CHAPTER IV.

NEWSPAPERS IN THE BEGINNING OF THE

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

Contributors to the Journals-First Daily Paper - Favourite Newspaper Titles-Strange Titles-Daniel Defoe-Newspaper Stamp Duty-Dean Swift-the Tatler and Spectator Class of Journals Sir Richard Steele and Joseph Addison-John Dunton-John Dennis.

THOUGH, in adverting to the curious advertisements which appeared in the newspapers of an early date, and transferring to my pages some specimens of them, as illustrating the manners of the times, I have made in that respect an incursion, if I may so call it, into the first half of the eighteenth century,-I have not in other respects brought the newspaper history of our ancestors further down than the close of the seventeenth century. And though I have found no materials until the beginning of the eighteenth century which would enable us to form an opinion as to the position of editors-once called printers-of the newspapers of a previous date, yet in the early part of that century we begin to have our darkness enlightened on the subject. In the year 1704 a paper called the Observator, of great circulation and popularity —great, I mean, in that day—was prosecuted for a libel. Whether this was the same Observator that

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was started by Sir Roger l'Estrange in 1681, I have been unable to ascertain, not having succeeded in procuring a sight of the Observator of either date; but be that as it may-and it is not a matter of much importance, whichever way the fact may be-an action was brought, in 1704, against the printer and publisher, then always one and the same person, for a libel on a man of some note at that time. In the course of the cross-examination of the party who acted as editor of the newspaper in question, it transpired that all the remuneration he received for the discharge of his editorial duties was half-a-guinea per week! Newspaper editors in our day do not, as a rule, think themselves over-paid; but what would they think if some newspaper proprietor were seriously to propose to them to accept a salary of half-aguinea per week? Yet it may be a question whether, miserably inadequate as was this remuneration for literary labour in the begining of the eighteenth century, it was not quite as good, considering the comparative quantity and quality of the writing, as that which the late William Hazlitt received at the end of that century and the beginning of the present. Mr. Hazlitt's son, now one of the registrars in the Court of Bankruptcy, states, in the Life of his Father, that when he commenced his literary career, between seventy and eighty years ago, he only received five shillings per column, closely printed in small type, from one of the London papers-the name of which escapes my memory-for which he then wrote. Yet

Mr. Hazlitt is allowed, by all literary men of the present time, as he was by his contemporaries, to have been one of the best literary, dramatic, and fine art critics that ever were connected, in either of these capacities, with the newspaper press. Literary labour is certainly not, with very few exceptions, liberally paid in the present day; but when we compare, or rather contrast, the terms given by newspaper proprietors and publishers in 1871 to what were given in 1704-and in some cases at the beginning of the present century-we have reason to be gratified and grateful that matters are not worse with us.

In referring to the Observator as having been prosecuted in 1704, I ought not to omit repeating my remark that this Observator must have been at the time a popular and prosperous paper; for no fewer than three other papers under the same name, with some slight variations, were in the same year, 1704, established in opposition to it. The names of these several journals respectively were-A New Observator-the Legal Observator-and the Observator in General.

Among the eminent men who not only were contributors to, but editors of, one or more of the Observators of this period, was Bishop Burnet, author of the "History of the Reformation," and of his own Life and Times. Somehow or other this fact does not seem to have been noticed, except in one or two instances, either by contemporary writers or by those who have written at later dates on the newspaper journalism in the beginning of the eighteenth cen

tury. Bishop Burnet most probably contributed to more than one of the newspapers contemporary with himself, but he was the acknowledged and accredited editor of A New Observator. Whether this was the New Observator started in 1701, or the New Observator commenced in 1704, is a point in relation to which I possess no information. Of Observators of some kind or other there was at this period a plentiful harvest. A few years before, several sprang into existence, all more or less partaking of the newspaper character.

It was not until the year 1702 that numerous as had been the newspapers published, as before stated, at intervals of a month, or a fortnight, or a week, or other uncertain periods-a daily paper was started. Its title was the Daily Courant; but nothing is known, so far as I have been able to learn, as to the parties by whom, or the circumstances under which this first daily journal was set on foot. I have mentioned the year 1702 as the date of the appearance of the Daily Courant, as the first daily paper; but it is right I should state that other writers give other dates. The one most generally given is 1709; and I confess that I was at first disposed to believe that that was the correct one; but since I began writing this part of my work I have ascertained, beyond all question, that it must have been published before the year 1706; for in the "Autobiography of John Dunton"-to which I shall afterwards have to refer it is repeatedly alluded to, under the date of 1706, as being a well

known paper. As its starting is an era in English newspaper history, it is as well to be right in the date. Mr. Timperley, in his History of Printing in the Eighteenth Century," gives the year 1703 as that in which the Daily Courant appeared as the first daily paper which had been established in England. A writer in the Times, three years ago, fixes the date, as I do, in 1702. Other writers have fixed the same date. Mr. Timperley was a plodding man, very anxious to be correct in his statements, but, after carefully examining the facts of the case as they have been brought before me, I have been compelled to come to the conclusion that he is wrong in his date of 1703, and that the Daily Courant appeared as the first daily paper in England in the year 1702. Of course if I am correct in my belief that the year 1702 is the correct date, Mr. Townsend is equally correct, when, in his "Manual of Dates," he assigns the year 1702 as the year in which the Daily Courant started into existence. Of this there can be no doubt,—that Chalmers and Nichols, and others who fix the date, at 1709, are entirely mistaken; for other writers of that time as well as John Dunton, speak of it as being then a prosperous paper. It was, in its origin, a poor miserable thing. It was printed only on one side, and was somewhat less in size than a leaf of the Saturday Review. Its first number had only a few paragraphs of intelligence, and these of very little interest. It contains an address, in its opening number, in the way of an apology for the small