EDITING AND EDITORIAL INTERVENTIONS IN ENGLISH JOURNALISM FROM THE CIVIL WARS TO THE RESTORATION

Abstract

This article builds on recent work on seventeenth-century journalism by arguing that newsbooks rapidly became an interactive medium. This emerges from recent studies of censorship and official monitoring of the press, in terms of interference by licensers, but it can be developed much further by demonstrating how different kinds of readers exerted control over what was printed. This was not only just a matter of commercial advertising, but also of book reviews and readers' letters, as well as of editors being ‘desired’, ‘instructed’ and ‘appointed’ to insert notices and news stories. This was done not only merely by members of the political elite, but also by readers from across the country and across the social spectrum, not least as part of political campaigning and lobbying. As such, new light is shed upon the processes involved in journalism, and upon the importance which contemporaries placed upon the news media.