Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern
Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 426pp. ISBN
0521819016
Joad Raymond’s Pamphlets and Pamphleteering traces ‘a trajectory’ of pamphlet
publishing from ‘Marprelate to Marvell’, but in fact covers its inception as a
literary form in the sixteenth to work by Dryden and Locke at the end of the
seventeenth century. Raymond argues that the pamphlet form was a model
of efficiency in print, offering a whole range of rhetorical devices and
opportunities of expression never before available to any other than the
elite. The pamphlet, he argues, was essentially polemical, in part fostered by
religious, social and political conflict, and the greatly increased use of the
form had a huge impact on the range and reach of debate on all aspects of
the world in print.
His survey brings together a number of important aspects of the
pamphlet press, in particular as material products, and as a form that
influenced writing in all spheres. His excellent chapter on the printing trade
(English and Scots) considers trade practices, printing processes, typography
and marketing. He places printing and the pamphlet in a European context,
he considers issues of gender and female authorship, and his final chapter,
discussing the pamphlets of the Popish Plot, adds something new to the
history of that period.
Raymond is interested in demonstrating the place of the pamphlet in
three narratives of the past: the ‘explosion of print’ in the mid-seventeenth
century; the development of women as printed authors; and, crucially, the
‘invention of a public opinion’ and the pamphlet’s role in spreading the
news. He uses graphs and a mass of printing data to demonstrate that the
outbreak of the Bishop’s Wars in 1637, and the Scottish propaganda
campaign that they sparked off, at first based in the Netherlands, were
catalysts for the English ‘explosion’ of print in 1640. This argument is not
new - it forms the crux of his book The Invention of the Newspaper (Oxford,
1996) - but the data on publishing and the linking of it to Scotland is. He
argues that the anonymity and modesty of the pamphlet form appealed to
women writers, offering them an opportunity to go into print without
suffering the consequences of unwomanly publicity. He points out that the
common and effective use of the authorial persona in the pamphlet form
may disguise many other female authors. He states, rather than examines,
the role of women in the print and publishing trade, but discusses, briefly,
the role of women in prophetic and news writing and Quaker women’s
writings. The theme of public opinion and high-level political debate takes
up the majority of the book. There is a heavy emphasis on newsprint. Three
chapters, ‘The business of news’, ‘Scottish origins of the explosion of print’,
and ‘Printing Revolutions’, deal mainly with the development of the
pamphlet as news.
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Though Raymond has sought to undermine a Whiggish – and
inaccurate – approach to the chronology of the newspaper, he nevertheless
figures the development of the pamphlet in linear terms. He describes a
number of ‘displacements’: the displacement of the ‘news-ballad’ by the
news book; the displacement of the ‘stage and pulpit as purveyors of news’
by the corantos and news-books; the displacement of the female pamphlet
by ‘literary works’; and finally the displacement of the news book by the
folio news paper. However Raymond fails to defend this chronology, while
his own analysis of the popish plot makes it clear that there was a vital and
ongoing contribution from all these genres at the same time.
Despite an excellent chapter on ‘What is a Pamphlet’, there is a lack of
clarity on what constitutes a pamphlet and what a book, or how the
pamphlet engages with the popular reader. Detailed discussions of topics
including the satire and physical appearance of Jonson’s Staple of News
(though published in a collected works, not in a pamphlet), Milton’s 40-page
Areopagitica (acknowledged as a failure as a pamphlet because it was deemed
too literary), sermons running to hundreds of pages, and elite poems by
Marvell and Dryden, seem to be dealing with texts beyond the scope of the
less educated reader. While Raymond is arguing that these works used the
techniques of pamphleteers, this does not really add very much to his
argument that pamphlets increased political or religious awareness.
Raymond’s argument is, nevertheless, convincing in terms of
establishing pamphlets and pamphleteering as an influential literary form
that needs to be acknowledged in the broader sphere. His work is as ever a
pleasure to read. He incorporates a compendious knowledge of the texts of
seventeenth century England. His comments on the nature of those texts
are insightful and nuanced; his prose style clear and lucid; the illustrations,
which carry detailed explanatory captions, are excellent. This book would be
particularly useful for students studying literary aspects of the press, and
makes a valuable contribution to the growing library of work dedicated to
the growth of popular political consciousness in early modern England.
Angela McShane Jones
University of Warwick
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