English 245 with Dr. Gary Gutchess
 Tompkins-Cortland Community College

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Lessons

1. Classical Britain

2. Beowulf 1

3. Beowulf 2

4. Middle Ages

5. Romance

6. Sir Gawain

7. Malory

8. Chaucer's Miller

9. Wife of Bath

10. Religious Protest

11. Biblical Drama

12. Play of Mankind

13. Early Modern Period

14. Thomas More

15. Philip Sidney

16. Print Culture

17. Walter Raleigh

18. Twelfth Night 1

19. Twelfth Night  2

20. Civil War

21. An Age of Irreverence

22. Aphra Behn

23. Reading Papers

24. Gulliver

25. Rape of the Lock

26. School for Scandal

27. New God

28. Revolution

Final Exam

   ***     23. Reading Papers     ***

Origins of our media circus

NOTES AND COMMENTARY
Adapted by Dr. G from David Damrosch, et al.,
Teaching British Literature (New York: Longman, 2003)

The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the breaking news bulletin, the digest, the column of advice, the editorial, and the letter to the editor. What can we learn from reading these familiar genres of journalism as they were first devised so long ago?

Readings in the early history of journalism can raise basic questions. In what ways did the first popular reading papers mirror the community they addressed? In what ways, and for what purposes, did they seek to lead or influence that community? Did they make clear distinctions between reporting and editorializing? In what ways did they cause the community to define itself, at least in part, as that group of smart, informed, stylish people who read the papers?

The Papers

The Athenian Mercury: This paper seems to have invented the correspondent system in which the subscribers were the journalists, a system subsequently used by major news organizations until very recent times. Mercury the messenger god is an apt presiding spirit in that the paper seems to be in many places at the same time gathering news from the wide world of its readership. This paper was also the birthplace of the advice column, setting up a relationship between readers as inquirers and writers as authoritaties. Compare current columns of advice and information: what relations do contemporary audiences demand between the columnists (Ann Landers, Cecil Adams, Doctor Ruth, etc.) and their public? How are these relations encoded in the columns’ language and format?

Review of the State of the British Nation: the first media celebrity in England was Daniel Defoe (1660-1731). He had written anonymously for The Athenian Mercury, but in The Review he devised the least anonymous of all periodical personae, a readily recognizable version of himself: beset, pugnacious, exasperated, and undaunted. More than any subsequent paper, The Review presented the ongoing story of a single journalist vehemently engaged with breaking news. He was a wonderful observer of the current scene in London (see the brief selections from A Journal of the Plague Year in our anthology) and also a champion of the merchant class and trade, for he had engaged in a variety of businesses in the city. He was also in demand as a talented political observer, propagandist and partisan. All in all, Defoe represents the reporter as hero of the middle class.

The Tatler: This paper, published 1709-1711 but revived and in publication today, began by moving further toward entertainment, replacing Defoe's stringency with the gregariousness of Isaac Bickerstaff, pen name for Richard Steele (1672-1729). The paper, from its title onward, undertook to mimic talk and to critique it. Dunton’s “Athenians” read and responded to letters, and Bickerstaff does that too, but he derives much of his authority, as the vaunted "Censor of Great Britain," from the skill with which he hears, dissects, and prompts ongoing conversation.

The Spectator: The most successful paper in terms of circulation and run time was The Spectator, founded by Steele with his friend Joseph Addison. In contrast to The Tatler it mimics silence. The fictive author portrays himself as a “silent man” suddenly determined “to print my self out,” in the form of a “sheet-full of thoughts every morning.” Multiplying himself daily, he imprints his thoughts not only on paper but in the minds of his many readers.

Readers occupy Mr. Spectator both as objects of his attention and as presences in his paper: writers of letters, performers of actions, recipients of counsel. He occupies them as their eyes or way of seeing: he offers them the “secret satisfaction” that arises from the precise observation of self and others. He is still a diarist, a distinct personality and an eccentric one, and yet he is forming public opinion, binding a cult of followers under the pretense that he is an impartial or "objective" journalist reporting the truth.

The Craftsman: Much of The Craftsman’s craft consists in pointedly alienating its readers from their own familiar (albeit unacceptable) political predicament, by transposing their circumstances into an alien milieu, so that Walpole becomes a foreign “vampyre” and South Sea stock a comically potent set of nonsense syllables, capable of inducing frenzy in the hearer. Only by careful deflection, and by outright lying, can Amhurst and colleagues tell the truth as they see it. (By the way, the bloody corpses thought to be vampires were simply decomposing; gas released by decay forced blood through the mouth, nose, ears and wherever else it could escape the corpse.)
Above: The South-Sea Bubble, engraved by James Carter after a painting by Edward Matthew. The London stock market developed at the London Exchange and in the coffeehouses in 18th century. The South Sea Company was one of the materialistic excesses of the period, as the company derived much of its revenue from slave traffic in the New World.

The Female Spectator: Eliza Haywood’s approach differs from those of her male predecessors. They propose to teach their readers from a position of patriarchal authority and innate rightness, whether grounded in learning (the Athenians), savvy (Review), sociability (Tatler), or inborn, enlightened eccentricity (Spectator). The Female Spectator, by contrast, undertakes to teach from her mistakes. “Hers is the voice of error rather than propriety, experience rather than innocence . . . [S]he has been guilty herself of the conduct she is to criticize.” As one critic puts it, “basing her persona’s claims to authority upon her experienced culpability rather than her naive superiority, Haywood rewrote the moral essay.” She also relies heavily on collaborators. How would this mask have helped overcome common prejudices of the public against women?

