PLEASE NOTE: this is a text only article. The full article is in ‘The Cowper & Newton Journal
Volume 8: 2018 SPECIAL ISSUE: Cowper: Home and Away
Guest editor: Katherine Turner
The best-known passage from The Task, and one which established the image of Cowper as the
home-loving poet of fireside retreat contemplating the world ‘at a distance’, is the description
from the beginning of Book IV, ‘The Winter Evening’, of the newspaper’s arrival and perusal. A
painting which hangs in the Cowper and Newton Museum, attributed to J. Tate Grey and dated
1891, embodies the iconic power of the passage; it depicts Cowper reading the paper to Mrs
Unwin and Lady Austen while ‘the bubbling and loud-hissing urn / Throws up a steamy column,
and the cups / That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each’ (IV, 38-40).1 The painting, like the
poem, emphasizes the domestic sobriety of Cowper’s reading situation, in contrast to many
images of newspaper reading from the later eighteenth century, which tended to locate the
practice in disreputable or drunken contexts, such as coffee-houses, taverns, and inns. (In 1780, a
letter which appeared in several London and provincial papers observed that without newspapers
‘our Coffee-Houses, Ale-Houses, and Barbers-Shops, would undergo a Change next to
Depopulation.’2)
In her 2010 study of the Romantic period entitled War at a Distance, Mary Favret offers
a detailed reading of the newspaper sequence in ‘The Winter Evening’, arguing that Cowper here
defines the predicament of the modern subject in a time of war, ‘lib’rated and exempted’ by
distance, and yet emotionally involved in the wider world.3 Favret’s reading is nuanced and farreaching,
and yet somewhat partial; much of Cowper’s description in ‘The Winter Evening’ of
the world revealed through ‘this folio of four pages, happy work!’ (IV, 50) has nothing to do
with war, but is concerned with more cheerful and even comic topics, such that his observation
from elsewhere in The Task, ‘Variety’s the very spice of life’ might be aptly invoked to describe
the appeal of the newspapers.4 Taking this passage from The Task as a springboard, this essay
will explore the complex role which newspapers played in Cowper’s life and work. It will also
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attend to the ways in which Cowper related his reading to what he gleaned from other sources
via the social media of his day – conversation, gossip, and, in particular, letters. Although
Cowper’s fascination with news is at its most intense during the composition of The Task, it
remains a vital interest throughout his life, and the news-hungry, political Cowper that emerges
from a thorough reading of his letters challenges our vision of the rural recluse, the stricken deer.
Much of Cowper’s work is suffused with a complex awareness of the interplay between private
and public worlds, or between home and away, which is perfectly embodied in the material
practice of newspaper reading.
Early in 1782, Cowper’s friend John Thornton wrote to Benjamin Franklin sending a
volume of Cowper’s poems and describing him as ‘a friend of mine who has been many years
excluded from the World, as not being in his right Mind and considers himself as a Non Entity
and reads nothing beyond a News paper’.5 Franklin wrote back thanking Thornton and admiring
the book – ‘I have read the whole with great pleasure’ – and Cowper reports all of this, with
evident pride, in a letter to William Unwin. However, Cowper concludes this very same letter by
declaring that, thanks to recent jingoistic reporting of events in America, ‘the Newspapers and
their Correspondents disgust me and make me sick’.6 Just in this brief exchange we see the
importance of newspaper reading to Cowper, but also the reaction of dismay which it often
provoked. He writes to Lady Hesketh in October 1787 that ‘the pertness of the Herald is my
detestation, yet I always read it; and why? because it is a newspaper, and should therefore
doubtless read it were it ten times more disgusting than it is’.7 Sometimes it’s the ‘pertness’ of
the journalists which offends him, while at other times he complains about the substance of the
news itself. ‘I read the News—I see that things go wrong in every quarter’, he writes to Hill in
January 1781, claiming to prefer his cucumbers to politics; and elsewhere in The Task he
fantasizes about eschewing the concerns of the world entirely:
Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless contiguity of shade,
Where rumour of oppression or deceit,
Of unsuccessful or successful war,
Might never reach me more. My ear is pain’d,
My soul is sick, with ev’ry day’s report
Of wrong and outrage with which earth is fill’d.
