniffy one about Ramsay - a painter who rivalled Reynolds in his day but is less regarded now. There were a number of intriguing lives, including one of Thomas Gent, an Irish man who became a printer in York but was eventually bankrupted.

My favourite vignette was one where Dobson goes through a publisher’s catalogue and digs up various authors and works that haven’t been remembered. There’s a novel called Polly Honeycombe, a female Quixote figure who is driven mad by circulating libraries and the novels of Fielding and Richardson. Talking of Fielding, someone wrote a sequel to Tom Jones, depicting his married state. Someone also wrote a Sterne offshoot, The Life and Opinions of Miss Sukey Shandy of Bow Street, Gentlewoman. Among these unknown writers are the works of Eliza Haywood, someone who’s getting far more recognition these days.

The copy of the book I read was printed in 1896 and had a similar list of mostly forgotten works from the turn of that century. It’s possible that we are truly missing out on such works as The Lady of the Iron Bracelets and Who Poisoned Hetty Layton?. It is also interesting that in the 130-odd years since my copy was printed, I was the first person to read the book through, as I had to cut some of the pages open. Even a previous owner, George Stevenson, who fixed a lovely ship-themed ex-libris to the front, had not finished it. This is a shame, Eighteenth Century Vignettes (Third Series) is an easy and enjoyable read that poked into many odds and ends of eighteenth century stuff. 

Review: The Sultan’s Istanbul on 5 Kurush a Day by Charles FitzRoy

 The Sultan’s Istanbul on 5 Kurush a Day is part of a series of books which purport to be travel-guides for visiting various cities in various time periods. Ancient Athens and Rome have one, as does Shakespeare’s London. This one deals with Istanbul I 1750.

Istanbul is still a fascinating city, and the Ottoman capital at this time is a place of luxury, grandeur, mystery and strict social control. It’s not the Baghdad of Arabian Nights full of pickpockets, and while there are beggars, they are mostly helped by the various mosques and the principal of zakat.

The first piece of advice FitzRoy gives the traveller is to hire a dragoman, this is more than an interpreter, this is someone who can interpret the laws and customs of Islam and the Ottomans, and a good dragoman seems to be someone who leads their charge around safely, without being thrown into prison. He is also in charge of the bakshish, a mandatory tip/bribe that ensures anything happens.

As a Christian, you will be staying in the Foreigner/Christian area of Pera, which is also known as Beyoglu (something I found interesting because it’s also the name of the most popular Turkish restaurant in the area, a place everyone knows as ‘the Turkish on the corner’ and nobody knows as Beyoglu.) You will probably want to explore the local mosques, perhaps even the grand old cathedral of Byzantium, the ‘Ayasofya’, but you will need to do it carefully and respectfully, these are functional places of worship. 

Even harder to enter is the Topkapi Sarayi, the Imperial Palace of ‘the shadow of God on Earth’, the Great Turk. If you get into the first two courts, probably through some sort of diplomatic contact, there’s no way you will enter the seraglio, the most guarded places in the palace, a place totally haram. There’s a lot in the book about the separation of men and women in Istanbul, the headscarves and cover-alls, how even the most basic houses divide between a men’s area and a women’s area. 

It’s in subjects like this the book falls into some difficulties in point of view. An eighteenth (and nineteenth) century traveller to Istanbul would have been fascinated by this area of things, a secret world filled with erotic charge that was probably quite dull in reality. This book wants to honour the eroticism a reader from the 1750s would have implicitly carried to Istanbul but is clearly concerned about very legitimate modern concerns about orientalism and the ‘sexy foreigner’ notion. 

Elements such as this, an awareness of anti-islamic prejudice and also an awareness that (many) Europeans have more of an idea about Islam than people in the eighteenth century, means that the book never fully grasps who its audience is. While the book is a guide to 1750s Istanbul, it’s never clear whether the audience is supposed to be a European in the 1750s or a European from today who would like to travel to 1750s Istanbul. This makes the book a little muddled, with lots of fascinating information but a shilly-shallying tone.

The book has chapters about the layout, the bazaars, how to shop and explore, where to go - where not to go, Christians are very unwelcome in the holy area of Eyup. There are descriptions of public holidays and celebrations, particularly the yearly departure of the hajj pilgrims and the circumcision of the princes. There’s a fair bit about the social order, the Grand Turk himself, his sultanas and other sexual partners, the always present janissaries, who may overturn their soup tureens and riot at any moment. There’s information about the truly peculiar system of handing on power, where Sultan’s sons used to murder each other till there was one left, but now are locked in a gilded cage until one is selected.

There’s also a lot about how the law and religion are intertwined, and how the people believe that the state exists to enforce Allah’s law. It’s a place where religion colours every moment of every day, with the muezzins ringing out for the prayers. If the book is to be believed, 1750s Istanbul is a very ordered place and very safe from unrest (if the janissaries aren’t on one) but this order is based on strict control.

I’d love to visit Istanbul today, much of the beauty described in the book still stands, but the book does make me wish I could hop in a Tardis and visit it then, provided I had a good dragoman with me (and not the Doctor, he’s terrible at keeping his head down).