History of British Newspapers - 18th Century

18th Century

There were twelve London newspapers and 24 provincial papers by the 1720s (the Daily Courant was the first daily newspaper in London). The Public Advertiser was started by Henry Woodfall in the 18th century.

The first English journalist to achieve national importance was Daniel Defoe. In February 1704, he began his weekly, The Review, which was eventually printed three times a week and was a forerunner of The Tattler (started by Richard Steel in 1709) and The Spectator (started by Steele and Joseph Addison in 1711). Defoe's Review came to an end in 1713. Between 1716 and 1720 he published a monthly newspaper with old style title, Mercurius Politicus. The Examiner, started in 1710 as the chief Conservative political mouthpiece, which enjoyed as its most influential contributor, Jonathan Swift. Swift had control of the journal for 33 issues between November 1710 and June 1711, but once he became dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral, he gave up regular journalistic work.

In 1702 Edward Lloyd, the virtual founder of the famous "Lloyd's" of commerce, started a thrice a week newspaper, Lloyd's News, which had but a brief existence in its initial form, but was the precursor of the modern Lloyd's List . The 76th issue of the original paper contained a paragraph mentioning the House of Lords, for which the publisher was told he would have to pay a fine. He preferred to discontinue his publication instead. In 1726 he in part revived it, under the title of Lloyd's List, published at first weekly, it would later become a daily.

The increasing popularity and influence of newspapers was unappealing to the government of the day. The first bill in parliament advocating a tax on newspapers was proposed in 1711. The duty eventually imposed in 1712 was a halfpenny on papers of half a sheet or less and a penny on newspapers that ranged from half a sheet to a single sheet in size. Jonathan Swift expressed in his Journal to Stella in August 7th 1712, doubt in the ability of The Spectator to hold out against the tax. This doubt was proved justified in December 1712 by its discontinuance. However, some of the existing journals continued production and their numbers soon increased. Part of this increase was attributed to corruption and political connections of its owners. Later, toward the middle of the same century, the provisions and the penalties of the Stamp Act were made more stringent, yet the number of newspapers continued to rise. In 1753 the total number of copies of newspapers sold yearly in Britain amounted to 7,411,757. In 1760 it had risen to 9,464,790 and in 1767 to 11,300,980. In 1776 the number of newspapers published in London alone had increased to 53.

The 18th Century saw the gradual development of the purely political journal side by side with those papers which were primarily devoted to news, domestic and foreign, and commerce. It was left to Steele and Addison to develop the social side of journalism in their respective papers. In 1761 the North Briton came out and it was largely a result of it's publisher, John Wilkes, and his campaign for increased freedom of the press that, in 1772 the right to publish parliamentary reports was established.