The Invention Of The Newspaper

The Invention of the Newspaper is the first book to explore the origins and early development of the English newspaper. It uses both manuscript and printed evidence to account for the precise moment of the newsbook's appearance - a moment just a few months before the outbreak of civil war. Raymond explores the newspaper's unique place in the flourishing political print culture of the 1640s, showing how newsbooks drew from and then reformed elements of literary culture, being both produced by a public hunger for news and, in turn, creating a market for it. The Invention of the Newspaper presents previously unexplored evidence concerning the distribution and readership of seventeenth-century news publications, which suggests that the early newsbooks were widely read and highly influential, and that - even today - they exert a considerable influence over the way in which seventeenth-century history is perceived.

The first newspapers, or 'newsbooks', appeared in 1641, although the reasons for their appearance have never been fully understood. The Invention of the Newspaper is the first interdisciplinary account of the origins and early development of the English newspaper, using both manuscript and printed evidence to account for the precise moment of the newsbook's appearance - a moment just a few months before the outbreak of civil war. Raymond explores the newspaper's unique place in the flourishing political print culture of the 1640s, showing how newsbooks drew from and then reformed elements of literary culture, being both produced by a public hunger for news and, in turn, creating a market for it. The Inverntion of the Newspaper presents previously unexplored evidence concerning the distribution and readership of seventeenth-century news publications, which suggests that the early newsbooks were widely read and highly influential, and that - even today - they exert a considerable influence over the way in which seventeenth-century history is perceived. Charting the newsbook's development as a genre, its narrative forms, literary merits and influences, and its relationship to other vehicles of communication, printed and spoken, such as sermons, alamanacs, and play-pamphlets, Raymond presents a detailed exploration of the newsbook's gradual dominance of the market for information. Review: Raymond has performed a public service by examining the transformation of the newsbook from 'a plain and non-controversial narrative of parliamentary proceedings into a bitter and aggressive instrument of literary and political faction.' We should, he urges, pay less attention to what contemporaries said about newsbooks and more to what they did with them. All seventeenth-century historians will benefit by reading this book. Christopher Hill, Literature and History richly researched and documented ... offers a keen analysis and broad samplings of one of the main discursive forms. David Quint, Studies in English Literature Raymond's book is a superb account of the history and function of the English newsbook; it examines every aspect of the writing, printing, publishing, distributing and reading of the news in the 1640's ... Erudite and engaged, Raymond looks deeply at the particulars of newsbooks in the 1640's and beyond them to a range of significant issues ... What emerges is a striking portrait of that busy and often chaotic traffic between and among authors, copyists, printers, vendors and readers of the news. Steven N. Zwicker, Reviews of Books In this immensely stimulating and diverse work, Raymond succeeds in keeping the different components of theory and description in balance. From the point of view of newspaper history the work is a terrific achievement. Raymond's material provides an important and stimulating contribution to many of the debates about the way English society worked in the mid-seventeenth century. Michael Harris, The Library, 19.4, December 1997