Volume 1 of The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Beginnings and Consolidation, 1640–1800, is the first of three in the comprehensive enterprise undertaken by the David Finkelstein and Martin Conboy (vol. 2: Expansion and Evolution, 1800–1900; vol. 3: Competition and Disruption, 1900–2017). In the series, the span of almost four centuries of press history is divided into its crucial phases marked by the turns of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Volume 1 covers 27 chapters with 23 case studies, an Introduction, Concluding Comments and a Key Press and Periodical Events Timeline (1605–1800). The latter three sections were written by the editor, Nicholas Brownlees, who is also co-author of three chapters (chapter 1, ‘Business of the press’, with David Finkelstein; chapter 8, ‘The evolving language of the press’, with Birte Bös; and chapter 16, ‘Translation and the press’, with Mairi McLaughlin) and author of a case study in chapter 16. The over 700-pages-long book offers a rich paratextual apparatus including a list of illustrations, acknowledgements, contributor biographies, a bibliography section of over 50 pages and an index. The scope of the synthesis of press history provided by the volume is in itself impressive and unparalleled by any other contribution in the field. It is important to note that although the volume focuses on Britain and Ireland, the transnational nature of historical news in the early and late modern periods is a recurrent theme and many parallels are drawn with the French, Dutch, German and Italian press, as well as the colonial press. This ensures the relevance of the work to media historians in Europe and beyond. Moreover, so does the diverse expertise of the contributors, a panel of internationally recognised authorities on media history and on its interfaces with politics, religion, law, literature, gender studies and people’s history, as well as specialised press discourses and the press in Ireland, Scotland and Wales. No less important is the discourse and language orientation of the volume. It is this angle of The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, 1640–1800 that is pursued in greater detail below. This focus is due to the sheer size of the volume and the availability of other reviews (e.g. Paltrinieri Reference Paltrinieri and Brownlees2024).
Historical linguists and discourse analysts are likely to be most interested in and best instructed by the following themes: (1) periodisation of press history (Brownlees, Timeline); (2) formats, genres and modalities (Scarborough King, chapter 6; Brownlees & Bös, chapter 8); (3) connections to language change (Sturiale, chapter 8); (4) readership and outreach (Dooley, chapter 15; Shapiro, chapter 17); (5) the role of translation and intertextuality (McLaughlin & Brownlees, chapter 16); (6) various registers and specialised press discourses (Taavitsainen, chapter 18; Whitt, chapter 18 case study; Cecconi, chapter 21). These topics reflect the most recent trends in linguistics and discourse analysis (cf. the collective works by Bös & Kornexl Reference Bös and Kornexl2015, Claridge Reference Claridge2025 and Włodarczyk & Brownlees Reference Włodarczyk and Brownleesforthcoming).
A detailed timeline of events is split into four subperiods, each roughly five decades long (1605–59, 1660–99, 1700–49, 1750–1800), marking major political, economic, technological and cultural developments. In Europe, the quick advance of printed news from the first serial news publication started in Strasbourg in 1605. The rest of the timeline is set against events local to Britain and Ireland. In 1620, the first English-language coranto (‘a serialised quarto pamphlet containing foreign news’, Brownlees, p. 6) was published in Amsterdam, and Ben Johnson’s News from the New World Discovered in the Moon, a critique of the new, but suddenly ubiquitous industry, appeared as the first literary metacommentary. The year 1660 not only brought the Restoration of the Stuarts, but also the first news monopoly in England (Henry Muddiman, The Kingdome’s Intelligencer), as well as the very first news publications in Ireland and Scotland. Rare as these are initially, it may be expected that at least some aspects of local Englishes are reflected in local newspapers. Towards the end of the century, in 1695, the Licensing Act lapsed, thus putting a stop to the authorisation of print prior to publication and opening the free lucrative market of news production. In 1700, the first provincial newspapers appeared in England (Norwich Post and Bristol Post-Boy). The next decades reflect the commercial dimension of the business, as it is estimated that, by then, up to 75 per cent of space in many daily newspapers was allocated to advertisements (Brownlees & Finkelstein, p. 36). The closing date is 1800, following the politicisation and appearance of radical newspapers which transformed the press into a powerful opinion-maker. This becomes even clearer as the impact of the slave trade debate running in the press since the 1790s fosters a legal outcome that surfaced clearly in 1806–7 in its abolition in Britain (Brownlees, p. 4).
