‘[I]f…I should be so Fortunate as to meet you in any Publick Place, Coffee-House, or Tavern, I would Divert my self in breaking your Head.’Footnote 1 So wrote one correspondent to John Tutchin in 1703. Threats of personal violence against Tutchin were not uncommon.Footnote 2 Even the duke of Marlborough concurred with the sentiment, writing that ‘I believe Mr. T[utchin] will be soundly drubbed; I hope every honest Englishman would approve…[I wish] I had some friend that would concern himself to get [Tutchin] well beaten.’Footnote 3 Tutchin refused to be intimidated – ‘if Threats would have Kill'd a Man, I had been as Dead as a Herring many Years ago’ – but the risk proved to be all too real.Footnote 4 In February 1707, he suffered an apparent attempt on his life: ‘As I was sitting above Stairs at a Publick House’, he recounted, ‘there came in upon me six Ruffians, and all fell upon me with their Sticks and Canes: I had nothing to defend my self, but my Hands…and had not the Man of the House got out of his Bed to my Assistance, they might have accomplish'd their Design.’Footnote 5 When he died a few months later, some attributed his death to the earlier attack. ‘It grieves me to the Heart’, one friend wrote, ‘that after all his good Services to his Country, he should have been murder'd at last.’Footnote 6
Whether or not his death was actually connected to this beating, it is clear is that he provoked extreme hatred in some quarters.Footnote 7 John Tutchin was a well-known and controversial figure in early eighteenth-century Britain. His fame – or notoriety – derived from his authorship of a twice-weekly printed sheet of ‘observations’, through which he had established himself as a prominent public commentator on current affairs. For over a decade, the Observator (1702–12) presented opinion and analysis about the constitution, religion, domestic politics, foreign affairs, and the press to the British reading public. It was controversial partly because it was perceived as illegitimately ‘meddling with state affairs’ that were properly the preserve of the government alone.Footnote 8 However, the main reason for hostility to the Observator was its role as a vehicle for the regular dissemination of a partisan whig worldview. During the ‘rage of party’ that divided British politics, press, and society in later Stuart Britain, this was guaranteed to stoke anger in Tutchin's tory opponents.
As a serial publication designed to convey comment on current affairs, the Observator was part of a wider trend in in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century press. ‘Comment serials’, as I call them here, first emerged as a distinct form of printed publication during the Succession Crisis or Exclusion Crisis (1678–82), and proliferated during Queen Anne's reign (1702–14). They differentiated themselves from the period's newspapers, in particular, by describing themselves using keywords that denoted ‘comment’ rather than ‘news’, such as ‘observations’, ‘reflections’, and ‘remarks’, and by adopting discursive genres such as the dialogue and the essay. Their main function was to project partisan arguments to the public more directly and persistently than was possible in other forms of publication, especially newspapers and pamphlets, and they were among the most prominent public partisan voices of their day. Some comment serials are reasonably well known, for instance Roger L'Estrange's Observator (1681–7), Daniel Defoe's Review (1704–13), and Jonathan Swift and others’ Examiner (1710–14). Others are more obscure, including Tutchin's Observator.
However, comment serials have not been examined as a collective phenomenon. The ‘explosion’ of topical print in the seventeenth century is well understood, through its various peaks and troughs: significant but temporary proliferation during the 1640s Civil Wars and the Succession Crisis, then permanent growth from the 1690s onwards. These correlated with shifts in government press policy, including collapses of licensing laws in 1641, 1679, and 1695, and the fluctuating intensity of partisan activity. Scholars have considered print's effects on political culture, for instance in stimulating public political engagement and partisan alignment.Footnote 9 Particular attention has been paid to the ‘pamphlet’, the main form of topical print throughout the early modern period. Pamphlets came in many varieties, but typically were short, cheap publications, designed for maximum impact through their speed of appearance, style, and content.Footnote 10 Scholars have also examined the ‘newspaper’ – another heterogeneous category rather than a single genre, encompassing various kinds of serial publication designed to convey reports of recent events, usually weekly or sub-weekly. Newspapers were first printed in Britain in the 1620s, exploded in the 1640s, and had similar chronological peaks and troughs to the wider print landscape thereafter. Serial publication was a major innovation, by allowing multiple separate publications to be presented as instalments of the same overarching publication, thereby giving serials significant traction among readers. As a result, some scholars have argued for the particular contribution of newspaper consumption to the politicization of the reading public.Footnote 11
Compared with pamphlets and newspapers, comment serials have received limited attention, not least because there is no agreement on terminology, or even the utility of the category itself.Footnote 12 In 1934, Theodore Newton called for a study of the ‘journal of political controversy’ to accompany work on the ‘newspaper’ and ‘literary periodical’, but this has never been systematically pursued.Footnote 13 Some scholars have used a concept of serials of comment in particular contexts, deploying terms such as ‘journals of opinion’ and ‘periodicals of reflection’, but usually only when describing individual serials, such as Defoe's Review,Footnote 14 or in analyses of sub-periods, as has been separately argued for the Succession Crisis, William III's reign, and Anne's reign.Footnote 15 There has been reluctance to connect these instances together into a holistic press phenomenon that evolved over several decades. Moreover, the most commonly used label, ‘journal of opinion’, is problematic, because in contemporary usage ‘journal’ was associated with miscellanies or newspapers;Footnote 16 ‘comment serials’ is suggested here as a preferable term.Footnote 17 Another difficulty is how to relate comment serials to scholarship about the emergence of the ‘periodical essay’ and ‘literary periodical’ in the early eighteenth century, typically exemplified by Addison and Steele's Tatler (1709–11) and Spectator (1711–12, 1714), which have overshadowed their more overtly political predecessors and contemporaries, including Tutchin's Observator.Footnote 18
Due to these historiographical limitations, the importance of comment serials in the ‘rage of party’ is imperfectly understood. Partisanship was a defining feature of early modern British political culture, as people identified with different political groupings, usually defined by constitutional or religious opinions, and expressed these through assembling, writing, reading, voting, petitioning, socializing, worshipping, and sometimes fighting. Partisanship was represented by a panoply of labels, many developed by opponents – papists, puritans, cavaliers, roundheads, whigs, tories – and party divisions continuously shifted, realigned, and altered in intensity. They were at their strongest during the Civil Wars, and then again in the ‘rage of party’ of c. 1680–1720, when the labels ‘whig’ and ‘tory’ became prominent. Broadly speaking, whigs believed in popular sovereignty through parliament and rights for nonconformist Protestants (‘dissenters’), while tories believed in a strong crown and church. One major battleground of party conflict was the press – including comment serials.
