Chapter 5 - Reading the 1745 Jacobite Rising

Summary

Chapter 5 examines in the 1745 Jacobite Rising in the context of the expansion of the periodical press and the print marketplace in the mid-eighteenth century. Information about the events of the 1745 Rising was made available to readers in a more continuous and a more pervasive way than during the 1715 Rising. The chapter explores how this expanding circulation of information prompted greater concern not just about the trustworthiness of the genres of the newspaper and the political pamphlet but also about how citizens were consuming information. It next focuses on three genres of printed works produced after the Battle of Culloden (1746) that reworked newspaper reports into their narratives: accounts of the trials and executions of the rebels, “Chevalier” or “Pretender” narratives about the escape of Charles Edward Stuart, and popular histories. With their conscious and unconscious intertextual borrowings, these printed works, like those of the 1715 Rising, inscribe the cultural memory of the 1745 as a series of complicated knots of memory.