Posted on 12/06/2001 2:09:03 AM PST by Jim Robinson
VII. Colonial Newspapers and Magazines, 1704–1775.
§ 2. The New England Courant.
It was James Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s older brother, who first made a news sheet something more than a garbled mass of stale items, “taken from the Gazetts and other Publick Prints of London” some six months late. Franklin, “encouraged by a number of respectable characters, who were desirous of having a paper of a different cast from those then published,…began the publication, at his own risk, of a third newspapers, entitled The New England Courant.” These respectable characters were known as the Hell-Fire Club; they succeeded in publishing a paper “of a different cast,” which, although it shocked New England orthodoxy pretty thoroughly, nevertheless proved vastly entertaining and established a kind of literary precedent.
For instead of filling the first page of the Courant with the tedious conventionalities of governors’ addresses to provincial legislatures, James Franklin’s club wrote essays and satirical letters after the manner of The Spectator just ten years after the first appearance of The Spectator in London. How novel the whole method would be to New England readers may be inferred from the fact that even the Harvard library had no copies of Addison or Steele at this period. Swift, Pope, Prior, and Dryden would also have been looked for in vain. Milton himself was little known in the stronghold of Puritanism. But the printing office of James Franklin had Shakespeare, Milton, Addison, Steele, Cowley, Butler’s Hudibras, and “The Tail of the Tub” 1 on its shelves. All these were read and used in the editor’s office, but The Spectator and its kind became the actual model for the new journalism.
As a result, the very look of an ordinary first page of the Courant is like that of a Spectator page. After the more formal introductory paper on some general topic, such as zeal or hypocrisy or honour or contentment, the facetious letters of imaginary correspondents commonly fill the remainder of the Courant’s first page. Timothy Turnstone addresses flippant jibes to Justice Nicholas Clodpate in the first extant number of the Courant Tom Pen-Shallow quickly follows, with his mischievous little postscript: “Pray inform me whether in your Province Criminals have the Privilege of a Jury.” Tom Tram writes from the moon about a certain “villainous Post master” he has heard rumours of. (The Courant was always perilously close to legal difficulties and had, besides, a lasting feud with the town postmaster.) Ichabod Henroost complains of a gadding wife. Abigail Afterwit would like to know when the editor of the rival paper, the Gazette, “intends to have done printing the Carolina Addresses to their Governour, and give his Readers Something in the Room of them, that will be more entertaining.” Homespun Jack deplores the fashions in general, and small waists in particular. Some of these papers represent native wit, with only a general approach to the model; others are little more than paraphrases of The Spectator. And sometimes a Spectator paper is inserted bodily, with no attempt at paraphrase whatever
Benjamin Franklin, a mere boy at this time, contributed to the Courant the first fruits of his days and nights with Addison. The fourteen little essays from Silence Dogood to the editor are among the most readable and charming of Franklin’s early imitations, clearly following The Spectator, yet at rather long environment. Silence rambles considerable adaptation to the New England environment. Silence rambles on amiably enough except for occasional slurs on the New England clergy, in regard to whom the Courant was always bitter, and often scurrilous. For the Hell-Fire Club never grasped the inner secret of Mr. Spectator, his urbane, imperturbable, impersonal kindliness of manner. Instead, they vented their hatred of dogmatism and intolerance in personalities so insolent as to become in themselves intolerant. Entertaining, however, the Courant is, from first to last, and full of a genuine humour and a shrewd satiric truth to life.
http://www.bartleby.com/225/0702.html
VII. Colonial Newspapers and Magazines, 1704–1775.
§ 6. The South Carolina Gazette.
