The Gazette , the Tatler , and the Making of the Periodical Essay: Form and Genre in Eighteenth-Century News
2020; Bibliographical Society of America; Volume: 114; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/707496
ISSN2377-6528
Autores Tópico(s)Travel Writing and Literature
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeThe Gazette, the Tatler, and the Making of the Periodical Essay: Form and Genre in Eighteenth-Century NewsRachael Scarborough KingRachael Scarborough KingFull TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe emergence of the periodical essay at the turn of the eighteenth century has been understood as a transformation of content: as a new tone and topic, which together forged a new genre. As Denise Gigante argues, the "distinguishing feature" of periodicals was "their literary dimension": "Mixing personal reflections with social critique, the first British essayists … self-consciously sought to forge a 'literary' tradition."1 Similarly, Richard Squibbs makes the "suggestion that the literariness of the periodical essay is one of the things that distinguishes it generically from other sorts of serial publication."2 Or, as Jürgen Habermas tellingly misnames them, the "moral weeklies … considered themselves literary pieces."3 Such an analysis focuses on what was distinctive about the writing in works such as Ned Ward's London Spy, Daniel Defoe's Review and, most influentially, Richard Steele and Joseph Addison's Tatler and Spectator, emphasizing these papers' separation from other kinds of ephemeral print such as newspapers, pamphlets, and magazines. Literary critics often highlight the language of the essays, secondarily noting the impact of their ephemeral form and periodical publishing schedule.This article orients itself instead to the perspective of material form, proceeding from the observation that the first examples of what we now call periodical essays both looked the same as existing newspapers—they shared a format and layout—and overlapped with them in content in important and under-acknowledged ways. The question then arises: how did eighteenth-century and later readers come to experience novelty in an arena of visual and often textual similarity? Highlighting the connections between the London Gazette (1665–present) and the Tatler (1709–11) and Spectator (1711–12; 1714) in the figure of Steele—who launched the Tatler while serving as state gazetteer, and who copied the format of the newspaper for his new periodical—I argue that what we now call the periodical essay initially presented itself as internal rather than oppositional to the news marketplace. By engaging with newspapers through visual appearance, shared content, and self-reflexive commentary, these early and influential periodicals ultimately enabled the broadening and deepening of the category of "the news" that was a central feature of eighteenth-century print culture. They created a new realm of news consumption by forging a hybrid genre that relied on readers' understanding of formal cues. The newspaper format of the Tatler mediated how readers placed the paper within an expanding early eighteenth-century media environment, giving the periodical genre its early topicality and urgency.Reading the Tatler and Spectator in this way—as originally a kind of newspaper—clarifies the stakes around both papers' frequent and incisive commentary on the early eighteenth-century news media. The relationship of the periodicals to the news industry cannot be understood solely as one of antagonism or, more mildly, ironic inversion, as, for example, Brian Cowan contends: "Addison and Steele expressed some of the most important criticism of the news culture of early-eighteenth-century England through their Spectator project… . Addison and Steele used the newspaper form to convey their disapproval for the practice of newsmongering."4 Instead, as Stuart Sherman notes, "The Tatler functioned from the start as both a newspaper in itself and a highly perceptive satire on newspapers."5 To create this mixed genre Steele also chose a mixed form, making minor but meaningful alterations to the look of the Gazette. My argument thus moves beyond a general invocation of the medium of print, as in Calhoun Winton's point that "the paper was a manifestation of a changing print culture, and itself changed that culture,"6 to underscore bibliographical details of format, layout, and type. While the periodicals parodied and criticized newspapers, they also, and perhaps more commonly, served as sources of news themselves—both the foreign and political news that was the newspapers' bread and butter, and a new type of information regarding London society, entertainment, and gossip. By replicating the newspaper format, Steele invited this mode of reading; consumers scanning the array of titles on a shop board or coffeehouse table would have experienced similarity rather than difference in material appearance.7 The definition of "the news" itself was in flux in this period,8 and by filling