Chapter Eight - The Evolving Language of the Press

Summary

Introduction

This chapter will examine features of the language of periodical print news as it transformed from the short pamphlets of the 1640s to the ever more heterogeneous British and Irish newspapers of the eighteenth century. The chapter is divided into two historical periods which encapsulate important changes not only in the history of the press but in the language that made up the news publications of the time.

The first period from 1640 to 1695 includes the last series of foreign-news corantos, the huge outpouring of news pamphlets in the 1640s and 1650s, and the founding in 1665 of the Oxford Gazette, which became the London Gazette in 1666. Excepting the years from 1679 to 1682, the London Gazette had an effective monopoly of serialised news up until 1688, and even after that it remained the principal news publication until the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 (Handover 1965: 9–23; Nelson and Seccombe 2002: 545–9; Suhr 2021). On account of its focus on both foreign and domestic news, regular periodicity and, in particular, its one-sheet, two-column folio format, the London Gazette is often considered England's first newspaper (Williams 2010: 53; Conboy 2010: 33). It is no coincidence that in the Oxford English Dictionary the first reported occurrence of the term ‘newspaper’ is dated 1667.

The second period in the chapter, running from 1695 until 1800, witnessed an ever-increasing number of newspapers published both in and beyond London, a significant increase in the diversity of a news-paper's contents and text types, and a greater ideological positioning in the form of editorials and letters to the editor. The chapter will also include an examination of linguistic features of advertisements as they became an ever more prominent feature in British and Irish newspapers.

1640–95

The first two decades of this period not only overturned politics and society, but also the press and the language of news. The ‘explosion’ in press activity during the first two Civil Wars (1642–49) and much of the Interregnum led to an extraordinary richness and variety in news content, presentation and discourse (Raymond 2003: 202–75; 2011; Peacey 2004b: 237–71; 2012; Brownlees 2011: 97–161).