Franklin’s influence in journalism was not confined to Pennsylvania. He often assisted young journeymen in the establishment of newspapers in distant towns. Thomas Whitemarsh, for instance, went to Charleston, South Carolina, in 1731, as Franklin’s partner in a new enterprise, which soon included a new paper, The South Carolina Gazette. Naturally, Whitemarsh filled his front page with essays, sometimes reprinted from The Spectator, but often original, with a facetious quality suggesting Franklin. A few burlesques such as the papers of a certain Meddlers’ Club are little better than nonsense, rarely enlivened by a flash of wit. Once we find an odd bit of local colour, when a member of this club criticizes the fair ones of Charleston for promenading too much along the bay. “I have heard,” he says, “that in Great Britain the Ladies and Gentlemen choose the Parks and such like Places to walk and take the Air in, but I never heard of any Places making use of the Wharfs for such Purpose except this.” Essays of one sort or another were always popular in The South Carolina Gazette. Here may be found interesting notices of the various performances (probably professional) of Otway’s Orphan, Farquhar’s Recruiting Officer, and other popular plays of the period which were given at the Charleston theatres for twenty or thirty years before the first wandering professional companies began to play in the Northern colonies. Here, too, we find in the issue of 8 February, 1735, what is probably the first recorded prologue composed in the colonies.
http://www.bartleby.com/225/0706.html
VII. Colonial Newspapers and Magazines, 1704–1775.
§ 8. Politics in the Later Newspapers.
After 1750, general news became accessible, and the newspapers show more and more interest in public affairs. The literary first page was no longer necessary, though occasionally used to cover a dull period. A new type of vigorous polemic gradually superseded the older essay. A few of the well-known conventions were retained, however. We still find the fictitious letter, with the fanciful signature, or a series of papers under a common title, such as The Virginia-Centinel, or Livingston’s Watch-Tower. The former is a flaming appeal to arms, running through The Virginia Gazette in 1756, and copied into Northern papers to rouse patriotism against the French enemy. The expression of the sentiment, even thus early, seems national. This whole series, though somewhat florid in style, shows the familiarity of the cultivated Southerner with his favourite English poets,—Young, Pope, Shakespeare. Livingston’s well-known Watch-Tower, 7 a continuation of his pamphlet-magazine The Independent Reflector, has already the keen edge of the Revolutionary writings of fifteen and twenty years later. The fifty-second number even has one of the popular phrases of the Revolution: “Had I not sounded the Alarm, Bigotry would e’er now have triumphed over the natural Rights of British Subjects. 8
http://www.bartleby.com/225/0708.html
VII. Colonial Newspapers and Magazines, 1704–1775.
§ 9. The Vogue of French Radicalism.
Reports of French interest in America inclined the colonists still more to the French philosophy of government. As a matter of fact, from the time of the Stamp Act, political essays of every description filled the newspapers, and what one paper published was soon reprinted in others. Thus the influence of the press in this critical period can hardly be overrated. If the “pumpkin Gentry” of New England (to use a tory phrase) took offence at some encroachment, gentlemen planters of the South were sure to read the whole case in a few weeks and, in spite of their differing civilization, to sympathize with the Northern firebrands. When Dr. Arthur Lee sent home to The Virginia Gazette his Monitor, a series of essays describing hostile conditions in London, and urging his countrymen to non-importation, it was not by any means his countrymen of Virginia alone who heard the call. The Monitor has something of the distinguished style of the Farmer, and it is natural that the two should have been published together in a Williamsburg edition. Revolutionary Virginia burgesses always toasted the Farmer’s and Monitor’s letters together. But essays of an entirely different type also appeared constantly. Republicans and Loyalists fought violent battles under assumed classical names. Constitutionalis, Massachusettensis, Senex, Novanglus, Pacificus, Caesariensis, Amicus Publico, Cunctator, Virginius, Mucius Scaevola, Cato, Scipio, Leonidas, Brutus, and many more argued hotly and often powerfully the whole question of allegiance, on abstract grounds.
http://www.bartleby.com/225/0709.html
VII. Colonial Newspapers and Magazines, 1704–1775.
§ 10. The Massachusetts Spy.
Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy shows the course of this long battle. Constantly on the verge of being suppressed, from its establishment in 1770 to the Revolution, it carried radicalism to its logical conclusion. When the Spy began to be reprinted in other papers, as “the most daring production ever published in America,” the country as a whole was ready for Tom Paine’s Common Sense.
http://www.bartleby.com/225/0710.html
VII. Colonial Newspapers and Magazines, 1704–1775.
§ 12. The General Magazine and Historical Chronicle.
