Dawks is the name of a family of booksellers and printers who practised their craft in London during the seventeenth century and later. The younger Thomas Dawks was honoured with the title of 'His Majesty's Printer for the British Language' in 1676. Ichabod Dawks, 'honest Ichabod' as Steel called him, and the best-known member of the family, published Dawks's NewsLetter on the evenings of Post Nights (i.e. Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday) from 1696 to 1716. For this periodical a special script type in imitation of handwriting was used, the matrices of which have recently been identified. Mr Morison's account of the Dawkses, based upon a family diary which he lately discovered, enlarges at several points our knowledge of their respective careers, and, in the case of Ichabod, demonstrates the character of his contribution to the progress of English journalism. Illustrated with type facsimiles, line blocks and nine pages of collotype facsimiles of newsletters.
This book is an extensive investigation of letters and letter writing across two centuries, focusing on the sociocultural function and meaning of epistolary writing - letters that were circulated, were intended to circulate, or were perceived to circulate within the culture of epistolarity in early modern England. The study examines how the letter functioned in a variety of social contexts, yet also assesses what the letter meant as idea to early modern letter writers, investigating letters in both manuscript and print contexts. It begins with an overview of the culture of epistolarity, examines the material components of letter exchange, investigates how emotion was persuasively textualized in the letter, considers the transmission of news and intelligence, and examines the publication of letters as propaganda and as collections of moral-didactic, personal, and state letters. Gary Schneider is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Texas-Pan American.
Behind these news networks was the entrepreneurial spirit of Benjamin Collins, a figure of national importance, who set up Salisbury's first bank, established newspapers in London and the provinces, wrote children's books with John Newbery, and whose publishing interests brought him into contact with the literary and commercial life of London. This fascinating study of the information networks of eighteenth-century provincial life will be interest to literary students and biographers as well as historians.
Oxford Textual Perspectives is a new series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works. Work in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing, 1690-1840 argues that between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries manual writing was a dynamic technology. It examines script in relation to becoming a writer, in constructions of the author, and in emerging ideas of the human. Revising views of print as displacing script, Work in Hand argues that print reproduced script, print generated script; and print shaped understandings of script. In this, the double nature of print, as both moveable type and rolling press, is crucial. During this period, the shapes of letters changed as the multiple hands of the early-modern period gave way to English round hand; the denial of writing to the labouring classes was slowly replaced by acceptance of the desirability of universal writing; understandings of script in relation to copying and discipline came to be accompanied by ideas of the autograph. The work begins by surveying representations of script in letterpress and engraving. It discusses initiation into writing in relation to the copy-books of English writing masters, and in the context of colonial pedagogy in Ireland and India. The middle chapters discuss the physical work of writing, the material dimensions of script, and the autograph, in constructions of the author in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and in relation to Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, William Blake, Isaac D'Israeli, and Maria Edgeworth. The final chapter considers the emerging association of script with ideas of the human in the work of the Methodist preacher Joseph Barker.
Does objectivity in the news media exist? In The Invention of Journalism Ethics Stephen Ward argues that, given the current emphasis on interpretation, analysis, and perspective, journalists and the public need a new theory of objectivity. He explores the varied ethical assertions of journalists over the past few centuries, focusing on the changing relationship between journalist and audience. This historical analysis leads to an innovative theory of pragmatic objectivity that enables journalists and the public to recognize and avoid biased and unbalanced reporting. Ward convincingly demonstrates that journalistic objectivity is not a set of absolute standards but the same fallible but reasonable objectivity used for making decisions in other professions and public institutions.
William Congreve’s comedy The Way of the World was first performed in 1700 at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. It was not well received, and as a result Congreve vowed never to write for the stage again—a vow he kept. Nonetheless the comedy was printed in the same year and has come to be regarded as the author’s masterpiece, a classic of Restoration drama. In a world still reacting against the puritanism of Cromwell and the Commonwealth, Restoration drama had slowly transitioned from celebrating the licentiousness and opulence of the newly returned court to the more thoughtful and refined comedy of manners that was to dominate the English stage of 18th century. In one way Congreve’s The Way of the World is the last (and best) of its type, and in another way, it is the forerunner of a style that is echoed even now. The play centers on the love affair of Mirabell and Millamant who are prevented from marrying by a number of obstacles, not the least of which is Mirabell’s past dalliance with Millamant’s aunt’s affections. Intricate, witty, and amusing, the comedy nevertheless concludes with no clear heroes or heroines—one of the things that makes it such an incisive portrait of human experience and an enduring example of its type. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.
Three hundred years ago, an unprecedented explosion in inexpensive, disposable print--newspapers, pamphlets, informational publications, artistic prints--ushered in a media revolution that forever changed our relationship to information. One unusually perceptive man, an obscure Dutch/British still life painter named Edward Collier, understood the full significance of these momentous changes and embedded in his work secret warnings about the inescapable slippages between author and print, meaning and text, viewer and canvas, perception and reality. Working around 1700, Collier has been neglected, even forgotten, precisely because his secret messages have never been noticed, let alone understood. Until now. In Mr. Collier's Letter Racks, Dror Wahrman recovers the tale of an extraordinary illusionist artist who engaged in a wholly original way with a major transformation of his generation. Wahrman shows how Collier developed a hidden language within his illusionist paintings--replete with minutely coded messages, witty games, intricate allusions, and private jokes--to draw attention to the potential and the pitfalls of this new information age. A remarkably shrewd and prescient commentator on the changes unfolding around him, not least the advent of a new kind of politics following the Glorious Revolution, Collier performed a post-modernist critique of modernity long before the modern age. His trompe l'oeil paintings are filled with seemingly disconnected, enigmatic objects--letters, seals, texts of speeches, magnifying glasses, title pages--and with teasingly significant details that require the viewer to lean in and peer closely. Wahrman does just that, taking on the role of detective/cultural historian to unravel the layers of deceptions contained within Collier's extraordinary paintings. Written with passionate enthusiasm and including more than 70 color illustrations, Mr. Collier's Letter Racks is a spell-binding feat of cultural history, illuminating not only the work of an eccentric genius but the media revolution of his period, the birth of modern politics, and the nature of art itself.
