If a person nowadays wishes to become informed of the news, it is not hard for them to do so—visiting a news website, opening social media, or turning on the television fulfils the task easily enough. It is more challenging, perhaps, to try and remain ignorant of it, given the influx of news online. As such, there is all sorts of ‘journalism’ present in the modern world, from celebrity gossip to reporting capable of toppling governments. But what of the seventeenth century?
Enter the bookshop of John Trundle in Barbican, London, in 1614 and you would find no shortage of news with which to familiarise and entertain yourself. Perhaps the news of Three Bloodie Murders committed the year earlier catches your eye. Or maybe it is the report of a man in France who, a habitual blasphemer, ‘sunke into the ground up to the neck’ and died for his sins—a frightening tale indeed!
Just as you think you have made up your mind, a vivid and graphic woodcut catches your eye: It is from a pamphlet purporting to relay ‘True and Wonderfull’ news of a dragon roaming the woods of Sussex, which has slain many men and animals. You recall hearing about such a creature from a ballad-monger a few days prior but to see its violent form rendered so graphically is another matter—and it will only set you back a penny.
Leaving the shop, newly-bought pamphlet in hand, you cannot help but overhear a hum of gossip—more fighting between Russia and Poland, renewed controversy over the suspicious death of Thomas Overbury the year before, and some hearty praise of some dramatist’s new play (now on at The Globe).
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Were all the aforementioned accounts put into print and published under The Weekly Informer, there would be little doubt that they constituted a ‘newspaper’. Yet, on their own, it is safer to conclude that these are ‘news pamphlets’—and the gossip simply gossip. Even if they do not meet the physical, or communicative, definition of a ‘newspaper’, the sheer number of news items produced means that an early modern Londoner might quite easily have come to acquire as much information as they could possibly hope to obtain from one. But do these works constitute ‘journalism’?
Britannica defines ‘journalism’ as the ‘collection, preparation, and distribution of news and related commentary and feature materials through such print and electronic media as newspapers, magazines, books, blogs, webcasts, podcasts, social networking and social media sites, and e-mail as well as through radio, motion pictures, and television.’ By this definition, news pamphlets are examples of journalism.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘journalism’, somewhat unhelpfully, as ‘the occupation or profession of a journalist’ and ‘journalist’, also slightly tautologically, as ‘someone who earns his or her living by editing or writing for a public journal or journals.’ The term ‘journal’ has various definitions, and those that require it to be ‘periodical’ (i.e. published regularly) clearly exclude these pamphlets. The OED also dates the term ‘journalist’ to 1693, but a publication from 1691 makes reference to those who ‘would be so adventurous as to undertake to be a Journalist’ and a 1645 text refers to ‘Journalists and Commentators of the time’.
The first time ‘newspapers’ can clearly be observed in England is around 1621, when Nathaniel Butter (among a few others) began to sell short pamphlets with news from various countries, usually concerning warfare. The difference was not the information which was available—stories of bloody battles had long dominated the press—but its form: regularly published, concerning a variety of places, and under a standardized, general title (rather than one which was specific to a given event). Joad Raymond’s contention that the term ‘journalist’ is ‘somewhat anachronistic’ is important to note (and it is the reason I have used inverted commas around the term in the title); Those who edited these texts—they were amalgamations of letters, eye witness accounts, etc… so to call them ‘writers’ is misleading—did not seek to investigate claims or hold power to account, simply to convey alleged ‘truth’ to their readers.
By the 1640s, these publications (designated ‘newsbooks’) were commonplace in London. Raymond, in his study of the invention of the English newspaper, stresses the importance and popularity of these pamphlets in communicating information, both in London and the countryside. Travelling chapmen would sell these proto-newspapers in rural areas and hawkers would shout news in the London streets, so illiteracy was no excuse for ignorance.
Various licensed and unlicensed newsbooks emerged during the Civil War. Among them was A Perfect Diurnall of the Passages In Parliament, which emerged in 1642. It was edited by Samuel Pecke and published by William Cooke and Francis Coules, among others. By now, it was not uncommon for newsbooks to start their reporting on the title page, a clear change from the typical form of pamphlets—which had a designated title page.
The woodcut below is a particularly interesting indication of compositional innovation, as the title of the newsbook protrudes into the crude woodcut, which depicts the chamber of the House of Commons. The reassurance to the reader that this newsbook contains information ‘more fully and exactly taken then by any other printed Copies as you will finde upon Comparing’ is a testament to the increasing competition in the marketplace of news.
There is a superficial objectivity to these newsbooks which quickly fades away under closer examination. They may have stressed impartiality but political allegiances were clear, whether genuine or attempts at pandering to popular audiences. Following the Banbury mutiny in May 1649, The Kindomes Faithfull and Impartiall Scout wasted no opportunity to pin the blame on troublesome Levellers, who ‘have thrown aside the Spade, & taken up the Sword’—also mistaking a key instigator, Robert Everard, for William Everard, a prominent Leveller.
The Moderate Intelligencer was undoubtedly pro-Army but much more neutral in its treatment of Levellers. When three Leveller soldiers were executed for their part in the mutiny, the editor chose to praise them for dying ‘like Romans, fearing death no more then an enemy’, though they unreservedly condemned the ‘contrivers of this vile and foolish enterprize.’
Perhaps the most radical newsbook was The Moderate (which borrowed more than a little of its style, form, and nomenclature from the Intelligencer). In May 1649, the House of Commons voted to separate the Leveller prisoners John Lilburne, William Walwyn, Richard Overton, and Thomas Prince, as well as denying them maintenance. The writer decries this decision as ‘worse than ever was exercised by the late King, or any of his predecessors’, suggesting that denying them maintenance from the state meant that should they run out of money they might ‘starve in prison’. In the same issue, the murder of Isaac Dorislaus, an ally of Cromwell, is likewise emotionally decried as one which ‘makes all Cavaliers odious, not only to the English Nation, but to the whole world.’
These biases were not by mistake, they were meticulously crafted: Laurent Curelly contends that The Moderate‘s pro-Leveller stance was adopted, at least in part, because of the competitive edge it allowed them to gain by standing out from other newsbooks.
The influence of these newsbooks cannot be called into question. Parliament recognised their threat to public order and the image of the Commonwealth, frequently issuing warrants for the arrests of their editors if they became sufficiently troublesome. The presses of the 1640s were flooded with all sorts of newsbooks, many of which were little more than direct copies of others. They were also popular.
The woodturner Nehemiah Wallington was so troubled by his addiction to these newsbooks that he lamented ‘finding so many of these littel pamflets of weekly news about my house I thought they were so many theeves that had stole away my mony before I was aware of them.’ Newsbooks were increasingly consecutively paginated and included issue numbers, prompting the reader to collect more than one and enticing them to purchase the next when it was published.
These newsbooks demonstrate a change not simply in the form of literary news, but also in the way that information was disseminated. If a Londoner in 1614 would have needed to pillage the shops of St. Paul’s Churchyard to quench their thirst for news, a customer in the 1640s could do the same by making a single purchase.