There were a few magazines of this standard English type in America before the Revolution. Franklin, as usual, led the way, though it happened that his rival Andrew Bradford actually published the first magazine in the colonies. Franklin’s soon followed, and these two little periodicals brought out the same month in Philadelphia, 1741, clearly indicate the attempt to transplant the English type, with some adaptations, for colonial readers. Franklin’s title, The General Magazine and Historical Chronicle for all the British Plantations in America, shows his intention of giving a review of colonial news rather than of British. He did, as a matter of fact, use The Virginia Gazette and other weeklies for articles and verse, but he also took European items whenever he could get them. Both magazines were evidently premature, however, for Bradford’s existed only three months, and Franklin’s only six
http://www.bartleby.com/225/0712.html
VII. Colonial Newspapers and Magazines, 1704–1775.
§ 14. The Pennsylvania Magazine; The Royal American Magazine.
With the next magazines we are again on the eve of the revolution. “The town has met,” and we read instructions, articles, orations, odes, and satires on the situation, sometimes reprinted from the newspapers, sometimes written for the magazine, but always inflammatory, since the two noteworthy periodicals of this period, The Pennsylvania Magazine and The Royal American Magazine, were edited respectively by the two firebrands, Thomas Paine and Isaiah Thomas. Paine’s magazine did not lack pungent wit of one kind or another, although for the more strictly literary sections both he and Isaiah Thomas drew freely on conventional English sources which, in theory, they should have rejected. Thomas’s Royal American Magazine is enlivened by the famous Paul Revere engravings and is otherwise interesting, particularly for its confident belief in the new country soon to be the United States.
http://www.bartleby.com/225/0714.html
III. Early Essayists.
§ 1. The Periodical Essay in America.
IN anticipating Dr. Johnson’s advice to fashion his prose style on the model of Addison, Franklin anticipated also the practice of American essay-writers for more than a generation. Like Franklin’s Dogood Paper, the first essays printed in colonial newspapers were written with a conscious moral purpose. With some spice of wit Timothy Dwight and John Trumbull collaborated in an imitation of The Spectator in 1769–70, and between 1785 and 1800 nearly a hundred series of light periodical essays were contributed to various New England journals. 1 Those of the better sort like the “Neighbour” of The Massachusetts Spy or the “Metabasist” in The Farmer’s Journal of Danbury, Connecticut, when not discussing politics, filled their columns with grave moralizing or racy satire on manners.
They were widely copied and recopied by other paper, and a few such as Noah Webster’s Prompter and Mrs. Judith Murray’s Gleaner attained the distinction of separate publication by reason either of their plain common sense or their studied correctness. In general, the imitation of English models resulted in feeble literary replicas, or in strange patchworks of Yankee homespun with Addisonian finery.
During the first decade of the nineteenth century nearly every literary device and favourite character in the long line of British essayists was reproduced in this country. Isaac Bickerstaff owned an American cousin in Launcelot Langstaff of Salmagundi, memories of I’Espion turc were evoked by Wirt’s Letters of a British Spy, and Goldsmith’s Lien Chi Altangi dropped a small corner of his mantle on Irving’s Mustapha Ruba-Dub Kheli Khan and S. L. Knapp’s Shahcoolen. The shade of Johnson dictated the titles of The Traveller, The Rural Wanderer, The Saunterer, and The Loiterer, and such editorial pseudonyms as Jonathan Oldstyle, Oliver Oldschool, and John Oldbug were significant of the attempt to catch the literary tone of the previous age. But the essay of manners, a product of leisurely urban life, was not easily adapted to the environment of a sparsely settled, bustling young republic. “Perhaps, indeed” wrote the Rev. David Graham of Pittsburg, “it is impossible to give interest and standing popularity, to a periodical essay paper, constructed upon the model of the British Essayist, in an infant country.” 2 Even in the populous cities “where the inhabitants amount of several thousand” there was little interest in the art of living. Reprehensible luxury and eccentric characters were hard to discover. But by dint of persistent attempts the essay of manners was made to grow in the new soil.
http://www.bartleby.com/225/1201.html
Does that sound familiar? You are carrying on a great American tradition, Jim!
So what has today's media abandoned? Consciousness or morality? The papers of the time, even with their satire and whimsical stories, were infinitely superior to the swill that's published today. They entertained, they informed, and they promoted thought and discourse. They were even cherished, and passed around hand-to-hand. Today's newspapers are written for a dumbed-down audience, and whose intent is to brainwash it's constituency.
bttt
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