Thinking about the subtitle of the volume, the ‘consolidation’ must be viewed in different dimensions: professionalisation of the business, creation of the first news agencies, commercialisation, etc. However, as much as it consolidated in the first phase, historical news discourse also diversified. To a linguist, it is appealing to ask to what extent did the ostensibly contradictory processes of consolidation and diversification apply to the linguistic and discourse aspects of the press? Several chapters provide some answers in this respect, in particular chapter 6 (Scarborough King), chapter 7 (Ryan) and chapter 8 (Brownlees & Bös), as they engage in the matters of medium and multimodality, aspects of format – layout and illustration – and the participation of news discourse in the long-term processes of language change, such as standardisation (Sturiale’s case study in chapter 8).
Chapter 6, by Rachel Scarborough King, focuses on the eighteenth century and shows that, in its early decades, it is not print, but the spoken word and manuscript that are the principal media of news circulation. This multimodality has an important bearing on the language of news and the discourse models that the early printed publications follow. The visual familiarity of the printed newssheets and later newspapers stems from the fact that news items were based on a datelined paragraph, closely following the conventions of letter writing, which is only natural since intelligence-gathering methods were epistolary before news was invented. The manuscript and printed medium were, as noted above, first and foremost very closely intertwined also because the same people were involved in their production (e.g. Henry Muddiman, the first editor of the London Gazette), and both relied on the efficiency of postal systems as well as on mechanisms of authentication of their content (p. 150). Finally, as shown in a hybrid issue of the Post Boy from 1710 with its blank page filled with manuscript news items (from the Clark Library Pole News Collection, p. 167), print and handwritten news coexisted also within one physical artifact. The fact that readers and producers would add content freely accounts for the versatile styles employed by the earliest periodical news (cf. Brownlees & Bös in chapter 8).
Scarborough King makes an important observation of particular interest to pragmatists involved in the study of historical discourses, in light of the recent increasing attention paid to visual and graphic features in this line of research. Contrary to the conventional opinion that the 1695 lapse of the Licensing Act resulted in format innovations, such as the two-column layout of the London Gazette (Ryan, p. 180), Scarborough King views these as remediation (‘shifting the format of [handwritten] newsletter into print’, p. 152). This is supported by contextualising the Gazette against the handwritten newsletters, such as the French-language Gazette d’Amsterdam, rather than just against genre conventions of printed newsbooks.
Writing a discourse- and language-oriented overview of the press in two subperiods, 1640–95 and 1695–1800, Nicholas Brownlees and Birte Bös (chapter 8) focus on the diversity of contents and text-types in the early press, a growing ideological positioning over time (the appearance and significance of editorials and letters to the editor) and the language of advertising. During the Civil War, the authors note, the very first news publications use a range of styles, rhetoric and inventive creativity, the latter, for instance, in the form of partisanship, satire and invective (e.g. animadversion). In particular, corantos and translated news dispatches in the period are characterised by brevity and hardly any engagement with readers (‘impersonal factuality’, p. 214). This feature could be explained through impartiality, which also surfaces in faithful translation, in both English and Irish news publications. Since the end of the seventeenth century, the differentiation of the forms, genres and linguistic styles is unprecedented and it parallels the gradual regional expansion of the press. After the 1712 Stamp Act, newspapers expand to cover six pages, with genres such as reviews, medical and science texts and letters to the editor as new additions. At this point, news publications may be described as ‘multitext conglomerates’ (p. 203). In the eighteenth century, magazines giving space to new issues of public interest, such as scientific and medical observations, start to appear.