the newspaper format with not only foreign battles and diplomacy but also opinionated commentaries, reader feedback, and criticism of fashions, books, and entertainments, Steele played a significant role in the concept's expansion, diversification, and ultimately segmentation. Increasingly over the run of the Tatler, and especially in the Spectator, the periodical diverged from the newspaper, so that reading back from the endpoint of the latter journal—with its active eidolon, authorial club, and continuous essays—can obscure the earlier one's dependence upon the same interpretive skills that went into reading a newspaper. But in their early days, the periodicals emphasized connection as much as distinction, positioning themselves as a branch of the news media.While scholars have noted the Tatler and Spectator's adoption of the newspaper format as well as Steele's role as gazetteer, the significance of these factors has been largely overlooked. Rather than separate from the sphere of newspapers, Steele used materiality to forge a fluid, productive relationship between the emerging and existing genres. Both the Tatler and Spectator employed the format of the government's official newspaper, the London Gazette: a single folio half-sheet printed in double columns on each side (see fig. 1). Like the Gazette, the Tatler also organized its paragraphs of information according to italicized datelines indicating the source of the "news," although these were London social spaces rather than the Gazette's foreign capitals. However, the Tatler added a second set of horizontal black lines containing a Latin motto, a feature upon which the Spectator would expand. The authors referred to their productions as newspapers: they described both works as "News," and Steele addressed his "Contemporaries the Novelists" and "Brother News-Writers," positioning himself as one of "we Novelists" or "us Writers of News."9 He initially deployed the language of news reporting to introduce coverage of theater, literature, learning, and fashion. In response, correspondents began sending him their own "Scandal & News," as one reader put it in a letter to Steele now in the British Library.10 Although previous periodicals, such as Roger L'Estrange's Observator and Daniel Defoe's Review, also had mixed news and commentary, they had not adopted the two-column datelined formula.11 The format was a way to appeal to existing newsreaders familiar with the methods of news publication; as Steele wrote in the preface to the first volume of the Tatler, "To make this generally read, it seemed the most proper Method to form it by Way of a Letter of Intelligence."12 He could only explain his new project through continual juxtaposition with readers' expectations of what they would find in the newspaper format.Fig. 1. The London Gazette No. 4535, 25–28 April 1709, p. 1, and the Tatler No. 6, 21–23 April 1709, p. 1, when Steele was editor of both periodicals. Z17 097, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; Nich. Newsp. 15A, fol. 212, Nichols Newspaper Collection, The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointAttention to the publication history of the Tatler and Spectator, and to the textual format that is the sign of that history, thus reveals the meeting points of form and content in the creation of new literary genres—showing how crucial material cues are to readers' experiences of novelty. With their miscellaneous character and voluminous length, periodicals have been seen as resistant to genre theory, but an attention to format offers one means to generalize about the seemingly inchoate category of the "periodical essay." Genres are historical designations that exist in systems whose components continually adapt and reconfigure in response to one another; in Ralph Cohen's terms,A genre does not exist independently; it arises to compete or to contrast with other genres, to complement, augment, interrelate with other genres. Genres do not exist by themselves; they are named and placed within hierarchies or systems of genres, and each is defined by reference to the system and its members. A genre, therefore, is to be understood in relation to other genres, so that its aims and purposes at a particular time are defined by its interrelation with and differentiation from others.13It is therefore not only noteworthy but, moreover, expected that what will come to be recognized as an innovation in genre should begin as a variation on an existing form. By highlighting the connective tissue of format, I show how it provides the context for interpretation of content—how the periodicals' simultaneously serious and ironic stance toward eighteenth-century news only becomes legible when they are read alongside the existing "public prints." As Steele wrote, "My Paper is a Kind of Letter of News, but it regards rather what passes in the World of Conversation than that of Business."14 In the experimental venue of early eighteenth-century periodicals, the appearance of the Tatler signaled that