3
(The Task, Book II, ‘The Timepiece’, 1-7)
Even when at his most depressed, however, he still seems to have read the papers; he
concludes a letter to Samuel Rose in January 1794 by observing that ‘Were I less absorbed in
miserable Self than I am, the horrid condition of Europe, and especially the affairs of England,
would touch me deeply. But, as it is, whether towns are taken and battles won or lost, seems to
affect me little’.8 Yet, disgusting though the papers sometimes were to him, Cowper seems to
have read them almost every day. He seems to have seen various local papers on an irregular
basis (The Northampton Mercury and the Buckinghamshire Herald), and the letters contain many
references to the practical business of regularly obtaining the London papers. He habitually took
in the fairly conservative General Evening Post; in March 1780 he writes to Hill that ‘I know
nothing, but what I learn from the General Evening’.9 In December 1786, he writes to Lady
Hesketh that he’s had a letter from Bagot, who ‘rallies me in it on the subject of my celebrity,
and tells me of Odes that he sees in the public prints and other pretty things composed to my
honour. I however see them not. Perhaps I should do well to give notice by advertisement to all
Gentlemen posts and others who feel themselves inclined to praise me, that I take in only the
General Evening and the Gentleman’s Magazine, consequently that their good things will be lost
on me, if published in any other papers’.10 Cowper’s household also sometimes took (or simply
borrowed) slightly racier newspapers such as the St James’s Chronicle and the Morning
Chronicle, both of which had good provincial circulation. In February 1782, Cowper reports to
Newton that they can obtain the Morning Chronicle six days a week in Olney via a local
supplier, for 3s 3d per quarter, which is more reliable than ordering it direct in the mail from
London.11
Cowper also seems to have hoarded newspapers in the house, if we are to believe what he
writes to Newton in August 1781, in response to a query about whether some of Newton’s papers
had been left at Olney on his last visit: ‘[they] certainly are not here. Our servants never touch a
paper without leave, and are so observant of our Injunction, in this particular, that unless I burn
the covers of the News, they accumulate till they make a litter in the parlour’.12
Thornton’s account in the letter to Franklin of Cowper reading ‘nothing beyond a News
paper’ is clearly overdone. However, at many points in his letters, Cowper insists that he reads
very few books, since they are expensive and hard to come by in Buckinghamshire. ‘My studies
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… are very much confined and of little use, because I have no books but what I borrow,’ he
complains to Newton in April 1783.13 If house guests are anticipated, he often advises them to
bring their own reading matter, as when he writes to Lady Hesketh in April 1786, ‘Should you
wish for books at Olney, you must bring them with you or you will wish in vain’, or to William
Hayley in April 1792 that books ‘are an article with which I am heinously unprovided’.14 This is
a bit disingenuous – his letters also reveal that friends often sent or loaned him books, especially
books of travel and religious literature – but Cowper remains one of the least bookish of poets:
‘not one of the Literati,’ as he described himself to Hayley.15 His keen interest in the daily news
and his talent for writing poems inspired by current events which could also transcend the merely
topical doubtless contributed to his popularity with the reading public, at a time when notions of
good citizenship were increasingly bound up with a growing appreciation of the British press and
the liberty which it helped to protect.16
In ‘The Winter Evening,’ Cowper is less concerned with the abstract ‘freedom of the
press’ and much more interested in the almost physical power of the newspaper to compel the
reader’s ‘inquisitive attention,’ keeping him ‘fast bound in chains of silence’ as he absorbs the
amazing variety of human experience which the newspaper unfolds, this ‘map of busy life’ (The
Task, IV, 50-5). Cowper pursues the map conceit at some length, making the newspaper a moral
geography of contemporary life, ranging from the heights of political and social self-importance
– ‘the mountainous and craggy ridge / That tempts ambition’ (IV, 57-8) – down to the
‘wilderness of strange / But gay confusion’ (IV, 78-9) – the advertisements and crazy
announcements so characteristic of eighteenth-century news-sheets. The newspaper is map-like
in other ways. Its contents describe events across the globe; it relies upon readers knowing how
to make sense of its odd layout and sign systems; its awkwardly large size makes it more
challenging than a book to hold and read; and it makes readers, especially those of a certain age,
squint closely to figure it out (several eighteenth-century readers complain about the increasingly
small print of newspapers, and ‘the injury done to the Sight’ by ‘reading so minute a
Character’;17 since they were taxed per sheet, printers had to cram as much as possible into a
small space, to avoid adding extra pages).