From the point of view of language, topics such as deixis and reference in news and news translations or the use of epistemic devices (the emergence of personalisation reflected also in editorial metadiscourse) have been analysed frequently (e.g. Bös Reference Bös, Emig and Gohrisch2015). These themes have all been a way of noticing, despite the ostensible absence of bias that was so often emphasised in the metacommentary, the well-thought-out strategies of factuality, of building credibility and evidentiality. Finally, the commercial foundation of news is defined in 1731 when the Daily Advertiser, the first newspaper entirely financed by advertising, was published. Brownlees & Bös also offer a gist of the development of this news genre (pp. 211–23).
The case study on the role and influence of eighteenth-century British newspapers on the ideology of standard language by Massimo Sturiale (chapter 8) underlines the substantial role of this medium in ensuring acceptance of the pronunciation features codified by dictionaries and other sources. This happened not only through metacommentary, but also in theatre reviews or job advertisements (pp. 217–19). Most importantly, however, it was through the personal contributions that readers made to the newspapers, on the issues of social status, provincialisms and accent norms debates. The press, as Sturiale underlines, reflected instability and change in pronunciations, despite the codification efforts on the part of contemporary elocutionists.
Readership, outreach and literacies in connection with the huge impact that the handwritten and printed news had on the early modern mindsets, as well as relative to the social histories of women, gender and social norms, are discussed by Brendan Dooley (chapter 15) and Rebecca Shapiro (chapter 17). Dooley traces the history of the exchange of news among merchants and diplomats in the ‘anonymous episodic format’ in handwritten newsletters. The period of interest, as Dooley notices, ranges from the Thirty Years’ War to the Napoleonic Wars – when the development and integration of European communication networks take place (p. 364); by 1690, the north and south of Europe were interconnected via a dense web of transit routes, with Madrid and Moscow being the east–west extremes. The contemporary political regimes, however, were initially reluctant to diffuse news regularly to the broader public for fear of generating unnecessary and inconvenient discussions. News consumption, and Dooley agrees here with many news historians, was often communal, public and shared, while news sources were versatile. This echoes the multimodality of early modern news (cf. chapter 6) and is an important contextualisation cue in the study of material from this period, as it foregrounds its considerable speech-relatedness. In terms of perceptions and evaluations, although initially the news-reading activity was in itself ridiculed and the matter viewed as trivial, very soon the Enlightenment movement legitimised it as a commendable intellectual activity (e.g. in 1755, the Lisbon earthquake sent literal and metaphorical shockwaves all across Europe). Gradually, alongside other factors, the fashion for reading, popularised through periodical news, boosted literacy rates and reached new social groups. Since 1776, not only European but also colonial events were disseminated regularly, providing a vehicle for the spread of new evolving varieties of English. In the case of the European turmoil, as Dooley shows, sharing news topics not only meant the interconnectedness of different language and dialect communities, but also a mutual ‘transvaluation of values’ (p. 378), reflected in major controversies and debates conducted in the press, not infrequently on issues of language (cf. Sturiale, chapter 8).
Moving on to the languages of news, chapter 16 by Mairi McLaughlin and Nicholas Brownlees provides an overview of the features of translated news in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and generalisations about the role of news translation in the period. The authors remind us that translation, copying, reprinting and otherwise recycling news items and contents was not only common, but accepted and nearly the only existing practice before the end of the eighteenth century. At that point, the first foreign correspondents were engaged to work for major newspapers (e.g. James Perry, editor of the Morning Chronicle, travelled to France in 1791 to report as eye-witness and sent dispatches back to his own newspaper, p. 385). Thus one of the challenges of news translation studies is to overcome the problem of the invisibility of the process, sources and actors involved. On the other hand, it becomes clear that knowledge of languages must have been a crucial prerequisite to becoming a news editor, while metacommentary, infrequent as it may be, mentions translation to boost news credibility by praising its faithful nature. On closer reading, however, as the illustration of a French translation of English news in the Gazette de France from 1657 shows (pp. 392–3), the output text contains omissions, additions and modifications, in particular in relation to non-newsworthy content and to the status of political figures, for instance, by means of changes in the terms of address (the aristocratic title in reference to the English ambassador is omitted in French).
