The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665-1740

345 Pages·1994·23.35 MB·English

by  Charles E. Clark

THE PUBLIC PRINTS
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THE
PUBLIC PRINTS
The Newspaper
in Anglo-American Culture,
1665-1740
CHARLES E. CLARK
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1994
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York Toronto
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Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1994 by Charles E. Clark
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clark, Charles E., 1929-
The public prints : the newspaper in Anglo-American culture,
1665-1740 / Charles E. Clark.
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-508233-8
1. American newspapers—History. 2. British newspapers—History,
3. United States—-Civilization-—To 1783. I. Title.
PN4855.C53 1994 307.23'22'0942—dc20 93-2834
I gratefully acknowledge the American Antiquarian Society for permission to reprint from "The News-
papers of Provincial America," Proceedings, Vol. 100, Part 2 (1990): 367-89; the Centre for Extra-Mural
Studies, Birkbcek College, University of London, for permission to reprint from "Metropolis and Province
in Eighteenth-Century Press Relations: The Case of Boston, "Journal of Newspaper and Periodical History, 5
(Autumn 1989): 1-16; and the New England Quarterly Incorporated for permission to reprint from
"Boston and the Nurturing of Newspapers: Dimensions of the Cradle, 1690-1741," New England Quar-
terly, 64:243-71.
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 31
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Marilyn, Douglas, Jonathan, and David,
who came of age (and then some) while this book
was in the making,
and again for Margery:
"Love is patient. . . ."
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Acknowledgments
To take a long view of the matter, this book probably started to germinate
more than half a century ago. I lived in a New England mill town when
there were still mills in New England. Occasionally I accompanied my
father on his weekly visit to our only job printing office. His mission there,
in his role as a minister, was to look after the coming Sunday's printing
needs of the South Congregational Church. Mine was to experience exhil-
arating sights, sounds, and smells and to be moved, for reasons I could not
have explained, by the notions of power and of community that were
incorporated in my vision of identical copies of whatever little items were
coming off the presses soon finding their way into the hands of hundreds of
readers. The printers published a weekly newspaper, bearing the unlikely
title of Argus-Champion. For me no part of the busy scene was more com-
pelling than the big flatbed newpaper press duplicating again and again the
words that had been written at a rolltop desk in the front office overlooking
Main Street. If pressed, I probably would not have denied that the soul of
the community, if anywhere, was down at the end of the street in my
father's church. But here in the newspaper and printing office, I believed,
was its heart and its nervous system.
And so I thank those small-town printers and publishers, now certainly
dead, for stimulating those first inchoate ideas about news, print, and
community. For a time 1 was so entranced with it all that 1 prepared to
spend my life as a journalist—part-time reporting as a teenager, school and
college newpapers, the august Columbia Graduate School of fournalism,
viii Acknowledgments
and a hard six-year apprenticeship with the Providence newspapers—
before finding my real niche in life as a student and teacher of early
American history. All those experiences, as must be obvious, have influ-
enced this book, even though the decision to write it came quite a lot later.
Even taking a shorter view, I have been at this project for a distressingly
long time, and the specific debts I have accumulated are correspondingly
many.
I have been aided by grants from the American Council of Learned
Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and several
funds, programs, and offices of my home institution, the University of
New Hampshire. These include the Central University Research Fund,
the Faculty Scholar Program, the Humanities Program, and the College of
Liberal Arts.
1 have held valuable fellowships which combined financial support with
the use of wonderful facilities and the enjoyment of equally wonderful
company from the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, the
American Antiquarian Society on two occasions, and the Commonwealth
Center for the Study of American Culture at the College of William and
Mary. The project really began at the Huntington Library many summers
ago and took coherent shape during two extended periods at the American