it was not a wholly new venture but an amended kind of paper, a stance that guided its reception.The Tatler was initially less about reform or rejection of the news than expansion, offering an additive rather than a replacement model of genre change. While literary scholars tend to see the journal as a novelty, positioning it as the start of the eighteenth-century periodical genre, some historians have connected it to late seventeenth-century news culture. Cowan notes that Steele and Addison faced a situation in which "[e]arly-eighteenth-century serial publications were associated with the ephemeral, satirical, deeply partisan, and highly unreliable news and propaganda products of the seventeenth-century civil war and Restoration crises of authority," leading them to take an oppositional stance to newspapers.15 Mark Knights places both news and entertainment periodicals within the context of partisan politics, arguing that they offered interpretations of the facts: "Periodicals competed to offer 'true' news and thus made truth something of a partisan affair."16 Although this approach emphasizes the connections between newspapers and periodicals, it neglects the particular dynamics of each genre. Yet despite the growing popularity of the subfield of periodical studies in literary criticism, periodicals and newspapers have been studied separately, with scholars such as Manushag Powell and Jared Gardner offering important interpretations of the periodical's model of authorship, while others such as Joad Raymond, Michael Harris, and Hannah Barker have investigated the development of the newspaper.17 The anthologization of individual issues of periodicals, both in the eighteenth century and today, has drawn a line between the two forms. Bringing these fields together makes apparent that the issue-to-issue updates and interactive, communal style favored by the periodical—in which texts were "authored" by a figure like Isaac Bickerstaff or Mr. Spectator, and readers were asked for epistolary response—derived from the newspaper, which republished diplomatic reports and private letters and did not include any authorial names. As Jean Marie Lutes has written, "The recovery work demanded by periodical studies involves the recovery not just of selected texts but also of dynamic print environments in which multiple texts self-consciously respond to each other."18 By revealing the "newsy" nature of the Tatler and Spectator, this article recovers a media ecosystem in which the borders between now-canonical modern genres were still permeable and fluctuating.Richard Steele, GazetteerOne goal of this article is to resituate Steele's centrality to the formation of the Tatler and Spectator and to the identity of the periodical. Scholarship often positions the Tatler as a stepping stone on the way to the Spectator and Steele as secondary to Addison, who wrote the most famous essays and is often credited with the witty, moralizing tone of the later periodical.19 But Steele may have played a more influential role in establishing the format and genre of the Tatler and Spectator—and thus in setting expectations for the purposes of a periodical journal. Steele held the government position of gazetteer, editor of the London Gazette, from 1707 to 1710, a period that overlapped with his inauguration of the Tatler, and was therefore one of the principal newswriters of the period. While the Gazette, the state's official journalistic organ, faced growing competition in the early eighteenth century, it remained the most widely circulated newspaper and retained a reputation for the most reliable, if not the most exciting, reports.20 At the time the Tatler appeared, printed news—which went by a variety of synonyms including "intelligence," "advices," and "informations"—in practice meant foreign affairs. Beginning with the corantos of the 1620s and standardizing with the introduction in 1665 of the Gazette, England's first broadsheet newspaper, the majority of items in English newspapers concerned foreign events; this remained true in the early eighteenth century's new, popular papers, Richard Baldwin's Post Man and Abel Roper's Post Boy.21 This was a time of rapid expansion in the news industry; five new newspapers appeared in the month after the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, and by 1712 there were twelve periodicals available in London. The Tatler appeared in a competitive, interactive news environment.Steele's work as gazetteer is therefore not simply biographical datum but rather informed his understanding of what a periodical could be and do: provide the same attention and seriousness to behavior, cultural consumption, and everyday life as the newspaper did to diplomacy, war, and trade. As Richmond P. Bond writes, "Steele could rightly reckon the Gazetteership as the immediate, practical apprenticeship for his new special undertaking."22 Even as he was editing the Gazette, however, Steele recognized that it was in decline. Circulation had reached new peaks—of 7,000 