Journalism Now Project - The Press in the 17th Century

When I discovered my topic for the ‘Journalism Now’ module was ‘The Press in the 17th Century’ my initial excitement was tempered with worry as I knew that there was more research material on the subject of the 18th century, (Daily Courant, Joseph Addison etc) than the 17th century. I needn’t have worried though as I soon found that the 17th century was one of the most fast moving and interesting periods of history to study in terms of journalism. The printing press had long been invented, the first newspapers began to emerge, the pioneers of journalism began to emerge and the groundwork was laid for the press that we know today.

In The March of Journalism; Harold Herd calls British journalism, “the product of a slow moving evolution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries”. The earliest writers who could be compared to journalists today would be the pamphleteers of Cromwell’s Commonwealth who bear more than a passing resemblance to today’s more opinionated columnists. Before that though, as early as the 1620s there had been sheets called corantos which Andrew Marr’s book, My Trade, discusses briefly.

“As early as the 1620s there had been the corantos – as in ‘current’, as in ‘current affairs’ - which were semi regular bulletins of news from the continent, picked out from similar papers there and translated without comment into English”.

These were the earliest forms of newspapers and are more commonly referred to as ‘newsbooks’, of which there were many examples, but they do not resemble the press as we know it today. Before, there had been such strict rules on printing in Britain that the first English speaking paper was actually produced in Holland by Joris Veseler around 1620[1]. This influenced the newsbooks which lasted throughout Cromwell’s Commonwealth.

The nearest things to newspapers - as we know them - following Charles II’s restoration were the official newspapers, the Intelligencer and the News, published by Roger L’Estrange, England’s official censor under Charles II[2]. My Trade notes that the newspapers were thought very dull by the public and the greatest reporter of his day, Samuel Pepys.

Quickly though, other newspapers began to appear such as the Oxford Gazette in 1665, the first official newspaper which we would recognise as such. As the court returned to London following the plague it became the London Gazette, and whilst hardly a good read by today’s standards, it was all the public were allowed at the time[3]. This paved the way for the first daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, sadly just outside of my timescale.

Journalism and the press as we know it today has come a long way from their humble beginnings in Grub Street as single sheets of news, containing barely relevant foreign affairs. However it is not for us as students of journalism to wonder at why the press began, there is no absolute truth anyway, it is only for us to wonder upon ‘Journalism Now’.


Footnotes:
[1]Wikipedia – History of British Newspapers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_British_newspapers
[2]Andrew Marr, My Trade – A Short History of British Journalism, Macmillan 2004
[3]Harold Herd, The March of Journalism – The Story of the British Press from 1622 to the Present Day, Unwin ltd, First published 1952