The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (51 page)

13.3 
The Tatler
and
The Spectator
.

This, by Addison, was presented as the reflections of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., the fictional persona of
The Tatler
. It was a device that allowed the authors great licence. The views expressed were never quite those of Addison or Steele; the uncomfortable and sometimes quite cruel satire of aspirant tradesmen and empty-headed fops was placed in the mouth of a third party. Mr Spectator could advance prescriptions for the reform of taste, the theatre or the Bank of England without pausing to reflect whether they made much sense; all was in the service of wit and raillery. The tone was very different from the impassioned advocacy of Defoe's
Review
, but perhaps no less effective for that. And for all Mr Spectator's denial of serious political intent, this was a Whig paper, deeply rooted in the salons and coffee houses of that political interest. When Jonathan Swift was enrolled to write for
The Examiner
in 1710, this was specifically intended to provide a Tory counter-weight to the prevailing Whig tone of the leading essay periodicals.
¹⁸

Just as they had with
The Tatler
, Steele and Addison closed
The Spectator
after only two years. This was not because the paper had lost its way; rather, the pressures of production had become too great. Many of the most successful topical periodicals were remarkably short-lived: the ten years of Defoe's
Review
proved an exceptional run. Their fate reveals the weakness of a periodical dependent on a single source of inspiration. However gifted the writer, the pressure of writing regularly with passion and wit, on a sufficient variety of subjects to keep the readership entertained, would eventually tell. Periodicals folded – not because their audience fell away, but because their creators became exhausted.

The long-term future required the development of a production model that depended less on a single creative genius. In England the way forward was indicated by Edward Cave's
Gentleman's Magazine
(1731).
¹⁹
This preserved the miscellaneous content but abandoned the highly personalised identity of the essay periodical. Begun as a digest of other topical publications, it gradually evolved into an independent periodical with original content, written by
professional writers hired for the task. This was a model of collective production that the newspaper press was not yet ready to follow.

For the moment it was Mr Spectator who captured the imagination.
The Spectator
epitomised the qualities that had made the essay paper so intoxicating: the invitation to take a walk through the city's crowded streets in the company of a witty and urbane guide, a worldly and cultured man with access to the smartest salons and the most advanced literary circles.
The Spectator
found many imitators in England and abroad. The new ventures that attempted to fill the void in the London press left by its closure mostly failed; there was no substitute for its original authors, who had now moved on to other literary pursuits. But abroad the ‘Spectators’ flourished. In the Netherlands Spectatorial publications helped revive a periodical trade constrained by the urban magistrates’ determination to limit their city to one regular paper. There was no such restriction on the essay papers, and readers would often take several.
²⁰
In France one can enumerate as many as one hundred such journals established between 1720 and 1789.
²¹
French readers took to their mix of literary criticism, wit, and advice on matters of taste. The Spectators were familiar and accessible; they offered for the first time in the French periodical press direct dialogue with the public. They represented all that had been lacking in journalism until this point in the highly controlled and reverential French market; the effect was like a jolt of electricity through French literary culture and the book trade. Naturally, such a transformation was not without its critics. The sheer frivolity of some of the periodicals irritated the more high-minded readership, but the publishers were unapologetic. After all, as one editor put it,

The earliest French Spectators by and large preserved the cautious tradition of anonymity, but gradually adopted a more robust authorial identity. Between 1720 and 1739 writers like Marivaux, d'Argens, the Abbé Prévost and critics like Desfontaines, La Varenne and La Barre de Beaumarchais all established their own personal vehicles.
²³
Some of these maintained a more serious tone, but across the whole spectrum cultural reviews made up three-quarters of the periodical literature, particularly in the more restrictive political environment of the earlier half of the century. From all of this, there was money to be made; after 1730 all major French publishers had journals on their list. The trade in periodicals provided a substitute for the saucy fiction and ‘philosophical’
works forbidden by the censors and therefore published abroad and imported back into France; this trade had reached massive proportions by the latter part of the eighteenth century.
²⁴
It was therefore fortunate for the Parisian publishers that the trade in periodicals offered more of an outlet; though it in no way prepared them for the extraordinary surge in news publication that would follow with the revolutionary events in the century's last years.

‘Riens délicieux’

In his issue of 5 May 1691, John Dunton published in the
Athenian Mercury
a daring and dramatic announcement:

To drive home his point Dunton followed his editorial statement with fifteen questions on marriage. This was not an unconsidered initiative. The
Athenian Mercury
had now been going for two months, and Dunton had taken the temperature of his readership. This was the most dramatic declaration possible: that women were a welcome contributing part of the reading community, and Dunton eagerly embraced his role as torchbearer. The issue of 22 May was entirely made up of questions from women, and Dunton now announced that on the first Tuesday of every month the issue would be set aside to address feminine concerns.

