The English Press

A History

Jeremy Black

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781472525635
• eBook ISBN: 9781472524911
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

In this succinct one-volume account of the rise and fall of the English press, Jeremy Black traces the medium's history from the emergence of the country's newspaper industry to the Internet age. The English Press focuses on the major developments in the world of print journalism and sets the history of the press in wider currents of English history, political, social, economic and technological. Black takes the reader through a chronological sequence of chapters, with a final chapter exploring possible scenarios for the future of print media. He investigates whether we are witnessing the demise or simply a crisis of the press in the aftermath of the News of the World scandal and Levinson Inquiry. A new title by one of the most eminent historians of Britain and a leading expert on the history of the press, The English Press will appeal to undergraduate students of British and media history and journalism, as well as to the general reader with an interest in the history of England and the media.

1

Origins

Newspapers were an eventual consequence of the spread of printing and the development of a culture of print. England was certainly not at the front of this process. It was China that played a key role in the spread of printing. Movable type was employed with ceramic type pieces, wooden movable type following in the fourteenth century, while, in the thirteenth, the use of metal type appeared in Korea. However, the number of characters in both languages made it very time-consuming to set type. In contrast, European alphabets were more convenient for printing. The stress in China was on xylographic printing with texts carved onto woodblocks, a relatively simple technology that permitted the frequent reprinting of books once their blocks had been cut. In contrast, if movable type was used for other purposes, individual books would then have to be reset to be reprinted. As there were plentiful labourers in China, woodblock printing was inexpensive and easy.¹

In both China and Korea, there was a focus on bureaucratic requirements and controls. In China, the main source of books was commercial publishers, but the registration of households led to the production of printed forms, while the scale of government fiscal requirements helped to ensure a degree of technological innovation, notably with the state salt and tea monopolies, which required the printing of large numbers of licences annually. Their licences were printed at state workshops at Nanjing with the use of iron plates, rather than woodblocks, as the wood could not have withstood the demands posed by the large scale of the printing. The use of national imperial printed texts to communicate edicts and information was matched by the publishing of texts by local magistrates, including gazetteers that provided an official record of county life.

By the sixteenth century, the publication of books in China was on a great scale and, covering a number of purposes, for a range of milieux. Commercial publishing expanded significantly, for the first time dwarfing both government and private publishing. The degree to which people, even ordinary people, were informed about developments because of the spread of printing and the widespread availability of books was most impressive. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in particular, there was an explosion of popular, unofficial texts about all kinds of current and historical events and more people than ever were writing and reading this material. These texts also reproduced a huge amount of gossip and rumour, thus disseminating popular stories. Literacy rates in East Asia were higher than the rest of the world until probably the mid-nineteenth century. Part of that was because so many books were in print in East Asia which encouraged a widespread use of the written word across society.²

This situation ensured that Gutenberg’s innovations in fifteenth-century Europe have to be considered in a wider comparative context. Until the use of the steam engine to power the printing machine in the early nineteenth century, the speed of printing with a European hand-press did not have much advantage over Chinese printing using brushes. Text in China was printed from the block by using a brush over the paper, so that the ink was transferred onto the paper. Indeed, Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), who went to China in 1582, founding the Jesuit mission, was surprised by the speed of Chinese printing and commented that the cutting of a block by a Chinese carver required less time than typesetting a folio after proofreading.

The scale of activity in China was impressive, but Gutenberg profited from the convenient relationship between movable type and the limited number of characters in Western languages. He also benefited from the availability of information about the properties of tin, lead and antimony, the metals used for type.³

The rapid spread of innovation was a central characteristic of the Western system. By 1500, there were presses in 236 towns in Europe. William Caxton was the innovator in England. This distribution was linked to the decentralisation of innovation and change that was so significant for its impact. In turn, a subsequent restructuring of the publishing industry, through a concentration of production, proved the most effective and profitable way to meet a growing demand, such that, by 1600, over 392,000 separate titles had been published in Europe.⁴ In the absence of significant amounts of capital, printers had to focus on the search for profit. They were primarily businessmen, and the search for entrepreneurial advantage encouraged them in fostering a degree of change that can be seen as helping usher in a different world.

In China, there was a major overlap between written and printed forms of information. In the West, there was a significant overlap, at first, between manuscript and print, with printed books produced in limited numbers, with similar purchasers for both and understandably so as they met different needs, and with printers using a Roman font that was similar to the appearance of manuscripts.⁵

At the same time as the rise in the printing of books, much of the profit in printing derived from the production of ephemeral items such as proclamations and broadsides, ephemera for which, unlike books, there was no second-hand market. Such jobwork helped create a flow of money. Successful book publication was more difficult as it required a more substantial investment, while sales would be slower than for (far less expensive) ephemera. As a result, benefits for book publication accrued from sales over a considerable area, which helped ensure that publishing focused on the centres of already prominent commercial networks, such as Venice, Antwerp and Nuremberg, which attracted Europe-wide purchasers.⁶

Printing in the West had a major impact with the Protestant Reformation of the early sixteenth century. Its theology was firmly based on the Word as represented in the Bible. The Reformation was heavily dependent on the ability of publications to overcome traditional constraints on discussion and the spread of ideas, and, in doing so, opened up a situation very different to that in China where a far greater degree of homogeneity and control could be maintained in the world of print. The populist purposes of the Reformation meant that larger audiences were sought than in the case of the Renaissance. The opportunities of print were brilliantly exploited in Germany by Martin Luther who wrote a series of accessible pamphlets and also benefited from the degree to which his supporters encouraged their dissemination. It was scarcely surprising that Luther was committed to the ability of people to read the Bible. In turn, the Reformation helped provide great opportunities for the publishing world, notably, but not only, in Germany. The printing of the Bible in the vernacular enhanced the reputation of both printing and the vernacular. It was also seen as a way to protect the faithful from Catholic proselytism.