The aim of this article is to identify the comment serial phenomenon and locate it in partisan culture. This being a vast subject, Tutchin's Observator is taken as the primary case-study. It is in three parts. The first examines how the Observator was conceived as a comment serial, and outlines the contours of comment serial publication across the period 1678 – c. 1730. The second explores the chief function of comment serials – to act as public partisan weapons – by analysing how the Observator was fashioned to fire regular whig ‘paper bullets’ into the public sphere. The third considers how comment serials reverberated around partisan culture, by examining patterns in the Observator’s consumption. The Observator is a good case-study because its contemporary importance contrasts with its historiographical neglect.Footnote 19 In this ‘golden age of periodical journalism’, it is overshadowed by more famous serials of canonical authors, especially Defoe's Review, Swift's Examiner, and Addison and Steele's Tatler and Spectator – even though the Observator predated all four. The historiographical prominence of these serials is the Observator’s curse, as it is frequently mentioned but rarely analysed, being generally represented as inferior in style and argument.Footnote 20
The first Observator appeared on 1 April 1702, shortly after Anne's accession. After ten years and 1,065 issues, the final Observator was published on 30 July 1712. It initially appeared weekly, but from May 1702 was twice-weekly, published on Wednesdays and Saturdays.Footnote 21 Physically, the Observator resembled most contemporary serials – a half-sheet folio, with two columns on each side. For most of its life, it contained a dialogue between characters named ‘Observator’ and ‘Countryman’, who had conversations about the news. For the first five years, it was written by John Tutchin (1663/4–1707), a poet and pamphleteer.Footnote 22 Tutchin was a whig, and specifically an ‘old’ whig: an oppositional whig of 1680s mould who rejected the ‘modern’ whigs who entered government in the 1690s. Besides the Observator, Tutchin is primarily remembered today for The foreigners (1700), a xenophobic poem that was answered by Defoe's The true-born Englishman (1701), and for two trials: one in 1685 for participating in the Monmouth rebellion (for which he was convicted and later pardoned), and the other in 1704 for seditious libel in the Observator (for which he was convicted but later escaped on a legal technicality). After Tutchin's death in 1707, the Observator was authored by another whig, George Ridpath, the editor of the Flying Post newspaper. This article focuses on Tutchin's period of authorship.
I
Tutchin's Observator was a comment serial, in that its explicit and primary function was providing comment on the news rather than the news itself. When the Observator was launched in April 1702, this was unique among British serials. Most were newspapers of one kind or another, including the twice-weekly, government-sponsored London Gazette, several thrice-weekly newspapers – the Post Man, Post Boy, Flying Post, English Post, and London Post – and the first successful daily paper, the Daily Courant. These newspapers all adopted well-established formal conventions. Their fundamental textual unit was the news paragraph, a discrete block of reporting that was disconnected from surrounding paragraphs.Footnote 23 One or more news paragraphs might be headed by the place and date from which the report had come. Earlier and later varieties of newspaper had contained editorial comment or partisan news presentation, but these were largely lacking from newspapers in 1702. Indeed, the Daily Courant specifically disavowed comment, the editor promising that he would not ‘take upon him to give any Comments or Conjectures of his own, but will relate only Matter of Fact; supposing other People to have Sense enough to make Reflections for themselves’.Footnote 24
The Observator was different. Its raison d’être was opinion, advice, or analysis – comment – rather than news. The Observator was packed with discussion of the constitution, religion, the press, domestic politics, and foreign affairs. This was demonstrated in the content summaries placed at the head of each issue, for instance this example from an early issue:
Reflections on the Poem of Sorrel. A Vindication of King William. On the Poem, call'd The English Muse. The Ingratitude of King William’s Favourites. On the Necessity and Advantage of Privateers to the English, in case of a War. The difference betwixt the English and French Nations, in Respect of Privateers.Footnote 25
This issue contains a typically miscellaneous variety of comment: discussions of a Jacobite poem, William III's political management, and war strategy against France. Tutchin's use of the terms ‘reflections’ and ‘vindication’ indicates that this was comment rather than news. This is not to say that the Observator contained no news, but its essence was discussions rather than reports.
