Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England

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A young tradesman of Stockton-on-Tees was returning home from a visit in the country when he was attacked by three footpads, who took hold of his horse and ordered him to deliver his money: Yet even with a relatively happy outcome, such reports helped reminding readers of the dangers of crime in their locality.

It is here perhaps that we can see the most marked changes in reporting over the eighteenth century. A typical example comes from a Chester newspaper of Although as the century progressed, at least some newspaper accounts of murder became lengthier and more complex, this style of crime reporting, as we shall see, proved persistent.

On 21 January the York Courant described another incident of violent death in which the killers had yet to be identified. As one of the major serious female offences of the century, instances of infanticide were noted fairly frequently in the newspapers, although they were rarely discussed at length.

Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England

There were also occasional reports of the bodies of newborn children being found whose killers remained unknown. These occasional reports of the finding of the bodies of dead new-born children reinforce the suspicion that cases of infanticide which were prosecuted were only a small proportion of those actually committed. One such came in , when the York Courant for 11 August reported the execution of Anne Sowerby, who had poisoned her husband, and who, after being drawn to York Tyburn on a sledge in the prescribed fashion, was burnt to death for petty treason Just before she was brought out of her cell before execution, she confessed the crime, saying that she did it with the encouragement of a John Douglas, who had poisoned his own wife.

As ever, the execution of one of the gentry for murder was especially newsworthy. Meyer was transported to York Tyburn in a mourning coach, accompanied by a clergyman and the city gaoler. His body was subsequently put in a hearse, and taken away for dissection at York hospital But it is possible, perhaps rather unexpectedly, to find reports where the psychological condition of the murderer is at the centre of interest. Atkinson apparently told a Mr Wharton, presumably a minister, that:. It is also noteworthy that the newspaper also reported that the relevant York assize had also sentenced eight other people to death, all for property offences: Perhaps the most vividly described comes from the York Courant of 10 April The report tells us that:.

Finding himself so strongly opposed to obtain his wish, he took her by the feet and dragged her for a considerable way on a plowed field, adjoining to the road which leads to Huntington, till her clothes were almost torn off, and himself out of breath.

Heterogeneous Mercury: Advertising the Novel in the Eighteenth-Century Provincial Press

This conduct the judge looked upon at his trial in as bad a light as the robbery. The committal of accused rapists was occasionally noted, but there was little by way of extended discussion It concerned the rape of a fourteen-year-old girl by Anthony Thorner, a sailor in the Royal Navy.

The farmer and his dog chased Thorner, and caught and overpowered him. Undeterred by this setback, Smith or those supporting her decided not to let matters drop:.

Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England - Jan Fergus - Bok () | Bokus

In contrast to the sometimes very rich accounts of murders and other serious crimes contained in Elizabethan and seventeenth-century pamphlets 39 , these eighteenth-century newspaper stories seem very brief and rather flat. There are indeed numerous references to crime in eighteenth-century newspapers, but most of these come in the form of advertisements aimed at recovering stolen property, or in brief accounts of prisoners committed or tried at the local assizes and quarter sessions: It is difficult to assess the impact of these latter. The York Courant adopted a standard approach to its coverage of the assizes, normally providing a list of those awaiting trial and also a list of grand jurors, which it seemed to think was a matter of some significance to its readership.

In the issue after the assize took place, a brief note would be given of the fate of all of those appearing there.

By the late s this coverage of the assizes was accompanied by reports from local quarter sessions, and, indeed, from other assizes. This may have had the effect of creating an image of a widespread crime problem, but the reporting was uniformly matter-of-fact and unsensational, while the content of these reports was frequently unlikely to cause too much concern. The first editor of the Northampton Mercury , when it was first published in , made a conscious decision not to include crime news, but to concentrate on the reports of politics and foreign affairs, which he thought would be the main preoccupation of the upper-class readership that he aimed at attracting Things had changed by the later eighteenth century, but even then accounts of serious crimes were hardly filling the columns of the newspapers under consideration in this article.

This at first looks like evidence of an increased interest in crime, but, as a student of the paper in question has commented: Newspaper editors knew that there was an interest in crime, and that it was the more sensational cases which were worth reporting: Moreover, what was considered newsworthy sometimes created some anomalies. A number of reports in the York Courant for early illustrate this point.

There was also a report of a girl aged four being found in Hull docks with her throat cut, a wound from which she soon expired.

These reports were juxtaposed with brief accounts of other fatalities: Thus the brief accounts of murder and other serious crime in the newspapers would seem to be just part of a distinctive aspect of contemporary reporting, rather than representing a distinctive picture of contemporary crime There were a few sensational crimes which were given brief reports. We have already encountered the cases of Susannah Watts and William and Anne Butterfied 49 , and a number of other violent crimes were described, murders included But such cases probably averaged less than one a month. Similarly, by this point the Courant was rarely reporting crimes, however sensational, from outside Yorkshire.

There were occasional advertisements concerning stolen horses, or, more frequently, horses described as lost or stolen, and of suspicious persons, but, again, these were probably not of either a quantity or quality to provoke respectable fears.

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A case where a bear kept for bear-baiting escaped and savaged a woman received more space, and more moral comment, than any of the murders reported that year It should also be remembered that the newspaper was not the only print medium through which information about crime was conveyed to the reading public.