to 8,000 copies sold per issue—in the early 1700s with public interest in the War of the Spanish Succession, but began decreasing soon after Steele's appointment as gazetteer, with further lows coming after he lost the position.23 Steele attempted various innovations, but he was stymied by his superiors in the secretary of state's office.24 Instead, he turned his attention to the Tatler, which he started and operated with the full knowledge of his Gazette supervisors. Initially writing the two journals side by side, he organized the Tatler in the manner most familiar to him, copying the Gazette's format and layout as well as its method of printing short paragraphs of news after an italicized dateline, the date and location indicating the source of information. Steele positioned the Tatler to serve an original news function, offering its readers an updated version of the out-of-style Gazette, at the same time as he initially replicated some news items from one paper to the other. He expected his audience to read and compare multiple papers, already a common practice in the London coffeehouse environment, and to arrive at an accurate narrative through various perspectives. This newspaper orientation, which prioritized short, topical, and continuing stories that encouraged readers to continue picking up the paper, may be more significant to the long-term development of the Tatler and Spectator than the content of any individual essay. Steele inaugurated a kind of lifestyle reporting by expanding the definition of news.While Steele was not well known as a journalist at the time of his appointment as gazetteer in May 1707—having previously achieved moderate success as a playwright—he immediately attempted reforms. The editor and writer of the Gazette was a subordinate role in the secretary of state's office, and Steele would not have had the authority to run the paper independently; he was subject to the directions of Charles Spencer, Earl of Sunderland and Secretary of State for the Southern Department, and of the undersecretaries, who included Addison. But soon after his appointment, he suggested reforms that, he argued, would "raise the Value of the paper written by Authority, and Lessen the esteem of the rest among the Generality of the People."25 The first three of these suggestions would have allowed him more directly to collect news from foreign diplomats, but the last and most significant was that the Gazette move from its biweekly Monday-and-Thursday publication schedule, in place since the paper's institution in 1665, to triweekly publication on the post days of Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Steele hoped to make the Gazette more competitive in both content and form.Steele's suggestions, and the degree to which they were executed, illuminate modes of news gathering in the early eighteenth century and begin to reveal the direction of adaptation he would pursue in the Tatler. At the cutting edge of the news industry were three papers: the Post Man, Post Boy, and Flying Post, which were printed triweekly for immediate distribution to both London and provincial readers.26 This is the model that Steele would adopt for the Tatler, but he was unable, at least initially, to convince his Gazette superiors of the benefits of the reform, which the Gazette did not make until June 1709.27 However, his other suggestions worked to capitalize on the gazetteer's privileges: since the Gazette operated out of the secretary of state's office, the editor had firsthand access to incoming diplomatic reports, an advantage that contributed to its reputation as a dry but trustworthy source. Steele, however, wanted foreign diplomats to send a news circular to him, rather than to the undersecretaries. No records survive showing whether this directive was carried out during his tenure, but state records show that the system was in place a few years later. In July 1720, Secretary of State James Craggs wrote to Robert Sutton, ambassador to France, "H:M: has been pleased to give direction, that the London Gazette which is published by the Royal Authority, should for the future be regularly & sufficiently furnished with all proper advices & Intelligence from abroad."28 This directive was repeated nearly verbatim in dispatches to foreign ambassadors on multiple occasions in the 1720s and '30s. Providing news for the Gazette was part of a diplomat's official duties, and the paper's editor was dependent upon these foreign agents' communications.Steele entered into this cycle of news exchange with continental diplomats, even if he was unable to establish the direct news channel that he desired. Correspondence to and from Sunderland's underlings frequently mentioned Steele's duties as gazetteer and the appropriate modes for turning diplomatic communiqués into items for the newspaper. For the most part, this came in the form of reproof, as Steele was admonished for inaccurate or confidential information making its way into the Gazette. In June 1708, for example, Adam