Another indicator that the Observator was designed as a comment serial is its choice of genre – initially a free prose or essay style, and then dialogue. In both cases, the adoption of a discursive genre rather than newspaper forms enabled – and indeed required – Tutchin to centre the Observator on comment. However, Tutchin preferred dialogue. He lamented that his initial prose style had rendered his arguments ‘not so clear as he could have wished’, as ‘the Scruples and Reasons on the other Side, were not by this Method so plainly Remov'd or Answer'd’.Footnote 26 Dialogue, in contrast, enabled him to present the alternative arguments through the questioning of the ‘Countryman’, an honest but ignorant Englishman, and then provide the correct view in the voice of the ‘Observator’, a learned patriot who represented Tutchin himself. This drew on a long heritage of dialogue as a genre of political comment, even pre-dating the Civil Wars.Footnote 27
The Observator’s title also identified it as a comment serial. ‘Observator’ means ‘one who makes observations’, and ‘observations’ had functioned as a keyword for ‘comment’ in topical print since at least the 1640s, sometimes with particular connotations such as answering opponents, analysing news items, or providing topical opinions. ‘Observations’ and ‘observator’ were also specifically juxtaposed with keywords for ‘news’ to express the idea of ‘comment on news’, for instance in the minor serials Observations upon the most remarkable occurrences in our weekly news (1693); Pegasus (1696), which contained sections entitled ‘News’ and ‘Observator’; and the New state of Europe, both as to publick transactions and learning[,] with impartial observations thereupon (1701). In the Observator, Tutchin deployed the language of ‘observations’ to describe his serial, declaring that ‘My Business is to make Observations, and to draw Conclusions from occurring Circumstances’, and looking forward to a time when ‘we shall be so Happy in our Publick Affairs, that there will be no need of Observations’.Footnote 28 Further, by taking ‘Observator’ as his title, Tutchin unambiguously centred his serial on comment. Indeed, the title personified comment, and reinforced this further with Tutchin's appearance as the dialogue character ‘Observator’. John Tutchin, a.k.a. ‘Mr Observator’ or ‘the Observator’, was effectively presenting himself as ‘Mr Commentator’ or ‘the commentator’.
Tutchin's Observator was a comment serial, not a newspaper. In this, it was not alone. It was not the first comment serial – not even the first serial ‘Observator’ – and had many rivals. The remainder of this section will outline the main contours of the wider comment serial phenomenon. As already indicated, the first wave of comment serials appeared during the Succession Crisis of 1678–82. However, they had important antecedents during the Civil Wars, and these should briefly be discussed first.Footnote 29 Many Civil War serials had a similar function to later comment serials, being designed as regular partisan weapons for royalists or parliamentarians. However, describing them as ‘comment serials’ would be misleading. With a few minor exceptions,Footnote 30 most Civil War serials were conceived as news publications,Footnote 31 and expressed their partisanship primarily through news selection and presentation, sometimes with interleaved editorial comment. Some, especially certain late 1640s ‘Mercuries’ such as Mercurius Melancholicus (1647–9), Mercurius Bellicus (1647–8), and Mercurius Elencticus (1647–9), could be dominated by comment, but they continued to adopt the form of news publications, describing themselves as organs of ‘news’ or ‘intelligence’, so are best interpreted as the comment-heavy end of a spectrum rather than as a distinct form.Footnote 32
In contrast, serials specifically devoted to comment were a tangible phenomenon in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, different from the period's newspapers. At its core were serials that adopted the dialogue or essay genres, which were constructed as comment serials both through actively taking up these discursive genres and specifically rejecting newspaper forms. Although they did not have a consistent contemporary label, some observers acknowledged their distinctness from newspapers, especially during their apogee under Anne. In 1708, Charles Leslie described Tutchin's Observator and Defoe's Review as the whigs’ ‘weekly penny Papers, which go through the Nation like News-Papers’.Footnote 33 A 1707 book noted that people read not only ‘printed News’ in coffeehouses, but ‘3 Papers besides, relating to the Government’, the Review, Observator, and Leslie's tory Rehearsal.Footnote 34 Roger L'Estrange denied that his, earlier, Observator was a newspaper, as did Defoe the Review.Footnote 35 These serials also indicated comment in their titles, for instance ‘observations on Transactions at home’ in the Review, ‘Reflections on the present State of affairs’ in Mercurius Politicus (1705) and ‘Remarks upon Papers and Occurrences’ in the Examiner. Admittedly, comment serials were not universally distinguished by contemporaries: they were often described simply as ‘pamphlets’, ‘libels’, ‘papers’, or even ‘newspapers’. Even in formal terms, comment serials were not a watertight category, as they did not form a single genre, they had a partisan discursive style that was shared with many pamphlets and newspapers, and they overlapped with comment sections in newspapers.Footnote 36 But this does not negate the tangibility of the overall phenomenon.
Why did comment serials appear during the rage of party, but not the Civil Wars? In both cases, the impulse for regular, public partisan weapons was strong, and there was a conducive regulatory environment, not least through the active licensing of political print (in royalist Oxford and parliamentarian/commonwealth London) or the absence of licensing (after 1679 and after 1695).Footnote 37 Part of the answer may simply be that the idea of serials explicitly devoted to comment had not yet been conceived in the 1640s, as early serial publication was indelibly bound to news, having originally been developed as a mechanism for capturing the rolling nature of news. Instead, comment was generally published in one-off pamphlets, or within or alongside news in news serials. The immediate reasons for comment serials emerging in the Succession Crisis are unclear, but it may be significant that contemporary news serials followed more restrictive formal conventions (of series of news paragraphs headed by a place and date) than their Civil War precursors, which limited the possibilities for comment within news serials and thus created a need for dedicated comment serials as organs of regular comment. Regardless, the speed with which comment serials spread indicates that the political and market conditions for them to succeed were already ripe. Their subsequent proliferation after 1700 was undoubtedly connected with the most intense phase of public partisan warfare under Anne, when partisanship was so chronic that fashioning continuous partisan weapons had become essential.Footnote 38
Using genre, keywords, and content, it is possible to outline the scope of comment serials with reasonable precision. They emerged in the 1680s, had their heyday in the 1700s and 1710s, and declined in the 1730s. Between 1678 and 1730, there were over 100 comment serials with 10+ issues – including 21 with 100+ issues, and 5 with 500+ issues – in addition to over 100 more with shorter runs.Footnote 39 Most were dialogues or essays, broadly shifting from the former to the latter by c. 1710. Most were directly political and partisan, but these figures include serials of the Spectator variety that may be considered moral comment serials (of which more shortly).