The combination of printing and the Reformation was also significant for the development of proto-nationalism, not least because information on religious matters was now offered in the vernacular. In England, Protestant worship was introduced under Edward VI (r. 1547–53) by means of the Book of Common Prayer (1549), which contained forms of prayer and Church services for every religious event. Parliament passed a Uniformity Act decreeing that the Prayer Book alone was to be used for Church services, which were to be in English. In turn, during the Catholic reaction under Queen Mary (r. 1553–8), Catholic church literature, such as Mass books, was produced in large quantities. The Bible and the Book of Common Prayer were also translated into Welsh.

The persecution of English Protestant leaders under Mary provided a key theme for John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments of Matters Most Special and Memorable Happening in the Church with an Universal History of the Same (1563). Popularly known as the Book of Martyrs, this was an extremely influential account of religious history that propagated an image of Catholic cruelty and Protestant bravery that was judged to be of value to the Protestant government of Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603) as it sought to define and defend its notions of identity, and therefore loyalty. Foxe provided an account of England as a kingdom that had been in the forefront of an advance towards Christian truth, and depicted the Catholic alternative to Elizabeth as wicked. After an order of Convocation (the clerical parliament of the established Church) of 1571, cathedral churches acquired copies and many parish churches chose to do likewise. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs was to have a resonance into the twentieth century and was central to the Protestant martyrology that was important to the national role of the Church of England and to the sense of Protestants as needing to be vigilant against Catholic persecution.⁷

Printing was an important part of the process by which information in the West, as in China, became increasingly impersonal, and ensured that more information was communicated in the written rather than spoken form. However, again as in China, the written form did not have to involve printing, and manuscript newsletters produced by commercial news-writers remained important in the West late into the eighteenth century. They are much understudied and discussed. In England, Wye’s Letter, the leading newsletter, was a major source for the printed press in the early decades. Wye’s also commented on the press. For example, the issue of Wye’s Letter of 26 December 1728, which was used by the York Courant on 31 December, commented: ‘The Craftsman of Saturday last is as much, if not more, taken notice of than any of the former; and, we hear, it was with some difficulty that they got them delivered out.’ So also with other newsletters such as Stanley’s which supplied most of the Ipswich Journal of 11 April 1730, Miller’s, Jackson’s, Calcroft’s and the General Post-Office Letter. In 1723, Nottingham’s Weekly Courant cited both ‘Jackson’s Letter’ and ‘Miller’s Letter’. At the same time, the source was not always indicated. Thus, the Kentish Post of 16 August 1727 cited news ‘From a Written News Letter’. However, a key sign of change was that the manuscript press then collapsed.

Although there were textual variations with printing, notably with errors, changes in new editions, and as a result of censorship, it, nevertheless, represented a way, as in China, to fix the text in a fashion different to the textual instability arising from the continual alterations offered by hand-copied texts and, even more, by the oral transmission of information and opinion. Thus, the character of textual memory, and of memory as a whole, changed. The more fixed character of print was linked to the more public response to what was published. This response was to be encouraged by advertising and seen with the development of reviewing.⁸

At the same time, printing, like the modern Internet, opened up big social and geographical contrasts, and, for this and other reasons, has to be historicised in terms of particular contexts. Without any connection to printing, education had already played a major role in late medieval Western cities, but its importance as a means to approach and use the world of print led to a greater emphasis than hitherto on education, as well as enhancing the place of learning in education. However, access to the information offered through education developed in terms of existing social structures. As books, treatises, pamphlets and other printed forms became an important media for public dispute and individual consumption, a process encouraged by rising literacy, the majority of the population was excluded for reasons of cost and/or limited literacy.⁹

The culture of print brought new authorities and new processes of authorisation. This was a matter in part of censorship which served a range of goals, from religious and political control to attempts to regulate the book trade.¹⁰ The intensity of censorship varied, with the United Provinces (the Dutch Republic; Netherlands) initially the laxest in Europe, although printers could be punished, for example for printing obscenity. Moreover, censorship did not so readily extend to manuscript newsletters, which were both harder to control than printed works and also excused from the same degree of control because they were seen ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Origins
• 2 The growth of a press culture, 1695–1750
• 3 Maturity, 1750–1814
• 4 Steam and modernisation, 1814–61
• 5 Heyday, 1861–1922
• 6 New challenges, 1922–75
• 7 To the present, 1975–2019
• 8 Into the future
• Conclusions
• Selected further reading
• Copyright