Lord Macaulay and the News

One way to pursue the technological history of modernity is to try to understand how news and ideas got around at any given time. For instance, I wrote a short piece last year about Baron von Grimm, who created, helped to write, and distributed a newsletter that kept wealthy and literate citizens of 18th-century France informed about what was really happening in their country — as opposed to what the strictly-censored official sources of news wanted them to believe.

But Grimm did not invent this sort of thing. There’s a fascinating account of an early stage in the history of the newsletter in one of the most famous of all works of narrative history, Lord Macaulay’s History of England from the Accession of James the Second. Macaulay, in classic Victorian fashion, takes a few hundred pages to get around to the official starting point of his book, because how can you understand the rise to the throne of James II if you don't understand the career of his older brother, Charles II, whose coming to the throne makes no sense if you don't grasp the essential narrative of the English Civil War, which has its roots in ... You get the idea.

But somewhere in that opening 500 pages Macaulay takes a (very long) chapter to do a kind of social and economic history of Restoration England, covering everything from population estimates to leading industries to the social place of clergymen. It’s a fascinating narrative, and anticipates models of social history that didn’t come to their full flower for another century or so. One of his interests here is technological change, and that leads him to describe the rise of the postal service. “A rude and imperfect establishment of posts for the conveyance of letters had been set up by Charles the First, and had been swept away by the civil war. Under the Commonwealth the design was resumed. At the Restoration the proceeds of the Post Office, after all expenses had been paid, were settled on the Duke of York [later to be King James II]. On most lines of road the mails went out and came in only on the alternate days. In Cornwall, in the fens of Lincolnshire, and among the hills and lakes of Cumberland, letters were received only once a week.”

It was a start. But then things started to change in London specifically, though not as a result of a governmental program. Rather, “in the reign of Charles the Second, an enterprising citizen of London, William Dockwray, set up, at great expense, a penny post, which delivered letters and parcels six or eight times a day in the busy and crowded streets near the Exchange, and four times a day in the outskirts of the capital.” Exciting! (By the way, I wish we would retire the term "entrepreneur" and replace it with "enterprising citizen.") But, Macaulay immediately notes, “this improvement was, as usual, strenuously resisted,” and in a turn of events that’s hard to understand today, people began to insist that the penny post was somehow connected with the so-called (and ultimately shown to be fictional) Popish plot against King Charles — perhaps a way for conspirators to share plans. It is characteristic of that age of political intrigue that when people heard about a new medium of communication they immediately speculated on its usefulness to the perfidious.

But the penny post worked; a wide range of Londoners found it useful. And as the various postal services, public and private, became more strongly established, people became more eager for and expectant of news. Macaulay explains, in a passage I will quote at some length, that there was one particular form of news that became something of a rage in the latter years of the Stuarts:

No part of the load which the old mails carried out was more important than the newsletters. In 1685 nothing like the London daily paper of our time existed, or could exist. Neither the necessary capital nor the necessary skill was to be found. Freedom too was wanting, a want as fatal as that of either capital or skill.

So for Macaulay there were political, technological, and socio-economic reasons — all interacting with one another — why newspapers did not yet exist, even though

the press was not indeed at that moment under a general censorship. The licensing act, which had been passed soon after the Restoration, had expired in 1679. Any person might therefore print, at his own risk, a history, a sermon, or a poem, without the previous approbation of any officer; but the Judges were unanimously of opinion that this liberty did not extend to Gazettes, and that, by the common law of England, no man, not authorised by the crown, had a right to publish political news. While the Whig party was still formidable, the government thought it expedient occasionally to connive at the violation of this rule. During the great battle of the Exclusion Bill, many newspapers were suffered to appear, the Protestant Intelligence, the Current Intelligence, the Domestic Intelligence, the True News, the London Mercury. None of these was published oftener than twice a week. None exceeded in size a single small leaf. The quantity of matter which one of them contained in a year was not more than is often found in two numbers of the Times.

Yet despite the limits of the medium, the Royal party felt that they needed to keep such newsletters under direct control:

After the defeat of the Whigs it was no longer necessary for the King to be sparing in the use of that which all his Judges had pronounced to be his undoubted prerogative. At the close of his reign no newspaper was suffered to appear without his allowance: and his allowance was given exclusively to the London Gazette. The London Gazette came out only on Mondays and Thursdays. The contents generally were a royal proclamation, two or three Tory addresses, notices of two or three promotions, an account of a skirmish between the imperial troops and the Janissaries on the Danube, a description of a highwayman, an announcement of a grand cockfight between two persons of honour, and an advertisement offering a reward for a strayed dog. The whole made up two pages of moderate size.