Crime pamphlets — a relatively under-researched source for this period — continued to be produced, and contained considerably more information than newspaper reports and devoted ample space to moralizing Certainly, the moral universe within which crime reporting took place in the eighteenth-century newspaper was very different from that traditionally offered by the murder pamphlet It is unknown if there was much of a readership in northern England for that major source upon which opinion about crime, or at least metropolitan opinion about crime, was formed, the Proceedings of the Old Bailey These publications, which rapidly dropped in price from a shilling to 6d, offered the local reading public a full account of what happened in trials at the York assizes.

That covering the Lent assizes, for example, contained full details of the trial of a number of alleged murders. Lawrence Harvey of Easington was accused of the murder of his apprentice, Mary Nowell, aged nine. Again, the trial was described in full detail, as was the sentence against Elizabeth Boardingham, to be burned for petty treason Such accounts would have had much more impact than the standard newspaper report. The public could also read printed gaol calendars, which were probably displayed in taverns and coffee houses, and might well have formed the basis of the list of felons to be tried at the assizes which, as we have noted, appeared in the York Courant.

These usually provided more information than that given in the newspaper, with information on the case roughly equivalent to that given on an assize indictment, and details of the relevant committing justice Ballads were widely circulated, and included crime and punishment in their subject matter Single-sheet broadsides, like ballads selling more cheaply than newspapers and hence perhaps more likely to be read by the poor, and many of which dealt with crimes and executions, were to survive well into the nineteenth century Thus newspapers may have been the main source of printed information about crime, but they were certainly neither the sole nor the fullest such source.

Some interesting pointers here have been suggested in a thought-provoking article by Helen Berry It has generally been accepted that one of the functions, deliberate or otherwise, of the eighteenth-century English provincial newspaper was to break down regional isolation, and help the processes of national integration. The dependence of provincial papers on London news, which in any case diminished as the eighteenth century progressed, masks a relationship in which newspapers operated not as passive consumers, but rather as agents in a two-way process of communication between centre and peripheries Thus in what was a far from unique case, by the York Courant was available in a number of London coffee-houses, had a permanent correspondent in London, and accepted London advertisements for publication The role of newspapers in aiding political integration has long been acknowledged, notably through the work of Hannah Barker But what Berry, concentrating on Newcastle publications, has argued is the importance of newspapers in fostering cultural integration between the values of the metropolis and those of a regional capital and its elite.

London, she argues, set the standard. But she is insistent that the Newcastle elite was not simply a passive consumer of London taste and London fashion. The transition can be demonstrated by analysing two chronologically distant editions of the York Courant. The content of the first, one of the earliest extant editions, no.

This filled nearly all of the four pages of the newspaper, slightly less than a column being devoted to other items, of which there were three: This can be contrasted with the edition of 17 April Foreign news filled a column and a half on the first page, while page two was largely devoted to national politics as played out in London. The remainder of the paper was filled with variegated matters, including a notice of the annual Doncaster Florist [i. Floral] Meeting, a Grand Concert to mark the annual music festival in the same town, a meeting of the East Riding Agricultural Society, an advertisement for a boarding school for ladies at Scarborough, and an advertisement for a free school near Northallerton.

Reports of crime had to compete for publication with a lot of other newsworthy material in the late eighteenth-century York Courant. To live in ignorance of passing occurrences will not be borne in an enlightened nation, especially when it is considered that such a species of ignorance would absorb every noble faculty of thought and investigation, and reduce us to a state of barbarity.

Evidently, most people committing crimes, especially the crimes we have been mainly concerned with here, stand up badly as polite and rational human beings, replete with taste, civility and enlightenment values.

But the way in which their activities were reported were unlikely to have struck terror into those who did aspire to such values. But for the most part, although the reality of crime was recognised, it was kept on the margins, largely retained in the almost routine areas of advertisements for the recovery of stolen goods and the brief listings of felons who were awaiting trial or who had been tried at the assizes. Never were the feelings of the multitude so much interested as they appeared to be when his wife and brother attended the cart, to take a last, a long farewell.

The sympathetic tears rushed from almost every eye, when the unhappy pair were taking their parting embraces! He wept almost continually, at the same time praying for forgiveness at the throne of mercy. It is supposed, the expence of apprehending and prosecuting him cannot be less than l [i.

His body now hangs in chains on Heltby Hill, near Frodsham. The edition of the same newspaper for 7 September , indeed, provides evidence of how the values of eighteenth-century politeness and civility were entering the courtroom. We are clearly in a more measured world than that obtaining a century before.

Although all eighteenth-century English provincial newspapers shared some common features, we should perhaps think of their potential differences: As Snell makes clear, the influence of the Kentish Post was bounded by the sea to the south and the east, and by the influence of London publications to the north and west 74 , and hence would not have the regional importance of the York Courant or its Newcastle equivalents Goody Two-Shoes was once one of many extra renowned kid's books between Rugby schoolboys, and males learn the Lady's Magazine. A document by way of the Committee on a knowledge expertise process, the pc technological know-how and Telecommunications Board, the fee on actual Sciences, arithmetic and purposes, and the nationwide study Council, at the process presently utilized by the nationwide Library of Congress, and improvements that have to ensue in that process.

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