“This part of London,” wrote Charles Knight, “is a very Temple of Fame. Here rumours and gossip from all regions of the world come pouring in, and from this echoing hall are reverberated back in strangely modified form echoes to all parts of Europe.” So it is an echoic as well as ancient place, a part of London from which that strange commodity known as news spreads in all directions.
In the eighteenth century news was disseminated largely by means of the daily and weekly journals provided by coffee houses and taverns. “What attracts enormously in these coffee-houses,” wrote Saussure “are the gazettes and other public papers. All Englishmen are great newsmongers. Workmen habitually begin the day by going to coffee-rooms in order to read the latest news. I have often seen shoe blacks and other persons of that class club together to purchase a farthing paper.” Another eighteenth-century account, by Count Pecchio, is of “English working men” in taverns for whom “are published a number of Sunday newspapers which contain an abridgement of all the intelligence, anecdotes, and observations, which have appeared in the daily newspapers in the course of the week.” “In the coffee-houses, as soon as the newspaper arrived,” wrote another commentator, “there was the silence of the grave. Each person sat absorbed in his favourite sheet, as if his whole life depended on the speed with which he could devour the news of the day.”
Here we have the image of the Londoner as “devourer” of the news, just as he was a devourer of food and drink. It is one of the first intimations of the “consumer,” one who can only experience the world by the act of ingestion or assimilation. A city is perhaps by its nature an artificial arrangement, so it creates artificial demands. Addison characterised as a definite London type “the Newsmonger” that “rose before Day to read the
London itself was like a newspaper, as Walter Bagehot observed, where “everything is there, and everything is disconnected,” a series of random impressions and events and spectacles which have no connection other than the context in which they were found. In reading the newspaper, the Londoner was simply continuing with the normal perceptions of urban life; he “read” the public prints and the city itself with the same idle curiosity, as if the newspaper confirmed that vision of the world which London had already imparted to him. The very form of the city was imprinted in the pages of the journals-a man called Everett of Fleet Street sold his wife to one Griffin of Long Lane for a three-shilling bowl of punch (1729), a boar lived off the rubbish of Fleet Ditch for five months (1736), a man found frozen and standing upright in the same ditch had been drunk and fallen into the mud (1763), bread and cheese were thrown to the populace from Paddington steeple according to annual custom (1737), the wife of one Richard Haynes was delivered of a monster with nose and eyes like a lion (1746), a grave-digger was found smothered to death by his own exertions in an open grave (1769), a man stood up in the church of St. Sepulchre and shot at a choir of charity children (1820), a man named James Boyes walked in front of the congregation in a chapel at Long Acre and proclaimed himself Jehova Jesus (1821). And so it goes on, endlessly, the “news” conveying the accidents and disasters of the city in columns of print like thoroughfares. It was well known to the firemen of London, as one of their greatest hazards, that a crowd would spring up immediately around any great conflagration in order to witness the course of its destruction.