Such was journalism. As in France a hundred years later, the people of Restoration England knew that they were being deprived of a thorough and accurate account of events — a troublesome thing in a time of such frequent political upheavals. These chaotic political conditions, in company with the rudiments of a news-sharing infrastructure, gave impetus to entrepreneurs to develop the technological skills and distribution networks necessarily to create something like the modern newspaper — which started to happen early in the next century.

Macaulay, writing in a time when Britain was awash in newspapers and journals of all varieties that covered a wide range of political and cultural subjects — he himself, in addition to his political career, wrote regularly for the Edinburgh Review — understood that the last years of the Stuarts had laid the foundation for his own informational environment. Moreover, he was one of the first historians to recognize the value of those early experiments in news-gathering and news-distributing: he learned most of what he knew about public opinion in the Restoration era by reading those old newsletters.

Grimm's heirs

 

The last year or so has seen an intriguing renewal of a genre from the early years of the internet: the email newsletter. A couple of months ago Alexis Madrigal described this development as a natural and healthy response to a never-ending and increasingly vast stream of online data: "My newsletter is finite (always less than 600 words) and it comes once a day. It has edges. You can finish it." Madrigal also draws on a metaphor created by Robin Sloan, who has a newsletter of his own, and who sees online life as comprised of stock and flow: Stock is "the durable stuff," accumulated and consolidated knowledge, while flow is what steadily, or overwhelmingly, comes to you through your email and Twitter and Facebook and RSS. But only if the flow is manageable can the best of it be converted into stock. Newsletters, in Madrigal's reading of the situation, filter the flow and as it were pre-convert it to stock. Or at least make it readier to be converted.

Whether they know it or not, today's newsletter-makers are following an interesting historical precedent: their great model is Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm, a German who made his name in Paris as a friend of some of the most famous literary figures of his day, including Diderot and Rousseau (both of whom came to hate him, probably for good reason, but that's another story).

In 1753 Grimm began to write and edit La Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique, a newsletter about cultural events that was meant to supplement and when necessary correct official news sources, which were subject to rigorous censorship. The situation was not as bad as it might have been, thanks to the fact that for many years the chief censor was Malesherbes, who knew most of the philosophes and supported them in every way possible. (Without Malesherbes to clear the way the great Encyclopédie would surely never have been published. Incidentaly, we owe another debt to Malesherbes: he was the great-grandfather of Alexis de Tocqueville.) Still, there were things one dared not say for fear of offending some powerful person connected with the court of the ancien régime, some person Malesherbes couldn't protect you from, so Grimm made sure that his newsletters were copied — by hand, interestingly: Grimm used amanuenses rather than printing presses — and distributed from outside France, i.e., beyond the reach of the censors.

La Correspondance was a curious combination of journalism, learned instruction, and gossip column. Grimm would summarize recent works of philosophy or literature or social criticism and then describe how those works were being received by le monde (and even occasionally le demimonde). He commisioned Diderot to attend the annual art exhibition at the Paris Salon and write up his responses to what he saw — which Diderot did at great length and with vivid acuity: these became the most celebrated contributions to La Correspondance. Grimm became very skilled at recruiting guest writers who understood disciplines he didn't know well or who wrote from social locations he couldn't get access to. Moreover, as I have learned from Yoni Appelbaum, the historian Paule Jansen has discovered that Grimm also functioned as a filter and aggregator: much of the content of the Correspondance previously appeared in other journals.

For the first twenty years of La Correspondance Grimm ran the newsletter himself and was its chief contributor, but then he turned it over to his secretary, who kept it going (in a diminished state) until 1790, when the Revolution made it impossible to continue.

Perhaps the most interesting point to make about La Correspondance is this: it never had, nor did Grimm ever want, a large subscriber base. Grimm's interest was in what John Milton called a "fit audience, though few" — but Grimm defined fitness by social standing. He counted among his subscribers Catherine the Great of Russia, Frederick II of Prussia, and several other European kings, princes, and aristocrats. Their interest in the newsletter seems to have been both personal — wanting to be "in the know" about the goings-on in Paris, the cultural capital of their world — but also politically self-interested, since some of the French thinkers took rather extreme political positions which, in the nature of things, were likely to spread to the intellectuals of the rest of Europe.

Moreover, these handwritten newsletters, even though not written in Grimm's own hand, had the personal touch: they were not official publications, diplomatic dispatches, authorized works of scholarship, but confidential and gossipy letters from knowledgable and charming friends. There was something of both stock and flow about them. They brought cultural and artistic news the subscribers weren't likely to get otherwise, at least not in so reliable a form, but they also explained what one should think about, how one should evaluate, the ever-changing, dynamic, rollicking world of Parisian art and culture. La Correspondance may not have had many subscribers, but I bet on the day of any given issue's delivery the readers' pulses were reliably racing.