Antiquarian Society, where I did the bulk of my reading in the American
newspapers, the book's core source. The Antiquarian Society has sus-
tained me in other ways as well; I have been fortunate to be included in
certain aspects of its Program in the History of the Book in American
Culture headed by David Hall, and in 1990 1 was a lecturer in "Three
Hundred Years of the American Newspaper," the Society's important
observance, supported by the Gannett Foundation, of the tricentennial of
Publick Occurrences. My time at Williamsburg in the fall of 1990 came at a
crucial point because it was then, with financial support from the Com-
monwealth Center and daily encouragement from the staff of the Institute
of Early American History and Culture, where I was physically en-
sconced, that I recovered from a discouragingly unproductive period and
finished the first complete draft of the text while profiting from stimulating
new ideas.
The individuals who contributed to the fruitfulness of my times in
Worcester and in Williamsburg are far too numerous for a complete list,
but chief among them are John Hench, Nancy Burkett, Joyce Tracy,
Dennis Laurie, Keith Arbour, and Joanne Chaison at the Antiquarian
Society, and Thad Tate, Mike McGiffert, Fredrika Teute, and Bob Gross
in Williamsburg.
I have also made use of a number of other libraries and institutions
whose resources and staffs have helped make this book. The list must
begin with the University of New Hampshire's Dimond Library. It also
includes the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston Atheneaum,
Widener Library at I larvard, Beinekc Library at Yale, New-York I listori-
Acknowledgments ix
cal Society, New York Public Library, Library Company of Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania Historical Society, Library of Congress, British Library,
Institute of Historical Research of the University of London, Bristol Re-
search Library, Cambridge University Library, and the libraries of the
History Faculty and of Gonville and Caius College at Cambridge.
I learned something of the mechanics of printing in the summer of 1973
in the printing workshop led by Homer Martin and Richard Flint during
the 26th annual Seminars on American Culture sponsored by the New
York State Historical Association in Cooperstown. In the summer of 1986,
my poor skills as a compositor were refreshed while I was introduced by
Willie Parker and his associates to the workings of an eighteenth-century
wooden printing press during a week as a costumed apprentice at the
printing office of Colonial Williamsburg. I am grateful to the Colonial
Williamsburg Foundation for making that experience possible and also for
providing permission to use the photographs on pp. 195-98, which show
Peter Stively setting type, Tim McMahon inking the form, and Wil-
liamsburg's master printer Willie Parker manning the press.
1 am also grateful for the contributions to this project that have come
from involvement in various programs of the New Hampshire Humanities
Council, and specifically for the help and friendship of Charles Bickford.
I have received essential encouragement and counsel from many col-
leagues and friends at my own university, including Dean Stuart Palmer of
the College of Liberal Arts and a succession of history department chairs
beginning with the late Don Wilcox and proceeding through Hans
Heilbronner, John Voll, and Jeff Diefendorf. I am grateful to them and to
Warren Brown, who was similarly encouraging in practical ways during
his term as coordinator of the Flumanities Program. Other colleagues who
have helped include especially Bill Harris, Laurel Ulrich, Ligc Gould, and
Cathy Frierson. Jeanne Mitchell, History Department secretary for many
years, has been a faithful supporter and aide. 1 have been nourished in
many ways by a succession of graduate students, usually in seminars
related in some manner to the topic of this book. Some of these seminars
have profited from the cooperation of the Portsmouth Atheneaum and its
staff, but especially of one of its principal officers, Richard Candee. To
name but a few of the many students whose work and conversation have
contributed somehow to this project—apart from Ryan Madden, who did
yeoman service as a research assistant one summer—would be to ignore
others unjustly. A few of them, whose work 1 have used directly, are cited
in the notes. However, there is one who cannot remain unmentioned here.
The single recent student to whom I owe the greatest thanks is Preston
(Tuck) Shea, both for his own arresting scholarship and for his help with
mine.
"Recent" because Chuck Wetherell was once a student in my depart-
ment as well, though I have nearly always thought of him as a collaborator
and colleague instead. Our work together has enriched this book and, I