Grub Street culture : the newspapers of Nathaniel Mist, 1716-1737

• Main Author: Symonds, Matthew Thomas
• Published: University College London (University of London) 2007
• Subjects: 072
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.506985

This thesis is a study of the interaction of print culture and the practice of politics in Britain during the first half of the eighteenth century. The thesis also concerns itself with methodological problems, examining how historians have previously used newspapers in political, intellectual, and cultural history, and suggesting some new ways to go about matters. It focuses on the newspapers owned by Nathaniel Mist, a Jacobite printer, variously called the Weekly Journal or Saturday's Post, Mist's Weekly Journal , and Fog's Weekly Journal. The study is divided into three. The first section deals with the contents of the newspapers, news reporting, editorial comment and other miscellany, and advertising. This section is based on a detailed examination of the newspapers to allow numerical analysis, a database was constructed of the precise details of the contents of every third newspaper, including how many lines of type each paragraph took up. This provides the context for the second section, where I reconstruct the political identity of the newspaper, examining its civil, ecclesiastical and cultural politics in turn. The third section is an extended study of the 'Persian Libel' crisis of 1728, when Mist published a seditious libel attacking George II and Sir Robert Walpole and setting up the Stuart pretender as the rightful king. To escape the displeasure of the ministry, and prosecution for high treason, Mist fled to France. Meanwhile, his entire household was taken into custody and his press destroyed. Rather than just treating this as an unfortunate incident in the story of the growth of the liberty of the press, I seek to place it in the wider context of British print culture, particularly the nature of writing, publishing and censoring texts in early modern England. I also discuss the relationship between the British state and the practice of sedition.