The authors rightly indicate that comparative studies provide the only way to extend our knowledge of the types of editorial intervention and that ongoing digitisation efforts have been instrumental in pursuing this line of research. For instance, McLaughlin’s (Reference McLaughlin2021) corpus of the French press (1631–1789) has brought some interesting findings: translated news was more concise than original news, borrowings were more frequent in translations than in originally produced news, passive constructions were more frequent in the Anglophone news rendered in French, and news from British sources was notable for the high frequency of first- and second-person pronouns, speech-related features and emotive vocabulary (p. 402). Overall, some of these features may have percolated to the general journalistic styles, as the chapter claims.
Rebecca Shapiro takes on board issues of social and gender norms in chapter 17 (cf. Conboy, chapter 5 on women as writers and audience, p. 134), thus providing some background for potential efforts to recover language manifestations of the gender variable in historical news. As reading was an elite activity during this period, female literacy rates remained much lower than those of men (cf. Jones, chapter 4 ‘Readers and readerships’, p. 111–12). That notwithstanding and although the first periodicals for women were produced by men (e.g. John Dunton’s Ladies Mercury, 1693, p. 410), women performed a range of roles in the print trade. Shapiro’s chapter focuses on eighteenth-century female publishers, printers, bookseller, patrons, translators and editors. It shows that in the latter part of the century women from a variety of regions and classes were active in the printing business. Next to female participation, the other important issue addressed in the chapter is ‘what is meant by a periodical for ladies’? (p. 407), and, more broadly, how did news publications cater for female audiences? Can female press be viewed as a specialised news register in its own right?
Early women’s magazines were very much social manuals for the middle and upper classes (p. 412), as they often reprinted contemporary conduct literature. It is interesting to note that the first short-lived Ladies’ Mercury had a question-and-answer format (authority building: an unknowing reader versus a knowing editor), but later conduct magazines did not stick to it. A later longer-lived Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) was still a tribute to female domesticity (fashion advice, needlework patterns and recipes were found next to poems and letters to the editor), but it occasionally reported rifts in gender norms, such as its account of the suicide of a ‘fallen girl’ (1770, p. 414).
Alongside female magazines and target audiences, other specialised registers also developed in connection with the evolution of news, as chapter 18, ‘The medical press’ by Irma Taavitsainen, shows. The appearance of periodical news publication revolutionised the delivery and dissemination of knowledge in the realm of science possibly more than in any other domain. Various news outlets provided a more effective and quicker outreach, especially since the foundation of the Royal Historical Society in 1665. Taavitsainen presents the evolution and diversification of the specialised branch of news discourse starting with its versatile styles of writing. The broad range of the medical press (medical news, reports, book reviews, advertisements for medical services and products, etc.) was adapted to the needs of the intended audiences and their background knowledge. Generic conventions of ancient medical works were preserved in treatises, but different materia medica employed household forms, such as the recipe. As Taavitsainen emphasises, the producers similarly formed a mixed community, including contemporary professional scientists (who published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and outlets of other London societies, such as the College of Physicians) as well as amateurs and quacks (p. 428). As polite society’s interest in scientific novelties grew in the spirit of the Enlightenment, the general periodical the Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1922) started reprinting medical articles from other sources and featured them alongside popular recipes for treating worms. At the same time, as the magazine opened to input from readers, it became a site for debate on issues such as smallpox inoculation (p. 433).
Increasing professionalisation, consolidation and disciplinary specialisation of medicine resulted in the foundation of specialised journals in different areas, especially in Scotland, with Edinburgh becoming the hub of the medical press in the eighteenth century. The Edinburgh Medical Journal was first published in 1731, having started under a different name a year earlier. Its primary focus was on clinical and pathological case studies, but it also included astronomical and agricultural matter, which shows a disciplinary and thematic breadth that most likely translated into a much broader lexical scope than the later more specialised publications. The first review journal was founded by an Edinburgh physician, Andrew Duncan, in 1752 (p. 435) and a range of more specialised publications followed. Not unlike the contemporary political news coverage, unbiased presentation was also part of the policy of medical titles, which aimed to enable readers to form their own opinions. Over time, stance and evaluation features were implemented. It is important to note that when the book review section began to include critical appraisals, the reception was no longer as positive.