The subordinate relation of women to male spokespersons is sometimes quite explicit.  For instance Bickerstaff describes his sister’s moral progress after marriage in terms that plainly sketch the kind of influence that this confirmed bachelor hopes to wield over female readers: “upon talking with her on several subjects, I could not but fancy that I saw a great deal of her husband’s way and manner in her remarks, her phrases, the tone of her voice, and the very air of her countenance. This gave me an unspeakable satisfaction . . .” The satisfaction need not be spoken, in part because the desired male-female ventriloquy (“the tone of her voice”) has already been so successfully accomplished.

The Female Spectator’s tale of Seomanthe, by contrast, quietly ironizes the authority of its female narrator, who writes to show the danger “of laying young people under too great a restraint,” only to discern that she is exerting too little restraint over her own “expatiat[ing]” argument; she promptly seeks to redress the discursive balance. The episode performs wisdom more as process than as pronouncement.

Periodical Personae

The journals get us talking about the journalists, as they cultivate the characters of the reporters. A useful question in each instance: how do the personae engage with their readers, and by what means do they set themselves apart? The answers play out differently in the Athenians’ aloofness, Mr. Spectator’s busy but almost invisible movement among his readers (No. 10), the Female Spectator’s consortium of collaborators.

Fact and Fiction

Bias is evident in government-sponsored papers (Mercurius, Gazette) that during the Restoration were often the only print-news sources legally available. The great fire of London might be seen as a gross failure of government planning and emergency response, but the Gazette’s account of the fire is little more than a hymn of praise to His Majesty and his courtiers' efforts to help stop the blaze. The narrators rely on panic, piety, patriotism and similar emotions. The later, independent Daily Courant, by contrast, grounds its claims of impartiality in scrupulous documentation of sources. The passions bestirred by news furnish the Spectator and the Tatler with a steady source of comedy.

The mix of plausible fact and intense feeling shaped both newspapers and novels—the two most lasting narrative modes the period produced. The traffic between fact and fiction can be tracked in, for example in The Craftsman’s use of the London Journal item (itself of questionable veracity) as prompter for the satiric discourse of Caleb D’Anvers and his friends. We see narrative devices everywhere in Defoe who bridged the worlds of journalism and novel writing so that novels seem real (Moll Flanders) and news seems fantastic (see A Journal of the Plague Year). Defoe's essay on dueling forecasts the imaginative, casuistical method that would later drive his fiction. Projecting from his own “unhappy experience,” he imagines the “perturbed thoughts” of Hamilton on the eve of his death. What would it be like (he asks and answers), to be this person in this predicament?

The fiction of the journalists tends to be realist or rationalist, like the advice columnists' practical masks. Addison, Steele, and Defoe not only celebrate commerce but pretend that its dangers can be overcome with a little common sense. They claim to write to remedy the newly speculative culture’s fixation on the fictitious future (where stocks will rise, debts will be paid, and profits accrue) by prescribing a prudent focus on the present.

In Thomas Bowles engraving of "The Bubbler's Medley" that serves as frontispiece to the book (page 2120 and below), a quasi-scrapbook of printed papers is casually scattered across the picture’s plane. Bowles manages to cram many of the culture’s most pressing and durable preoccupations: with money, trade, and empire; with miscellany; with evanescence; with “memorial.” But most of all he suggests a cultural addiction to text itself, a world in which print representations (and misrepresentations) of reality are at once the most common and the most prized commodities; in which readers (like the invisible assembler of this collage, and like the denizens of the coffee house in the upper-right corner) are perpetually engaged in assembling their own ephemeral anthologies.

 Left: the prolific of Daniel Defoe.

Left: Richard Steele, founder of the Tatler and the Spectator

and Joseph Addison, co-founder of the Spectator, author of the tragedy Cato, which inspired George Washington and the American Revolution

Left: from an engraving of Eliza Heywood in the British Museum.

Joseph Addison at Bartleby. 

Daniel Defoe's works at Literature Network.  Daniel Defoe at Bartleby.

Samuel Johnson, Life of Addison from Bartleby.

Richard Steele at Bartleby. The Tatler Volume 1 at Bartleby.

The Female Tatler from University of Michigan.

Students are not examined on these "other resources and amusements." However, if you know of an excellent website that would wonderfully  complement this lesson, please send it to Dr. G. If he adopts it in his list, extra course credit will be awarded.

ASSIGNMENTS FOR THIS LESSON

The lesson includes both a quiz and a journal writing assignment to be submitted on the interactive course site at  SUNY Learning Network.  See General instructions on Journaling for this course. For a sample journal, see Dr. G's 2007 Brit Lit 1 Journal.

Journal

Write for an hour (or more if you have time). Summarize the readings or make notes you will find useful on the final essay. Some other journaling ideas for today include:

How do the news and media personalities of our day compare with Mr. Spectator, Bickerstaff or any of the other "periodical personnae" of the early papers?

Fact and fiction are not clearly separated in the early papers, but are they entirely separated today? Are the purposes of today's newspapers and news magazines the same as those in the eighteenth century?

Which article in this section did you find most informative? Which one did you find most entertaining?

Ben Jonson lamented that the coming of the newspapers would mean the death of the theater. What new literary forms are killing the print newspapers today? Is this a serious loss?

 
 Copyright 2008 by Gary Homer Gutchess.