There was one other aspect of London “news” which did not escape the attention of Ben Jonson. In his The Staple of Newes (1625) he suggests that news ceases to be “news” when it is printed and distributed; its essence is intelligence given in whisper or rumour, the kind of report that in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries could permeate all London within a very short period. Jonson had his own view, then, of the “stationer” or publisher of news, who
knows Newes well, can sort and ranke ’hem
And for a need can make ’hem.
In 1666 the London Gazette emerged as the most authoritative of the public prints. “It inserts no News but what is certain,” wrote one contemporary, “and often waits for the Confirmation of it, before it publishes it.” It was printed on single sheets each Monday and Thursday, and was sold on the streets by vendors known as “Mercury women” calling out “London’s Gazette here!” in Cornhill, Cheapside and the Royal Exchange. Macaulay described it as containing “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 Jannissaries … a description of a highwayman, an announcement of a grand cockfight between two persons of honour, and an advertisement offering a reward for a stray dog.” It may be considered certain that the highwayman, the cockfight and the dog provoked the most attention.
It is some indication of the appetite for news in London that its first daily newspaper, Daily Courant, issued in 1702, predates by some seventy-five years the appearance of a “daily” in Paris. By the end of the eighteenth century there were 278 newspapers, journals and periodicals available in the city. Most of this astonishing number were published within the Strand, Fleet Street and those adjoining streets east of the present Waterloo Bridge and west of Blackfriars.
Fleet Street is an example of the city’s topographical imperative, whereby the same activity takes place over hundreds of years in the same small area. In this case, too, it was an activity that dominated the character and behaviour of those who took part in it, so that it can be said that the very earth and stones of London created their own particular inhabitants. In 1500 Wynkyn de Worde set up his printing press opposite Shoe Lane, and in the same year Richard Pynson established himself as a publisher and printer a few yards down the road at the corner of Fleet Street and Chancery Lane. He was succeeded as Printer to Henry VIII by Thomas Berthelet who set up shop by the conduit, again opposite Shoe Lane, and in the early 1530s William Rastell began a printing firm in the churchyard of St. Bride’s. William Middleton printed at the George, Richard Tottell at the Hand and Star, John Hodgets at the Flower de Luce-all signs within the narrow and crowded thoroughfare.
“This part of London,” wrote Charles Knight, “is a very Temple of Fame. Here rumours and gossip from all regions of the world come pouring in, and from this echoing hall are reverberated back in strangely modified form echoes to all parts of Europe.” So it is an echoic as well as ancient place, a part of London from which that strange commodity known as news spreads in all directions.
In the eighteenth century news was disseminated largely by means of the daily and weekly journals provided by coffee houses and taverns. “What attracts enormously in these coffee-houses,” wrote Saussure “are the gazettes and other public papers. All Englishmen are great newsmongers. Workmen habitually begin the day by going to coffee-rooms in order to read the latest news. I have often seen shoe blacks and other persons of that class club together to purchase a farthing paper.” Another eighteenth-century account, by Count Pecchio, is of “English working men” in taverns for whom “are published a number of Sunday newspapers which contain an abridgement of all the intelligence, anecdotes, and observations, which have appeared in the daily newspapers in the course of the week.” “In the coffee-houses, as soon as the newspaper arrived,” wrote another commentator, “there was the silence of the grave. Each person sat absorbed in his favourite sheet, as if his whole life depended on the speed with which he could devour the news of the day.”
Here we have the image of the Londoner as “devourer” of the news, just as he was a devourer of food and drink. It is one of the first intimations of the “consumer,” one who can only experience the world by the act of ingestion or assimilation. A city is perhaps by its nature an artificial arrangement, so it creates artificial demands. Addison characterised as a definite London type “the Newsmonger” that “rose before Day to read the Postman” and was avid for the “Dutch Mails” and “inquisitive to know what passed in Poland.” There were those who followed the latest case of rape or divorce in the Sunday newspapers, with the same avidity as their medieval counterparts purchased ballads “o’ the newest and truest matter in London.” The search for fresh titillation or sensation is strong and enduring and, in a city where the inhabitants are surrounded by a bewildering variety of impressions, only the most recent can be entertained. That is why, in a city of fire, the latest news is “hot,” especially at the coffee house “where it is smoking new.” “Our News should indeed be published in a very quick Time,” commented the Spectator, “because it is a Commodity that will not keep cold.” It must be shouted out like “Fire!” to arrest the attention of the passers-by.
London itself was like a newspaper, as Walter Bagehot observed, where “everything is there, and everything is disconnected,” a series of random impressions and events and spectacles which have no connection other than the context in which they were found. In reading the newspaper, the Londoner was simply continuing with the normal perceptions of urban life; he “read” the public prints and the city itself with the same idle curiosity, as if the newspaper confirmed that vision of the world which London had already imparted to him. The very form of the city was imprinted in the pages of the journals-a man called Everett of Fleet Street sold his wife to one Griffin of Long Lane for a three-shilling bowl of punch (1729), a boar lived off the rubbish of Fleet Ditch for five months (1736), a man found frozen and standing upright in the same ditch had been drunk and fallen into the mud (1763), bread and cheese were thrown to the populace from Paddington steeple according to annual custom (1737), the wife of one Richard Haynes was delivered of a monster with nose and eyes like a lion (1746), a grave-digger was found smothered to death by his own exertions in an open grave (1769), a man stood up in the church of St. Sepulchre and shot at a choir of charity children (1820), a man named James Boyes walked in front of the congregation in a chapel at Long Acre and proclaimed himself Jehova Jesus (1821). And so it goes on, endlessly, the “news” conveying the accidents and disasters of the city in columns of print like thoroughfares. It was well known to the firemen of London, as one of their greatest hazards, that a crowd would spring up immediately around any great conflagration in order to witness the course of its destruction.
That is why, in a period of growth and uproar, the news itself became more strident. The sale of early nineteenth-century newspapers, for example, was a raucous affair. “Bloody News,” “Horrible Murder!” and “Extraordinary Gazette” were bellowed out “with stentorian lungs, accompanied by a loud blast of a long tin horn” by porters and costermongers who kept editions of the papers under their hatbands. The advent of the steam-printing press also allowed the newspapers to imitate the “resistless force” of London, with all its energy and expansiveness. Two and a half thousand copies of The Times could be printed every hour and the whole process came to the attention of Charles Babbage, the inventor of the prototype computer, who remarked that the great rollers of the steam press devoured sheets of white paper “with unsated appetite.” Charles Knight noted that the courts around Fleet Street are “bustling and vivacious” with the production of more news to ever larger readerships-“the fingers of the compositors cease not; the clash and clang of the steam press knows no intermission.” Sales of newspapers amounted in 1801 to sixteen million copies; thirty years later it had increased to thirty million, and the figures continued to rise.