Cardonnel, secretary to John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough and leader of the Allied forces, wrote to "caution Mr Steele in his Grace's name, not to insert any thing in his Gazet relating to Prince Eugene [of Savoy] or his motions, but what you have from hence, for we receive false reports of that kind from all parts."29 In another letter, Cardonnel continued in a petulant tone, "It might very well be thought at Whitehall we know better Prince Eugene's motions than they could from the Hague"—the dateline of a June 12 Gazette item noting, "'Tis said Prince Eugene will be at Maestricht the next week"30—"and could have told them what was most proper for the Publick on that account."31 At other times, however, Cardonnel excused erroneous reports and attributed them to faulty sources, including himself. In October 1708, for example, he wrote, "I am sorry Mr Steel is so much blam'd for what he put into the Gazette relating to the siege [of Lille], since it came from hence, but I assure you we were then in a very melancholy cue."32 Cardonnel directed the undersecretaries to give news items to Steele, writing in July 1708, "you will give a copy of this to Mr Steele for the Gazette … before the world knows," and in August, "you will please to give the enclos'd relation to Mr Steel for the Gazet."33 Such correspondence from the continental battlefields makes clear the extent to which high-ranking diplomats bore responsibility for the contents of the Gazette.The dateline layout of the Gazette displayed to readers the network of diplomatic correspondence that authenticated the news items, which were generally presented without interpretation. It was the reader's job to follow stories from one issue to the next and discern a political bias to coverage. The Tatler's structure thus referenced the Gazette's system of newsgathering and transmission. While Steele adopted the London triweeklies' publication schedule, he maintained the physical appearance of the Gazette. The Post Boy and Post Man were known for the woodcuts of a post rider and packet boat that flanked the papers' black-letter title banners—these images visually distinguished the two newspapers from competitors, and many successors imitated the format. Periodicals like the Review or the British Apollo, meanwhile, featured large-font, multi-line titles surrounded by white space comprising up to half of the first page. But the Tatler relied on the Gazette's more sober layout, with a simple roman-font headpiece, double black lines setting off the byline "Published by Authority" (Gazette) or "By Isaac Bickerstaff Esq." (Tatler) and the date of publication, black-letter issue number in the upper right-hand corner, two columns of text, and a colophon designating the printer at the bottom of page 2. The works devoted similar column inches to their content, with advertisements taking up from a half column to one and one-half columns of the second page, and they might increase or decrease font size to fit copy onto the page. The Tatler was printed and distributed by John Nutt and John Morphew, who had been journeymen printers in the shop of Jacob Tonson, printer of the Gazette; later, Tonson took over the printing.34 The Tatler was not the first or only periodical to use the half-sheet, two-column format, but the direct transfer of methods and materials from the Gazette shows the importance of the latter to the formation of the new journal.The Tatler adapted the dateline method to London geography, as Steele explained: "All accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment, shall be under the article of White's Chocolate-house; poetry, under that of Will's Coffee-house; learning, under the title of Grecian; foreign and domestic news, you will have from St. James's Coffee-house; and what else I shall on any other subject offer, shall be dated from my own apartment." He assured his readers that he had "settled a Correspondence" in these locations, just as he had sought to establish a correspondence with British diplomats.35 This language certainly ironized the newspaper's use of datelines, perhaps calling out the frequently obscure sources of items that purportedly originated from precise locations. But more importantly, it relied upon the interpretive skills that derived from newspaper reading, demonstrating the importance of contextual information for accurate understanding in this genre. As Andrew Lincoln points out, newspapers' paragraphs would often be direct translations from foreign journals, so that they represented a non-English and sometimes enemy viewpoint; therefore, "Readers were expected to interpret news in relation to its source, rather than to take it at face value."36 The Gazette's readers and contributors understood datelines in this way, judging the reliability of news according to its origin. As Cardonnel wrote in 1709, "If you would retrieve the credit of the Gazette, you must not put in what chance news comes to you from Ostend"; in an earlier letter Cardonnel's