The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (65 page)

Sewall began his diary at the age of twenty-one, and continued it until the last year of his life: a span of over fifty years. During this time Boston was transformed from an insular provincial place to a bustling Georgian city. Sewall remained faithful to the values of the old school, but his patent integrity and lack of personal vanity ensured that he retained the respect of the whole community.

As a member of Boston's commercial and political elite, Sewall had access to the best sources of information. He was an avid reader of the incoming mails, and, as we have seen, he eagerly welcomed the publication of Boston's first weekly newspaper. He subscribed to the paper throughout his lifetime, and bound successive issues into neat volumes for inclusion in his library. But for all his delight in this refined specimen of European sophistication, what he read in
The Boston News-Letter
seemed to have had only a marginal impact on his news world. As we can see from his diary, even before the coming of the newspaper Sewall had been at the centre of a series of interlocking news networks: family, commercial, the judicial circuit and colonial government.

When Sewall moved into his father-in-law's house after his marriage he immediately joined a substantial news hub. Visitors and messengers brought information from family members settled in farms and settlements around Massachusetts Bay. At times of crisis Sewall would have been one of the first to know of threats to what was still a frontier society. When a messenger in 1690 brought news of an Indian assault, Sewall wrote immediately to his father and brother. Even the wedding party of Sewall's son, who was marrying the Governor's daughter, was briefly interrupted so the Governor could read aloud a letter from his own son (the colony's Attorney General) describing the business that had kept him away: the capture of a pirate.
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Pirates and their fate feature regularly in Sewall's diary. As a judge he was often concerned with their trials, and as a merchant trading in export goods he was acutely conscious of the threat they posed to the colony's economy. Despite this he was, more often than not, on the side of mercy. Possessed of an enviably robust constitution, Sewall travelled incessantly, riding out of Boston on commercial business or as a judge on circuit. A single entry from relatively early in the diary gives a sense of the rich intermingling of his circles of acquaintance, and their role as conduits of news:

17.2 
The Boston News-Letter
. A slavish imitation of
The London Gazette
, down to the sub-heading and style of date.

Sewall, like Wallington, was an unsceptical recorder of natural phenomena and heavenly apparitions. There is good reason why devout Protestants feature so prominently among the early keepers of diaries, often unsparingly frank: under the eye of an all-seeing God it was useless to dissemble. When
Sewall lost his wife in 1717, his humbling search for a suitable widow with whom to spend his declining years is fully and painfully recorded. It was in these last years of his life that the public printed media came to play a more important role in Sewall's access to news. This was not because the newspaper itself had improved; as we have seen, John Campbell took a remorselessly old-fashioned approach to the newsman's craft. Rather as Sewall cut back on his public responsibilities he was increasingly dependent on second-hand information. In his declining years he even relied on younger female relatives for news, as when ‘cousin Mrs Jane Green told me of Governor Burnet's commission being come, which I heard not of before; though ‘twas known of in the town the evening before’.
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What Sewall's diary reveals most vividly, in the first decades of the eighteenth century, is the survival of an essentially hierarchical structure of news gathering and dissemination. The public prints were part of the culture of society, and local debates could be stoked by pamphlets published in the Boston print shop. But the most important news inevitably came first to the colony's leading citizens, who passed on to kin, workmates and other citizens such as they thought fit. News sufficiently momentous was announced publicly from the pulpits of Boston's eleven churches. But there was much with which Sewall and his colleagues thought it unnecessary to trouble their social inferiors. The best news still, in Georgian Boston, passed around the circles of trust. Even a society built on principles of the spiritual democracy of equality before God had imposed its own social filters on that most precious of commodities, information.

Boston was not a typical place. It was only towards the end of Sewall's life (and not with his approval) that the city relaxed its very strict control of licensed premises. Business that in other places might have been conducted at home or in the tavern was often transacted in communal gatherings: the meeting house, around the courtroom, even at funerals. Boston, of course, was as prone as other places to the circulation of uncontrolled rumour, either of dramatic events in the interior or momentous happenings from Europe. On 22 September 1685 Sewall picked up a rather garbled story from ‘neighbour Fyfield’, a less eminent citizen who did not move in Sewall's normal circles, of the execution of the Duke of Monmouth (this had taken place in London on 15 July). Fyfield had it from the ‘crier of fish’, who had apparently picked up the news from a sea captain.
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Further diary entries in the following week record a corrected narrative from more reliable sources. Here, as often, rumour had moved more rapidly, though less accurately, than the normal channels of elite diffusion.