The first wave emerged during the Succession Crisis, the first major flashpoint of party tensions since the Restoration, and the moment the labels ‘whig’ and ‘tory’ entered national politics. Partisan pamphlets and newspapers proliferated at this time, and the invention of comment serials represented an attempt to produce a still more powerful print weapon in the context of extreme partisan pressure. The most important moment was the swift development of the dialogue serial in early 1681. The tory Heraclitus Ridens (1681–2), Roger L'Estrange's tory Observator (1681–7), and the ‘Popish Courant’ section of Henry Care's whig Weekly Pacquet (1678–83) were established as major dialogue serials between February and April 1681, during the most acute phase of the crisis, before and after the Oxford Parliament, accompanied by other minor titles the same year.Footnote 40 L'Estrange's Observator was a direct ancestor of Tutchin's: Tutchin referred to L'Estrange as ‘My famous Predecessor’ and ‘The first Observator’, despite being of the opposite partisan persuasion.Footnote 41 The Weekly Pacquet was an ambiguous case. At its foundation, it was not a comment serial, as it initially comprised a main historical section about the Catholic church and a light-hearted appendix, the ‘Popish Courant’, an anti-Catholic parody newspaper.Footnote 42 However, it later dovetailed with the 1681 comment serials, especially when the ‘Popish Courant’ switched to dialogue.Footnote 43 There is evidence that Heraclitus Ridens and L'Estrange's Observator were officially commissioned, although they probably had an arms-length relationship with the regime.Footnote 44 The whig comment serials were linked to a network of whig publishers, whose possible connections to politicians such as the earl of Shaftesbury are uncertain.Footnote 45
Between 1683, when the government regained control over the press, and 1702, there were only two major comment serials, both pro-government: L'Estrange's Observator, continuing until 1687, and James Welwood's Mercurius Reformatus, or the New Observator (1689–94?), a whig defence of William III's regime after the Glorious Revolution. The New Observator, which provided ‘reflexions upon The most Remarkable Events… in europe, and more particularly in england’, was presented as a successor to L'Estrange's Observator, although it was an essay rather than a dialogue.Footnote 46 The final lapse of pre-publication press controls in 1695 – a totemic date in press history – did not provoke a new wave of comment serials as it did newspapers, perhaps because of the less distinct party polarization of the late 1690s, when a court–country divide competed with a whig–tory one.Footnote 47
Tutchin then founded his Observator – the third and final major ‘Observator’ – in 1702.Footnote 48 This gave rise to a second wave of comment serials, accompanying the most intense phase of the rage of party, when whig–tory divisions strongly reasserted themselves. On both sides, there were near-continuous runs of comment serials. On the tory side, the most prominent comment serials were the Poetical Observator (1702–3), Heraclitus Ridens (1703–4), the Rehearsal (1704–9), Mercurius Politicus (1705), the Moderator (1710), the Examiner (1710–14), the Plain Dealer (1712), the Mercator (1713–14), the Monitor (1714), and another Examiner (1714–16). On the whig side, there were the Observator (1702–12), the Review (1704–13), the Medley (1710–12), the British Merchant (1713–14), the Britain (1713), the Englishman (1713–14), the Patriot (1714–15), the High-German Doctor (1714–15), another Englishman (1715), and the Free-Holder (1715–16). The three longest lasting of these, besides Tutchin's Observator, were Defoe's Review, Leslie's Rehearsal, and Swift and others’ Examiner. The Review was initially modelled on Care's Weekly Pacquet, containing a main historical section (about French history) and a light-hearted appendix (the famous ‘Scandalous Club’),Footnote 49 but later contained essays commenting on domestic affairs.Footnote 50 The Rehearsal was a tory answer to – and initially imitator of – Tutchin's Observator, again in dialogue.Footnote 51 The Examiner, effectively its successor, was an essay that defended Harley's ministry after 1710.Footnote 52 Again, there is limited evidence for political co-ordination, although the Review and Examiner were sponsored from within ministries, and whigs organized propaganda while in opposition after 1710.Footnote 53
The nature of comment serials began to shift after the appearance of the Tatler in 1709. They were no longer all filled with political comment, but came to comprise a spectrum from overt political discussion to social and moral comment. Although the Tatler and Spectator had multiple generic origins, they can usefully be regarded as moral comment serials – ostensibly aimed at advancing good manners, rather than just good political principles.Footnote 54 Their titles and self-descriptions aligned them with the comment serial tradition: ‘Spectator’ was cognate with ‘Observator’ and ‘Examiner’, and the Tatler’s ‘lucubrations’ and the Spectator’s ‘speculations’ resembled comment keywords like ‘reflections’ and ‘observations’.Footnote 55 Despite their fame, it should be emphasized that moral comment serials were outnumbered by overtly political comment serials during the 1710s. Of the 33 comment serials published between 1709 and 1720 with 30+ issues, 19 were overtly political.Footnote 56 Moreover, some of the other 14 had a political function.Footnote 57 The Spectator and Free-Thinker (1718–21), were whig in intent, but conveyed their partisanship more obliquely through social commentary.Footnote 58 The whig Guardian (1713) began as a moral comment serial but contained some political papers, and the tory Entertainer (1717–18), which contained ‘remarks Upon men, manners, religion and policy’, was a hybrid of political and moral.