employer, Marlborough, had observed of news datelined Ostend, "you cannot but have observed what has come to you from thence, of our motions, has hitherto been very imperfect and often farr from the truth."37 Scott Black notes that the Tatler's datelines were more than a visual device, as Steele "carefully matches the style of particular 'Discourses' to the topics of 'Action.'"38 Steele wrote of the practice, the "dates of places … may prepare you for the matter you are to expect."39 Datelines assumed readers' familiarity with a non-continuous, multivocal document that could only make sense when read from day to day and alongside other sources. They were not incidental but integral to Steele's effort to offer readers an expanded understanding of the news.Varieties of News in the TatlerSteele's decision to start from the Gazette model imbued the Tatler with the temporality and epistemology of the newspaper, which distributed authority between the individual editor and the network of correspondents. Steele appealed to such a network as early as Tatler No. 7 when he called for "any Gentleman or Lady" to "transmit to me any occurrences you meet with … by the Penny-Post," adding, "without such Assistance, I frankly confess, and am sensible, that I have not a Month's Wit more."40 By describing all readers as potential writers, Steele's "paper cultivated a new correspondence with its readers, as both a communication (corresponding with them) and a mirroring (corresponding to them)," as Sherman has argued.41 Similarly, when discussing the Gazette, Steele disclaimed individual responsibility for its contents; in 1707, he excused himself for a paragraph that had irritated Sunderland by noting, "I was directed to take notice of that Circumstance [the arrival of a fleet] by Mr Addison at Your Lordship's Order and us'd Mr Stepny's very Words."42 By adopting the dateline layout and printing reader correspondence as well as essays written by his friends, Steele applied the sense of ever-evolving political and military events—in which each post day or packet boat could bring an update, or postpone one—to the activities of the London world. The visual and stylistic intersection of the Gazette and Tatler was in part a contingent effect of Steele's struggle to put out two papers simultaneously, but it was one that enabled the new periodical to appeal to a reading public already accustomed to the methods of the bi- and triweekly newspaper.At first, the papers overlapped significantly as Steele used his Gazette correspondence as a source of copy for the Tatler, but gradually they developed supplementary rather than intersecting spheres of information and authority. While scholarship has tended to write off Steele's, and later Addison's, approach to news as satirical, the Tatler included foreign diplomatic and military news that followed the Gazette model. As Robert Waller Achurch has shown, much of this news repeated that in the Gazette, although the Tatler often featured more editorializing despite devoting less space to straight news.43 In the first line of the first number, Steele described the "Main Design" of his paper as being "for the Use of Politick Persons, who are so publick-spirited as to neglect their own Affairs to look into Transactions of State," gentlemen who exhibited "strong Zeal and weak Intellects."44 This critique is not of the newspaper itself, but of its readers; Steele implies that the Gazette and other newspapers should be reserved for public officials, while his paper will tell the rest "what to think." The periodical, he added, would consist of "my Advices and Reflections." This principle of "news plus" guided the paper, as he continued: "we shall not upon a Dearth of News present you with musty Foreign Edicts, or dull Proclamations," but rather with the literary and cultural news.45 He continued in Tatler No. 4, "I shall not pretend to raise a Credit to this Work, upon the Weight of my Politick News only, but … shall take any Thing that offers for the Subject of my Discourse. Thus, New Persons, as well as New Things, are to come under my Consideration; as, when a Toast, or a Wit, is first pronounc'd such, You shall have the Freshest Advice."46 Both ironic and strategic, Steele's adoption of the language of newspapers worked to expand the definition of news and capture a segment of the news-reading public.But even as he offered this new definition, Steele continued to provide Gazette-style foreign news, and frequently replicated items from one paper to the other. He opened the first section datelined "St. James's Coffee-house"—the source of "hard" news—by writing, "Letters from the Hague of the 16th, say, That Major General Cadogan was gone to Brussels, with Orders to disperse proper Instructions for assembling the whole Force of the Allies in Flanders in the Beginning of he next Month."47 The 11 April Gazette, at the end of a long paragraph dated "Hague, April 16 N.S." noted, "Major-General Cadogan s
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