A study of political journalism should explore how journalists appeal to and imagine the ‘public’, what they say about and how they attempt to encourage or limit political engagement. How do the authors and editors of newspapers and periodicals imagine their roles vis-à-vis the populace? What are their attitudes toward a public sphere that encourages participation, questioning, and judgment-rendering from subjects? Scholars have highlighted the widespread anxiety about popular political education, citing writers who feared the destabilising polarisation created by a more extensive news network. In The Review, Defoe routinely complains about ‘that Universal Pen and Ink Strife’: ‘Never was Nation in the World, so intollerably worried from the Press’ (vol. 2, p. 711). Most discussions of the press and the Habermasian public sphere in this period have focused predominantly on Addison and Steele, specifically on The Tatler and The Spectator, reading those journals as revealing their authors’ desire to limit rather than enhance popular involvement. As Brian Cowan notes, Addison and Steele ‘were not so enthusiastic about the potential for public politics’. Cowan offers a broader conclusion: ‘All parties, both Whig and Tory, shared an aversion to widening popular participation in the political public sphere’, and ‘the politicization of the public sphere remained a move that was only made in extremis’. One object of this chapter is to test that supposition, and to restore to the discussion those newsmen who provoked and taught readers to play the role of active, attentive, inquisitive citizens.

Scholars have emphasised negative attributes of the relationship between the press and the public. Not only were contemporaries uneasy about politics ‘out of doors’, but they also worried that the press functioned to manipulate and mislead rather than to clarify. Mark Knights’s excellent Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain (2005) studies the ways in which ‘the involvement of the public … raised questions about the capacity of the people to make informed, rational, political judgements’, as well as about writers’ partisan misrepresentations and deceptions (3). The proliferation of text, like the increase in coffee-house discourse, alarmed contemporaries, since the ‘emphasis on free speech was feared to be the first step on the road to free thought’: to extend the list of topics warranting critical scrutiny and uninhibited dialogue was ultimately to risk the spread of atheism.