Although the French had been the great innovators in the seventeenth-century periodical market, it was English publishers who showed the most lively awareness of the potential of an expanding female readership. Both
The Tatler
and
The Spectator
actively courted female readers. In setting out his agenda for
The Tatler
in 1709, Richard Steele appealed explicitly to ‘public-spirited’ men, but not exclusively: ‘I resolve also to have something which may be entertainment to the fair sex, in honour of whom I have invented the title of this paper.’ It was a back-handed compliment, with its implication of inconsequential gossip, to which women were seen as particularly prone. It sets the tone of elaborate gallantry and condescension that characterised much of the engagement of essay periodicals with their female readers.
²⁶
The Spectator
followed with Addison's insistence that ‘there are none to whom this paper will be more useful than to the female world’, and the evident success of the
Spectator genre soon inspired a number of periodicals specifically directed at women readers. These proved less successful. Both
The Female Tatler
and
The Whisperer
, written in the persona of Jenny Distaff, Isaac Bickerstaff's half-sister, were blatant attempts to exploit the success of the Spectator brand, and neither succeeded.
²⁷
It would be a further thirty years before a periodical emerged with a robust and genuine female voice: Elizabeth Haywood's
Female Spectator
.

The relationship between the earliest society periodicals and their female readers was complex. The editors were emphatic that their essays on morals and manners were particularly suitable for women, but they were also teasing and condescending. The essays were often couched as replies to a plaintive, tragicomical appeal for advice from a distressed female reader in a fix, confounded by some perplexing piece of social etiquette, or trapped by an unsuitable lover. Many of these letters give every appearance of having been written by the editors themselves. The convoluted explanations of the circumstances in which the correspondents found themselves certainly have more in common with the plots of contemporary dramatic pieces than with the lives of the allegedly inexperienced writers supposed to have penned them. These transparent devices allowed the essayists to have the best of both worlds: they could both titillate their readers and inhabit the moral ground with their responses; a device still widely practised, of course, in the serious papers’ reporting of scandal or celebrity today.

The relentless definition of female consciousness – the home, manners, social etiquette and love affairs – is often grating. This preoccupation was neatly expressed in the French
Journal des dames
, launched in 1759 offering its readers a diet of ‘riens délicieux’, delicious nothings. But this was only ever part of the story. It is worth recalling that the
Journal des dames
soon became something more than an entertainment paper, supporting the agenda of the Enlightenment and vigorously criticising both state-privileged cultural institutions and ministerial policy. The driving force behind this transformation was a sequence of three strong women, who successively managed the journal and gave it its distinctive voice.
²⁸
The
Journal des dames
was suppressed twice by angry ministers, in 1769 and finally in 1776.
²⁹

The changing shape of the
Journal des dames
is not unusual in the periodical press. New ventures sprung up and often failed to find an audience; a journal could not survive without close attention to its readers’ priorities. These were partly set by women, as readers but also as engaged protagonists in the press. Women had played an active role in the print industry virtually since its beginning, almost certainly a more active role than in any other craft industry.
³⁰
Many presses were very effectively managed by the women to whom they were entrusted, sometimes but not always after the death of their
husbands. John Dunton's sensibility to his female readers may owe something to the fact that his business prospered mightily when his wife was at the helm, and declined steeply after her death. Countess Alexandrine de Rye, widow of Leonhard II von Taxis, effectively ran the Taxis postal network for eighteen years after her husband's death, and steered the company through the notably turbulent decades of the latter part of the Thirty Years War.
³¹
Among those challenging her authority was the female Hamburg newspaper proprietor, Ilsabe Meyer.
³²
At the other end of the social spectrum the London press would not have been able to function without the army of ‘Mercury women’ who brought periodicals to their readers and sold them on the streets.
³³

The industry also found a place for an entrepreneur like Eliza Haywood, author and proprietor of
The Female Spectator
.
³⁴
Haywood started this periodical after a long and successful career as a novelist, and a less successful turn as a stage actress. She gave herself no airs: the first issue confided that the author ‘never was a beauty, and am very far from being young’. But its witty sequence of essays, on subjects that ranged from the immoderate use of tea to the conduct of military gentlemen (likely to be bad) found a ready audience. After it ceased publication
The Female Spectator
was several times republished as a collected volume, and translated into both French and Dutch.
³⁵
Haywood was even sufficiently confident to satirise the alleged female aversion to political affairs. In reply to a dyspeptic (though almost certainly invented) correspondent, who took her to task for promising more in the way of politics than she had delivered, Haywood defended her editorial choices: