News is a four-letter word, said a writer for the New-York Gazetteer (in a number dated 1 September 1783). Remarking upon the coincidence of these four letters with the initials of the four compass points and citing his original source as ‘The Edenburgh Gazette’, he drew a conclusion equally critical of writers and readers: ‘the four winds (the initials of which make the word NEWS) are not so capricious, or so liable to change, as our public intelligences’. At the time when he wrote, midway between two world-shaking revolutions, news had become a constant accompaniment to daily life, drawing cries and laughter, animating conversations, raising fears, creating doubts, fomenting discontent, celebrating triumphs and forming an undercurrent to experiences of all kinds. Not long afterward, the regularity of news reading would be compared by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to a kind of secular morning prayer, providing a moment of communion with a larger community – the city, the nation, the world – at the threshold of modernity (Hegel 1974: 360; Anderson [1983] 2006: 35; Dooley 2010: 2). However, news being somehow borne on the air from places near and far was already a constant sensation well before 1800, also because the English-language press drew extensively on information sources regarding every part of the globe (Arblaster 2005).

The period between the Thirty Years War and the Napoleonic Wars, two global conflicts in which Britain played a key role, saw the development and integration of European communication networks on an unprecedented scale, along with the formation of new types of news publication capable of conveying details and impressions of a rapidly changing geopolitical order to the first mass audiences. To be sure, for speeding up the transmission of information between regions, countries and cities, the groundwork had already been well laid in the previous period by the creation of public post routes and media to move along them – not to mention improvements in literacy education all over (Houston 1988; Caplan 2016). Personages involved in the international transfer of news included diplomats and merchants, official agents and spies, respected writers and literary hacks. Obviously, transfer points were deaf and blind to the quality of the content, so error and falsehood circulated as freely as truth and fact. But our concern in this chapter is to trace the information, not to test it.