Boston was a unique laboratory: a place where news was funnelled through more restricted filters than in more densely settled European lands. Here the
newspaper played a secondary role as the first source of news. Sewall was committed to print – he had supervised the Boston press for three years as a young man and he was a published author – and he collected the newspaper assiduously. But mostly he used his carefully bound copies as a source of reference: for names and dates or for the political texts, the speeches and proclamations that they reprinted in full.
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The Boston paper also provided some useful commercial reference material such as the dates of landing of incoming vessels; though the attempt to include commodity prices, an innovation of the second Boston paper the
Gazette
, was dropped at the behest of Boston merchants who did not want to lose their commercial edge over competitors in Connecticut and Rhode Island.
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In some years Sewall prepared for his bound volumes an index of the principal events, and he also added marginal notes as appropriate. For all this, the local paper played a small part in Sewall's network of information: smaller, indeed, than the imported papers brought by incoming vessels from London and Amsterdam. Perhaps for those less well connected than Sewall it was different: Campbell's paper had a more important role bringing the news to subscribers in the smaller outlying settlements around Boston. The arrival of competing papers brought different perspectives, and a certain loosening of elite domination of news. But in places like Boston, word of mouth communication, closely bound to the credit and reputation of the teller, remained at the heart of news communication throughout the colonial period.

The Amateur Newshound

By the mid-eighteenth century the Dutch Republic had lost something of its early lustre. It no longer inspired fear for the ruthlessness of its command of international trade, or awe at its sudden rise to the first rank of European powers. But it was still a marvellously sophisticated and ingenious society; and it still possessed one of Europe's most highly developed news markets. Each of its largest cities was served by a regular paper, some now long established. The
Oprechte Haerlemsche Courant
was the direct descendant of the paper established in the mid seventeenth century. Between 1650 and 1750 its circulation had expanded tenfold, to about 4,300 subscriptions for its thrice-weekly issues; the
Amsterdamsche Courant
sold about 6,000.
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These were impressive figures for the publisher, though perhaps less so when one considers the size of the population and the lack of local competition. Each of the ten Dutch papers published in the mid-eighteenth century enjoyed a local monopoly, protected and regulated by the local authorities. Such competition as there was came from overlapping markets: half of the
Haerlemsche Courant
’s print run was sold through its Amsterdam distributor.

The vibrancy of Dutch news culture emerged from a long and distinguished tradition of pamphlet production, significantly more uninhibited in its approach to public affairs in one of the most urbanised, literate and bourgeois of European societies. There was no better place to be a lover, an amateur, of news; and there was none more ardent than Jan de Boer.

Jan de Boer was a clerk.
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He spent three days a week working in the office of a vintner, an occupation that left him plenty of time for other activities. He was clearly in relatively leisured circumstances. He paid decent levels of tax, and possessed a small house in Haarlem that he was able to let rent free to ‘destitute persons’. De Boer was also a Catholic, a member of a minority Church that attracted some disapproval but whose members were generally left to practise their religion in peace. But de Boer was very aware that they owed this protection to the local magistrate, and a section of the population wished them no good.

De Boer's news diary is very unusual. Unlike the documents left by Wallington or Sewall it contained very little autobiographical material. De Boer seldom wrote about everyday activities: he devoted his energies entirely to chronicling the news. He began his diary at a moment of political crisis: the appointment of William IV as Stadtholder, and the tax riots of 1748 that allowed William to entrench his power. De Boer continued it for twelve years before laying aside his beautifully presented volume, for which he had prepared a highly decorated title-page. Although he applied all his professional skills to crafting his book it was not intended for wider circulation. As soon as it was concluded de Boer put it away in a locked cupboard with his other manuscripts. He got his wish: the news chronicle remains an unpublished manuscript to this day.
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De Boer wrote up his chronicle most days. Apart from the news that came to him by word of mouth, he also included reports from written sources, many of which he pasted into the volume at the appropriate places. De Boer was a gifted news-gatherer; he had the instincts of a true reporter. On a day when two ringleaders of the thwarted tax riot were to be executed, de Boer made sure he arrived early at Dam Square, so he could study the exact disposition. He was convinced that the arrangements made to marshal the crowd, with narrow entry and exit points, would lead to trouble, and so it proved. The huge crowd proved unmanageable, shots were fired and in the rush to escape many were crushed to death. Even in this tragedy de Boer could congratulate himself on the quality of his reporting: ‘I know that there was no-one else who had observed the events as closely and deliberately as I and who had immediately made notes on it all.’
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De Boer was also an avid reader of newspapers. He was a regular reader of the
Amsterdamsche Courant
, but the
’s Gravenhaegse Courant
was cited in his
diary almost as frequently. Because the two papers were published on alternate days (Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday locally, Monday, Wednesday and Friday in The Hague), readers with subscriptions to both could in effect purchase a daily paper. During times of particular excitement de Boer could also get hold of other papers: the
Leidse Courant
, and papers from Haarlem, Rotterdam and Groningen. Most could be purchased in one or other of the Amsterdam bookshops. De Boer also read and collected pamphlets. The Doelist riots led to a search for scapegoats for current economic ills, and a number of pamphlets openly questioned whether Catholics could be loyal Dutch citizens. De Boer was both a contributor to and an observer of this debate: his poem
De Patria
went through several editions, as he noted with considerable pride. Pamphlets were often purchased from street vendors, and sometimes offered to de Boer by friends who had obtained something known to be disapproved of by the magistrates. The generally law-abiding de Boer enjoyed the frisson that attended the trade in semi-clandestine, if not particularly dangerous, books.