Comment serials became less prominent during the 1720s and 1730s. This was partly due to an easing of party tensions in George I's reign, and partly to a growth of newspapers containing comment sections, which assumed the primary place in published regular comment in the age of Walpole.Footnote 59 Between 1721 and 1730, 13 new comment serials with runs of 30+ issues appeared, but only 2 between 1731 and 1740.Footnote 60 Comment serials were overwhelmingly a feature of the rage of party. In 1735, William Arnall, a Walpolian propagandist, encapsulated the ephemerality of both individual comment serials and their wider moment:
Who now reads, or even knows Lestrange's Observators, or Defoe's Reviews, or Leslie's Rehearsals, or the Examiners, with a Shoal of other Writings, all of much Noise and some Esteem in their Day? I dare say that many of the present Generation never heard of their Names. As they were solely confined to Party and Party-quarrels, and allied only to the Squabble of the Times, they perished with Time and with Party-heats.Footnote 61
II
Most comment serials were crack partisan weapons, designed to fire regular ‘paper bullets’ into the rage of party. In this, they had several advantages compared with pamphlets and newspapers. They were entirely flexible, being unconstrained by a news function or a need to focus on a designated subject, and could continuously adapt their messages to the moment. Unlike pamphlets, they could also build an audience over time, and use repetition over months or years to drive their points home. Tutchin's Observator was typical in this regard. Its primary aim was to defend and advance whig constitutional principles, and to a lesser extent politicians, against tory principles, politicians, and authors, which were feared to be ascendant after Anne's accession. Tutchin took full advantage of the comment serial form to fashion a flexible and powerful whig weapon.
To understand its workings, it is helpful to begin with the Observator’s worldview. For Tutchin, the ancient English constitution, the guarantor of people's rights and liberties, needed protection from tory threats to undermine it. The constitution had previously been threatened by tories promoting ‘popery and arbitrary government’ under Charles II and James II, had then been restored by the ‘great deliverer’ William III during the Glorious Revolution, was currently safeguarded by Anne and her future Hanoverian successors, and was now challenged by resurgent tories who supported a Jacobite restoration (the return of the deposed James II's Catholic son). A few quotations suffice to illustrate these positions. Tutchin stated that the Observator was ‘wholly designed for the Interest of England, its Antient Laws and Liberties, and the Defence of the Present Government, and Her Majesties Rightful and Lawful Title to the Imperial Crowns of these Kingdoms’.Footnote 62 Elsewhere, he summarized, ‘Ever since I have Written a Weekly Paper, in Defence of the Queens Right to the Crown, the Settlement of the Succession on the House of Hannover, in Vindication of…the Liberties of Englishmen; the Jacobites, Papists, and High-Flyers…have been my Opponents.’Footnote 63 He described himself as a ‘a Stumbling-Block in the way to Popery and Arbitrary-Power’.Footnote 64 After Tutchin's death, Ridpath reaffirmed Tutchin's aims by stating that the Observator ‘continu'd upon the same View of defending our old Constitution, and such Parts of it as were happily restor'd to us by the late King William’, against the ‘Underminers of the Constitution’.Footnote 65
One striking feature of Tutchin's worldview is the prominence of constitutional principle, which was also central to whig–tory conflict more generally.Footnote 66 Consequently, a prominent theme in the Observator was the repackaging and representing of whig constitutional theory – what the Countryman referred to as ‘Whigish Notions of Liberty and Property, the Interest, Constitution and Laws of old England’ – to the public.Footnote 67 The Observator generally aligned with the ancient constitutionalist strand of whig thought, with a heavy emphasis on English history: how the English constitution had operated in the past was how it should operate now. ‘My way is to look back into former Times’, Tutchin wrote, ‘for if we do not know what our Constitution and Priviledges were Ab Origine, we cannot tell what Encroachments are made upon ’em now.’Footnote 68 ‘Revolution Principles [i.e. the principles affirmed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9] were the Principles of our Ancestors; without them we had never known what are the Rights of Englishmen, and without them we had never been able to Defend those Rights to our own Use, and to leave them to Our Posterity.’Footnote 69 When Tutchin discussed particular political issues, for instance about the role of juries or militias, he accompanied these with long discussions of historical precedent.Footnote 70 A totemic theme was that ‘the Crown of England was never Hereditary, but as prescrib'd by Parliament; and no one was yet a Legal King or Queen of England, but by the previous Consent of the People’,Footnote 71 which he illustrated with a six-issue, reign-by-reign English history.Footnote 72 These discussions were sometimes drawn directly from treatises beloved of whigs such as Henry Care's English liberties (1682) and John Selden's Historicall discourse (1647–51).Footnote 73
A second key feature was character assassination of its political enemies – those who threatened the constitution. They were presented as malicious, self-interested traitors, with unjustifiable principles. Tutchin explained that ‘A High-Churchman, is the Weather-Cock of a Steeple, turn'd about by the Wind of Secular-Interest…whose Mouth Vomits Wild-Fire, instead of Divinity…he's for Passive-Obedience, Non-Resistance, and Soveraign Will and Pleasure, and other the Instruments of Slavery.’Footnote 74 Tutchin's simplest method was the pointed use of party labels. His opponents were not usually ‘tories’, but the sinister ‘party’ or ‘faction’ that sought to destroy liberties. Tutchin described them with a panoply of terms: nonjurors, Jacobites, Perkinites, high-churchmen, high-flyers, papists, tackers, memorialists, Tantivy, tories.Footnote 75 These labels could run together: ‘I smell a Rat, a Popish-High-Flying-Non-juring Rat.’Footnote 76 He conflated more moderate with more extreme labels to tar the former with the latter. For instance, he presented high-church Anglicans as crypto-Catholics, arguing that ‘High-Church and Popery are the same things under different Denominations’,Footnote 77 and nonjurors, who accepted Anne's queenship, as effectively Jacobites, who did not: ‘the Nonjurors, Jacobites and Popish Priests, are too near of Kin; they are possess'd with the same Evil Spirit’.Footnote 78
These two themes, which appeared throughout, were accompanied by other thrusts of comment that were more precisely topical. Especially prominent were answers to tory printed publications that streamed off the presses. Tutchin regarded print as a leading tory weapon against the constitution. ‘Since the Jacobites and Papists take the Liberty to Write against the Government, the Rights of the Kingdom, and the Hannover Succession; I shall continue to oppose them’, he wrote; ‘I only catch the Fire-Balls of Contention in my hand, and throw ’em back at the heads of those who first flung ’em.’Footnote 79 Or, ‘While these Men Write I must continue to Answer them; ’tis necessary Publick Poison should have a Publick Antidote.’Footnote 80 The Observator answered myriad tory books and pamphlets, including Henry Sacheverell's The political union (1702) and The character of a low church-man (1702), Sir Humphrey Mackworth's Peace at home (1703), Edward Ward's The dissenter (1704), Charles Leslie's The wolf stript of his shepherd's cloathing (1704) and Cassandra (1704), Sackville Tufton's History of faction (1705), and James Drake's Memorial of the Church of England (1705), and also the main tory comment serials, Heraclitus Ridens, the Rehearsal, and Mercurius Politicus. By returning fire against tory print weapons, Tutchin hoped to prevent the public falling for sinister tory designs.
These are just three prominent themes of the Observator’s whig comment; it should be emphasized that they were part of a shifting and flexible mix. They were also common to many comment serials. Comment serials that contained repackaged partisan constitutional theory include the Rehearsal, Mercurius Politicus, and the Free-Holder. Identifying the enemy as the ‘party’ or ‘faction’, and illuminating their character through myriad labels, is so ubiquitous as to require no illustration. L'Estrange's Observator and the Examiner began as vehicles for answering whig publications, the former proclaiming in its first issue that ‘’Tis the Press that has made ’um Mad, and the Press must set ’um Right again’, and the latter that ‘Some…Papers I intend to Examine, and set People right in their Opinions.’Footnote 81
The Observator’s construction as a whig partisan weapon was complicated by two factors. First, it did not generally describe itself using the term ‘whig’. Tutchin ‘hate[d] the very Name and Notion of a Party’, instead adopting more general, patriotic labels: ‘I am of the Queens Party…I am of the Party of those that are in the English Interest: I am on the side of Truth, and love all that are so, let ’em be High or Low-Church, Dissenters, Whigs, or Tories.’Footnote 82 Tutchin did praise the whigs as ‘Honest Fellows’ and the ‘Loyal Party’,Footnote 83 and was occasionally himself labelled as a whig within the Observator,Footnote 84 but the Observator did not usually identify as ‘whig’. Secondly, the Observator was not necessarily linked to whig politicians. Despite some scholars’ claims,Footnote 85 there is no evidence that it was sponsored by the Whig Junto, the quintet of lords who dominated whig high politics. A Junto connection was alleged by opponents, but Tutchin denied that he was ‘assisted in [his] Writings by a Club of Whig Lords’ or that ‘the Whig Potentates did send [him] a Observatoring’, and it is impossible to judge the matter from these contemporary claims and counter-claims alone.Footnote 86 However, the Junto cannot have been responsible for founding the Observator, because in 1702–3 it often criticized the ‘modern’ whigs, a term connected with the Junto. ‘What is it to poor England’, Tutchin asked, ‘whether the Procurers of Her Ruin be Modern Whiggs or Old Tories?’Footnote 87 It is plausible that Tutchin himself was responsible for launching the project, as he had the necessary experience, will, financial incentive to publish, and ‘old’ whig opinions, or perhaps it derived from the old whig circles in which Tutchin moved.Footnote 88 Certainly, there are implications for the Observator’s voice: it was that of a whig, not of the whigs. Comment serials were partisan weapons, but they were not simple examples of ‘party propaganda’, writing on behalf of politicians under unambiguous party labels.
III
Did comment serials matter? How widely did people read them, or even know about them? What impression, if any, did they make on partisan culture? Questions of this sort haunt all scholars of early modern print, and are invariably hampered by patchy sources. Fortunately, the evidence available for the consumption of comment serials tends to be more extensive than for the consumption of, say, pamphlets, because serials could provoke fresh reactions with each issue, making a greater volume of reactions more likely, and because serials could discuss their own reception. Sources for the Observator’s consumption include pamphlet and serial reactions, discussions of reception within the Observator (especially accounts of Londoners’ responses reported by the ‘Countryman’ to the ‘Observator’), readers’ letters printed in the Observator,Footnote 89 advertisements, and personal diaries and correspondence.
The primary impression given by these sources, shared by Tutchin and his opponents, is that the Observator had substantial public reach, or even fame, and that Tutchin was a major public figure. The Countryman reported to the Observator that people in London ‘talk most of Persons, and I think they talk more of you than any body else’.Footnote 90 One tory pamphlet asked readers to search for Tutchin's honesty, ‘it being neither Just nor Reasonable, that a Man, especially so publick, and well known as he is, should live without it’.Footnote 91 Tutchin and his opponents also agreed that the Observator influenced public opinion. Tutchin claimed success in discovering truth to his readers, asserting that no one would hinder him ‘from opening the Peoples Eyes’,Footnote 92 while his opponents argued that the Observator corrupted the public with its dangerous views. According to the Rehearsal, the whigs’
weekly penny Papers…have done much more Mischief than [the whigs’ books and pamphlets]. For the greatest Part of the People do not Read Books, Most of them cannot Read at all. But they will Gather together about one that can Read, and Listen to an Observator or Review (as I have seen them in the Streets) where all the Principles of Rebellion are Instill'd into them[.]Footnote 93
Mercurius Politicus was similarly worried about the impact of ‘Mobb Orators’, including Tutchin, whose ‘Attempts…to debauch the People, and stifle the Reverence and Obedience due to Authority, in the promisc[u]ous Croud of unauthoriz'd unqualified Intermedlers with Affairs of State and Church, must (if not timely supprest and punisht) end in the ruin of Civil Government.’Footnote 94
These claims were rhetorical commonplaces, and cannot be trusted on their own. But the Observator must genuinely have been perceived as influential by many tories, given that they produced dozens of print responses (Tutchin himself estimated around fifty).Footnote 95 Indeed, the three main tory comment serials of this period were all established entirely or partly to oppose the Observator: Heraclitus Ridens was ‘writ in opposition to John Tutchin’s Common-wealth Observator’;Footnote 96 the Rehearsal explained that the ‘Remedy’ for ‘these Pernicious Papers’ (the Observator and the Review) was ‘to Answer them…in the same Method at these Papers, to come out Weekly, and to be Read by the People’;Footnote 97 and Mercurius Politicus targeted ‘factious Incendiaries’, namely ‘the Observator, Review, &c.…pass[ing] for moderate Men by railing with a Pretence for Moderation’.Footnote 98 The repeated efforts from government or parliament to investigate or silence Tutchin,Footnote 99 and the fact that some even sought to silence Tutchin by physical intimidation, also reflect fears that the Observator had genuine influence.
But did it actually make an impression on the public? A contemporary estimate suggests that the Observator had a print-run of 1,000 copies per issue in 1704.Footnote 100 This is a plausible figure, typical for topical publications.Footnote 101 This may seem limited, but the Observator’s actual circulation would in fact have been far higher, for three reasons. First, if 1,000 copies were printed per issue, the total number of Observators in circulation over its complete run would have been vast, plausibly over a million. Anyone who encountered just one of these physical papers was a direct consumer of the Observator. Secondly, multiple people could have encountered each copy – a historiographical commonplace drawn from Addison's ‘modest computation’ that twenty people read each copy of the Spectator.Footnote 102 For the Observator specifically, there is considerable evidence for multiple consumption, especially in public houses such as coffeehouses. One contemporary in 1705 observed that the Observator and Review were the ‘entertainment of most coffee-houses in town’.Footnote 103 The Countryman's anecdotes about the Observator’s consumption are overwhelmingly set in coffeehouses, and present various multiple consumption scenarios, such as calling up a copy to consult (presumably later returned to allow consultation by others), reading a copy aloud to other coffeehouse-goers, and writing marginal notes on the copy for other readers.Footnote 104 Indeed, he suggests that reading the Observator was a key reason for visiting a coffeehouse at all: when one coffeehouse's copy was stolen, this was ‘a great Loss to a Publick-House, [as] many may come to Read it, and go away without spending a Penny for want of it’.Footnote 105 Thirdly, even if someone had not read or heard an Observator directly, it might be encountered second-hand through conversations or references in other publications. Through such indirect consumption, the Observator’s reach extended beyond those who encountered physical copies. Combining these insights, it becomes possible to see how the Observator could have acquired fame on the scale suggested by contemporaries.
The Observator’s readership reached across the social scale: the duke of Marlborough received copies while on campaign in Europe, while the poor had Observators lent to them at a reduced rate.Footnote 106 The target audience of advertisements suggests middling readers too, for instance well-educated youths, merchants, and parents seeking boarding schools for their children.Footnote 107 Geographically, the Observator’s impact was undoubtedly concentrated in London, but readers’ letters indicate readers in Berkshire, Devon, Hertfordshire, the Isle of Wight, and Suffolk,Footnote 108 and advertisements directed readers to products across Britain.Footnote 109 Evidence is lacking for the gender profile of consumption. This is striking given the extensive contemporary (and historiographical) discussion of female readership of some contemporary serials, perhaps hinting that political comment serials like the Observator were more of a male preserve.Footnote 110
How did people interact with comment serials? The chief pattern that emerges for the Observator is of having been the subject of partisan consumption, with reactions being supportive or hostile. This was certainly the impression of several contemporaries. During Tutchin's trial, one juror asked to be excused because he had previously criticized the Observator, but the attorney-general dismissed this on the grounds that ‘I believe no Man…has read [the Observator], but has given his Opinion of [it] one way or other.’Footnote 111 Summarizing his visits to some London coffeehouses, the Countryman reports that Tutchin divided opinion, as ‘some say you are a very Honest Gentleman; others say you are a meer Rogue, a Seditious, Pestilent Fellow’.Footnote 112 Partisan consumption has received some attention in histories of early modern reading,Footnote 113 and it is contended here that the partisan consumption of comment serials (and other topical print) should be examined as a prominent aspect of the culture of the ‘rage of party’.
Various patterns in the partisan consumption of comment serials may be observed. One is that people often prejudged their reaction to a comment serial from its partisan identity, and used it to confirm their own partisan thinking. ‘Whatever I Write is fore-Judg'd by some Persons before it is Written’, Tutchin lamented.Footnote 114 According to the Countryman, ‘all the Papists, the Perkinites and High-Flyers…Read the Observators on purpose to find Faults’.Footnote 115 A coffeehouse anecdote provides a stark manifestation of this attitude:
’Twas but t'other day, a Gentleman, in a Coffee-House, was reading the Queens Proclamation for putting in Execution An Act of Parliament for the Encouragement and Encrease of Seamen…the Gentleman lik'd the Method very well; but when he was told, That the same Thing had been Printed on the Observator long before the Passing of that Act, he said, That the Observator was a Rascal, and wonder'd that the Parliament, or any Body else, would hearken to what such a Fellow said.Footnote 116
The Observator was also read supportively by people who were already whigs. One tory pamphlet observed their ‘fondness’ for the Observator, and that ‘they every day, every where, affirm what it asserts’.Footnote 117 Another claimed that ‘there is no Book or Paper comes out, that is so much a Party-Book, and for which the whole Faction is so Answerable as this; it being Hugg'd and Cherish'd by them All’.Footnote 118 Individuals who expressed opinions on Tutchin also fit these patterns. Thomas Hearne, a tory, called Tutchin the ‘Author of a scandalous Libell call'd ye Observator’, while the whig earl of Peterborough considered him a ‘true Englishman’.Footnote 119 Despite claims about comment serials’ ability to influence public opinion, their chief significance may lie in affirming and galvanizing existing prejudices, rather than changing minds.
Comment serials also encouraged partisan ‘reading communities’ – collective reading by groups of partisans, both supportive and hostile, that shaped their reactions.Footnote 120 The Countryman's reports of collective coffeehouse reading often suggest this. For instance, in one coffeehouse, an oral reader and his acquaintance share a hostile reading:
presently in comes a Slovenly Sort of a Fellow, and Seating himself with…some of his Acquaintance, he call'd for the Observator, which being brought him…he lifted up his Voice and Read to the whole Audience, at every three or four Lines he would stop, and looking on his Company, says he, This Fellow is a Blockhead; then a little further, This Fellow is a Fool; then He's a Rascal, a Rogue, a Villain; so that by the time he had Read the Paper through, he had given you a Hundred fine Titles.Footnote 121
The Countryman reports the same in a supportive context: ‘I went to a Coffee-House in London, where some Gentlemen were Reading your Paper…I believe ’em to be all True Englishmen that were in the Company, for all of ’em heartily wish'd you might prove a true Prophet.’Footnote 122 The Observator also nurtured an imagined partisan community, based on individual readers knowing that they were part of a larger body of separate supportive readers.Footnote 123 One reader wrote to Tutchin that ‘My self, with all other true Englishmen that Love their Country, give you Thanks for Exposing the Frauds of the Nation which comes within your Knowledge.’Footnote 124 Another submitted information about the malicious actions of Devon tories with the comment that ‘I know thy Zeal to make Good Use of all things; I send this in Love…Thy Friends Love thee, as much as thine Enemies Hate thee.’Footnote 125 Comment serials thus contributed to the development of partisan communities by encouraging the association and mutual affirmation of partisans, both physically and virtually.
Moreover, comment serials functioned as prominent representatives of parties in public. Irrespective of whether the Observator was actually sponsored by whig politicians, it was represented as a whig party mouthpiece. Tories depicted Tutchin as the ‘Cryer and Trumpet of the Party’, the ‘Party's Scribe’, the ‘Mouth and Pillar of Whiggs and Dissenters’.Footnote 126 One pamphlet claimed that the Observator had been started ‘according to the Faction's Request’, after ‘a Party of Men…chose [Tutchin] for their Secretary’.Footnote 127Heraclitus Ridens justified its focus on the Observator with a Virgilian tag: ‘Crimine ab uno disce omnes – From this one Man know the Nature of his Party.’Footnote 128 Such claims were not uncommon. Other comment serials deemed to speak for the whigs in this way include the Review, Tatler, Medley and Englishman, and they were often associated with one another in lists of whig voices.Footnote 129 The Observator and Review were linked especially strongly, as ‘the 2 Foul Mouths of the Party’, ‘a Pair of Republican Orators, Mercenary Hirelings, and Weekly Scriblers of the Party’, and ‘Two Great Blunder-Busses…and Guardians of the Good Old Cause.’Footnote 130 This suggests that comment serials played a significant role as markers of party divisions in public, manifesting and representing party in a tangible form to observers.
IV
Comment serials such as John Tutchin's Observator were a distinctive and significant feature of the partisan culture of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain, and deserve greater attention in accounts of the rage of party. Beginning in the Succession Crisis and exploding during the reign of Anne, regular printed publications that were designed to provide discussions rather than reports were produced and circulated. They were overwhelmingly partisan in intent and construction, although direct links to party politicians are usually hard to prove. Through their regularity and their focus on comment, they became the most pronounced and undiluted partisan voices echoing around the public sphere. The Observator was one of the most prominent comment serials of the period. It was constructed as a whig weapon to fire twice-weekly rounds of paper bullets, charged with a flexible and shifting mixture of partisan comment, including repackaged whig constitutional theory, the tarring of tories as malicious and having incorrect principles, and responses to a continuous stream of tory publications. Although the evidential picture is limited, it appears that the major comment serials were well known, and that they contributed to partisan culture through patterns in their consumption, including by reinforcing and galvanizing partisan identities, by facilitating the development of real and imagined partisan ‘reading communities’, and by manifesting and representing party divisions in public.
