boldness and persistent tenacity with which the almost unaided author utters and defends his opinions on public affairs against a host of able and bitter assailants. Some of the numbers were written during travel, some in Edinburgh. But the Review appeared regularly. When interrupted by the pressure of the Stamp Act (which came into force on the 1st of August 1712), the writer modified the form of his paper, and began a new series (August 2, 1712, to June 11, 1713). In those early and monthly supplements of his paper which he entitled “Advice from the Scandalous Club,” and set apart for the discussion of questions of literature and manners, and sometimes of topics of a graver kind, Defoe to some extent anticipated Richard Steele’s Tatler (1709) and Steele and Addison’s Spectator (1711). In 1705 he severed those supplements from his chief newspaper, and published them twice a week as the Little Review. But they soon ceased to appear. It may here be added that in May 1716 Defoe began a new monthly paper under an old title, Mercurius Politicus, . . . “by a lover of old England.” This journal continued to appear until September 1720. The year 1710 was marked by the appearance of the Examiner, or Remarks upon Papers and Occurrences (No. 1, August 3), of which thirteen numbers appeared by the co-operation of Bolingbroke, Prior, Freind and King before it was placed under the sole control of Swift. The Whig Examiner, avowedly intended “to censure the writings of others, and to give all persons a rehearing who had suffered under any unjust sentence of the Examiner,” followed on the 1st September, and the Medley three weeks afterwards.
This increasing popularity and influence of the newspaper press could not fail to be distasteful to the government of the day. Prosecutions were multiplied, but with small success. At length some busy projector hit upon the expedient of a newspaper tax. The paper which seems to contain the first germ of the plan is still Stamp tax of 1712. preserved amongst the treasury papers. It is anonymous and undated, but probably belongs to the year 1711. “There are published weekly,” says the writer, “about 44,000 newspapers, viz. Daily Courant, London Post, English Post, London Gazette, Postman, Postboy, Flying Post, Review and Observator.”[1] The duty eventually imposed (1712) was a halfpenny on papers of half a sheet or less, and a penny on such as ranged from half a sheet to a single sheet (10 Anne, c. xix. § 101). The first results of the tax cannot be more succinctly or more vividly described than in the following characteristic passage of Swift’s Journal to Stella (August 7, 1712): “Do you know that Grub Street is dead and gone last week? No more ghosts or murders now for love or money. I plied it close the last fortnight, and published at least seven papers of my own, besides some of other people’s; but now every single half-sheet pays a halfpenny to the queen. The Observator is fallen; the Medleys are jumbled together with the Flying Post; the Examiner is deadly sick; the Spectator keeps up, and doubles its price—I know not how long it will hold. Have you seen the red stamp the papers are marked with? Methinks the stamping is worth a halfpenny.”
Swift’s doubt as to the ability of the Spectator to hold out against the tax was justified by its discontinuance in December 1712, Steele starting the Guardian in 1713, which only ran for six months. But the impost which was thus fruitful in mischief, by suppressing much good literature, wholly failed in keeping out bad. Some of the worst journals that were already in existence kept their ground, and the number of such ere long increased.[2] An enumeration of the London papers of 1714 comprises the Daily Courant, the Examiner, the British Merchant, the Lover, the Patriot, the Monitor, the Flying Post, the Postboy, Mercator, the Weekly Pacquet and Dunton’s Ghost. Another enumeration in 1733 includes the Daily Courant, the Craftsman, Fog’s Journal, Mist’s Journal, the London Journal, the Free Briton, the Grub Street Journal, the Weekly Register, the Universal Spectator, the Auditor, the Weekly Miscellany, the London Crier, Read’s Journal, Oedipus or the Postman Remounted, the St James’s Post, the London Evening Post and the London Daily Post, which afterwards became better known as the Public Advertiser. Part of this increase may fairly be ascribed to political corruption. In 1742 the committee of the House of Commons appointed to inquire into the political conduct of the earl of Orford reported to the House that during the last ten years of the Walpole ministry there was paid, out of public money, no “less a sum than £50,077, 18s. to authors and printers of newspapers, such as the Free Briton, Daily Courant, Gazetteer and other political papers.”[3] But some part of the payment may well have been made for advertisements. Towards the middle of the century the provisions and the penalties of the Stamp Act were made more stringent. Yet the number of Dr Johnson’s time. newspapers continued to rise. Dr Johnson, who in 1750 started his twopenny bi-weekly Rambler, and in 1758 his weekly Idler, writing in the latter bears testimony to the still growing thirst for news: “Journals are daily multiplied, without increase of knowledge. The tale of the morning paper is told in the evening, and the narratives of the evening are bought again in the morning. These repetitions, indeed, waste time, but they do not shorten it. The most eager peruser of news is tired before he has completed his labour; and many a man who enters the coffee-house in his nightgown and slippers is called away to his shop or his dinner before he has well considered the state of Europe.” Five years before (i.e. in 1753) the aggregate number of copies of newspapers annually sold in England, on an average of three years, amounted to 7,411,757. In 1760 it had risen to 9,464,790, and in 1767 to 11,300,980. In 1776 the number of newspapers published in London alone had increased to fifty-three.
When Johnson wrote his sarcastic strictures on the newspapers that were the contemporaries and, in a sense, the rivals of the Idler, the newswriters had fallen below the standard of an earlier day. A generation before the newspaper was often much more of a political organ than of an industrial venture. All of the many enterprises of Defoe in this field of journalism united indeed both characteristics. But if he was a keen tradesman, he was also a passionate politician. And not a few of his fellow-workers in that field were conspicuous as statesmen no less than as journalists. Even less than twenty years before the appearance of Johnson’s remarks, men of the mental calibre of Henry Fielding were still to be found amongst the editors and writers of newspapers. The task had fallen to a different class of men in 1750.
The history of newspapers during the long reign of George III. is a history of the struggle for freedom of speech in the face of repeated criminal prosecutions, in which individual writers and editors were defeated and severely punished, while the Press itself derived new strength from the protracted conflict, and turned ignominious penalties Press prosecutions. into signal triumphs. From the days of Wilkes’s North Briton onwards (see Wilkes, John: it was started in 1761), every conspicuous newspaper prosecution gave tenfold currency to the doctrines that were assailed. In the earlier part of this period men who were mere traders in politics—whose motives were obviously base and their lives contemptible—became for a time powers in the state, able to brave king, legislature and law courts, by virtue of the simple truth that a free people must have a free press. One of the minor incidents of the North Briton excitement (Wilkes’s prosecution in 1763) led indirectly to valuable results with reference to the much-vexed question of parliamentary reporting. During the discussions respecting the Middlesex election, Almon, a bookseller, collected from members of the House of Commons some particulars of the debates, and published them in the London Evening Post. The success which attended these reports induced the proprietors of the St James’s Chronicle to employ a reporter to collect notes
- ↑ “A Proposition to Increase the Revenue of the Stamp-Office,” Redington, Calendar of Treasury Papers, 1708–1714, p. 235. The stamp-office dated from 1694, when the earliest duties on paper and parchment were enacted.
- ↑ See the Burney collection of newspapers in the British Museum; and Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, iv. 33–97.
- ↑ “Fourth Report of the Committee of Secrecy,” &c., in Hansard’s Parliamentary History, xii. 814.