In medical discourse, the topic of the female body in connection with reproduction and birth has received a lot of attention since the ancient treatises. A case study by Richard J. Whitt appended to the chapter focuses on the epistemic spaces of knowledge on these issues, and, in particular, on female body parts. Whitt uses the Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT) and Modern English Medical Texts (MEMT) corpora and conducts a keyword analysis of the stems ‘part’ and ‘woman’. The analysis shows that markers of direct observation dominate throughout, which may be an indication of the arising strategies of epistemic implicature (p. 446).
Crime reporting was also characterised by some distinctive developments and features. Chapter 21 by Elisabetta Cecconi on ‘early forms of moral panic’ focuses on the circulation of crime news, dissemination of knowledge about law and order, and the role of the press in fostering (dis)trust of the judicial system in Britain. The development goes from a strong connection between Christian morality and legal practice in the seventeenth century, on the one hand, and secularisation and shift to forensic procedures in the eighteenth century, on the other. In terms of perpetrators, crime changes from being viewed as a mortal sin to a social problem. Very early on, female criminality occupied an important position, for example, the devil in the guise of another woman who acts as instigator of the deed was a common trope.
The study also draws evidence from a number of digital databases, including specialised historical language corpora – Lancaster Newsbooks Corpus (LNC, 1653–4), Zurich English Newspapers Corpus (ZEN, 1661–1791) – and general-purpose collections – Early English Books Online (EEBO) and the British Newspaper Archive. Cecconi indicates differences between genres of crime reporting; for instance, newsbooks or weekly pamphlets circulated in the first years of the Interregnum; following the Restoration, the London Gazette and others in the capital featured crime news regularly, also in the form of announcements and advertisements. This is observed, in particular, between crime reports and trial reports. The former are chronological narratives, the latter mirror the interactive nature of the trials and introduce a greater distance between the author and the reader (p. 494). Overall, it may be stated that the narratives were fact-centred and impersonal (p. 500). Over time a decline in sensational content may be observed (as early as 1726), alongside the dominance of serious attitude and sober style.
The shifting focus of crime reporting towards the law and trial procedure is marked by the publication of the cyclic Old Bailey Proceedings (1674) and Ordinary’s Account of Executed Offenders (1676). Cecconi’s chapter is followed by her case study illustrating the use of crime reporting for propaganda purposes by both Scottish Presbyterians and the London government in connection with the assassination of the Archbishop of St Andrews in 1679 by the former.
All in all, the volume provides a systematic overview of the field of historical news discourse in its earliest period. Extending the empirical scope to cover regional Irish, Scottish and Welsh sources and devoting space to hitherto non-mainstream topics in historical media studies (e.g. consequences of the coexistence of manuscript and print, the versatile roles of women, the integral place of specialised registers) constitute the greatest strengths of the volume. Another great strength lies in the broad contextualisation of both the individual themes and the historiography of news discourse.
The volume provides a rich array of answers to the question how different historical news was to contemporary consumers, serving their modern counterparts with plenty of food for thought. The technologies of the historical press are obscure to us; it surprises us how its reach was restricted to the reading elites; it strikes us that news publications did not operate within the ‘public sphere’ (Rogers, chapter 9) as we know it, and that it could not therefore play the role of a decisive opinion-maker. Moreover, since, as the volume shows, it took quite a while for news producers to understand that the formats and styles need to cater for the needs of the readers, historical news does not look reader-friendly or at all appealing to the modern eye. Newsworthiness, topicality, relevance and other pillars of a good news story are rarely there in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. On the other hand, news production was caught in the political versus commercial conundrum very early on, as publishers have always had their agendas and spread biases, while at the same time incorporating multiple perspectives and evaluations. Not unlike today, also in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the notion of contemporaneity developed (Dooley Reference Dooley and Dooley2010), the reader must have been a potential target of fake news and manipulations. Were the defence mechanisms at their disposal more or less effective compared to the present? They may have been slower, used different media and formats, but fact checking was clearly not invented in the twenty-first century.
