Chapter Eleven - The Scottish Press

Summary

From its establishment in the 1640s through to 1800, the Scottish periodical press underwent a profoundly radical evolution. While James Watson's Edinburgh Gazette – thought to have been Scotland's first recognisably modern newspaper – dates to around 1699 (Brown 2012: 353), the Scottish press was active in printing and distributing the news from the 1640s onwards. In the early 1700s Scottish newspapers depended largely on the London press for their content, but as the decades advanced, their perspectives turned simultaneously inwards and outwards: while English papers continued to provide source material, the attention of Scottish journalists and editors moved increasingly towards Scottish affairs, local politics and concerns, while coverage of global events also intensified. By the 1790s, in response to the French Revolution and its aftermath, political journalism had evolved still further, and radical reporting became more commonplace. Radical papers, such as the short-lived but influential Edinburgh Gazetteer (1792–94), were often challenged and frequently shut down by the government via charges of seditious libel, but they nevertheless provided significant blueprints for news reporting which the newspaper press would follow in the ensuing centuries and into the twenty-first century.

As Scottish newspapers became more established, numerous and independent, and as readers demanded more diverse reading materials, the marketplace expanded in the early eighteenth century to accommodate the magazine, which could be issued on a weekly or monthly basis. While often incorporating the news, magazines were truly miscellaneous in nature, containing essays on countless topics including history, medicine, religion, politics, philosophy and literature, as well as letters to the editor, book reviews and a poetry section, giving a clear and valuable reflection of contemporary debates and issues of concern. These magazines constructed the foundations upon which the canonical periodical publications of the nineteenth century would build and flourish: the examples of the Scots Magazine and the Weekly Magazine, or Edinburgh Amusement provided models for Blackwood's Magazine and the Edinburgh Review, thus helping ‘to fundamentally shape the nation's literary and political public sphere in the long eighteenth century’ and beyond (Benchimol, Brown and Shuttleton 2015: 1). This chapter analyses the establishment of the Scottish periodical press in the mid-seventeenth century and its development throughout the eighteenth century and, through a series of case studies, demonstrates the centrality of newspapers and magazines to daily life and debate in Scotland in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.