The chaotic layout of the papers is something Cowper writes about in his letters. Unlike
newspapers today, eighteenth-century ones observed almost no hierarchy of contents, such that a
description of a new play might be a large item on page one, while important court or military
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news would be hidden away in the middle of page three. Writing to Unwin in March 1782,
Cowper exclaims: ‘What a medley are our public prints. Half the page filled with the ruin of the
country, and the other half with the vices and pleasures of it! Here an Island taken, and there a
new comedy, here an Empire lost, and there an Italian Opera, or the Duke of Gloucester’s rout on
a Sunday!’18 The advertisements seem particularly to have intrigued him, as we see not only in
The Task’s wonderful catalogue of products and events, but also at various points in the Letters,
such as when (in June 1788) he offers to send Lady Hesketh an ‘extravagantly ludicrous’
advertisement by ‘a Dancing master of Newport-pagnel’, for her ‘amusement’.19
Advertisement from The Morning Chronicle which inspired Cowper’s vignette of
‘Katterfelto with his hair on end / At his own wonders, wond’ring for his bread’
(‘The Winter Evening’, 86-7).
6
There is a striking similarity between Cowper’s sense of the newspaper’s crazy riches and a
‘letter to the editor’ published in several London and provincial papers in 1780 and signed,
mysteriously, ‘WC’:
Sir, I have often observed, that there is not so inconsistent, so incoherent, so heterogeneous,
although so useful and agreeable a Thing, as a Publick Newspaper: The very ludicrous Contrast in
Advertisements, the contradictory Substance of foreign and domestic Paragraphs, the opposite
Opinions and Observations of contending Essayists, with premature Deaths, spurious Marriages,
Births, Bankruptcies, &c. &c. form a Fund of Entertainment for a World, of which it is in itself
no bad Epitome.
The letter goes on to describe the newspaper as a ‘Bill of Fare, containing all the Luxuries, as
well as the Necessaries of Life. Politicks are now the Roast-Beef of the Times, and a Dish
equally sumptuous to the King and the Cobbler’.20 Doubtless many Cowperians would be
delighted if this correspondent turned out to be Cowper himself, who in ‘The Winter Evening’
famously celebrates how the ‘deep research’ of the newspaper intelligence-gatherer provides ‘a
rich repast for me’ (IV, 112-13). Alas, ‘WC’ turns out to be a fairly prolific writer of letters to
the press who likely hails from Chester.21 However, our own Cowper is highly likely to have
read the letter, since it appeared in various newspapers over several months in 1780, and he may
well have been doubly motivated to read it because of the coincidence of his own and the
writer’s initials.
Cowper wrote many poems in response to newspaper stories. The most compassionate of
these include the influential anti-slavery poems and ‘On the Loss of the Royal George’. Several
of these ended up or indeed were first published in newspapers or in the Gentleman’s Magazine,
the chief vehicle for Cowper’s occasional verse. He seems not himself to have taken the
Gentleman’s Magazine regularly, but he managed to borrow copies from a neighbour who did –
in October 1785 he writes Lady Hesketh that he does not ‘take it in’ and a couple of months later
he describes borrowing a copy from a neighbouring ‘watchmaker … who takes in the said
Magazine for a gentleman at some distance’.22 Much of the detail which makes his anti-slavery
poems so powerful was garnered from his careful perusal of parliamentary debates on the slavetrade,
which the newspapers reprinted word for word. He also wrote several highly political
poems, some of which tend to be too topical to work very well for readers today, such as ‘On the
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Victory Gained by Sir George Rodney’; a sonnet on his young cousin’s recitation of documents
in the House of Lords during the trial of Warren Hastings; and a satire on Lord Gordon,
instigator of the 1780 anti-Catholic riots, which makes it clear that Cowper had been following
Gordon’s colourful career in the newspapers with almost obsessive attention to detail.23 In 1781,
he had to make last-minute changes to the proof sheets of Poems in light of current events; he
excised some anti-Catholic lines from ‘Expostulation’ which now seemed too inflammatory after
the Gordon Riots, and he removed two poems which Cornwallis’s defeat at Yorktown had
rendered obsolete (‘A Present for the Queen of France’ and ‘To Sir Joshua Reynolds’).24
Although reformist in many of his political views, Cowper was fascinated by royal news,
especially reports of the King’s illness and recovery. In November 1788, he complains to Samuel
Rose about the gloatingly gloomy tone of reports on the King’s health: ‘We mourn daily for the
King, and three times in the week, execrate the malignity and Viperism of the Morning
Herald’.25 He sent occasional poems on royal affairs to the newspapers, often using William
Unwin or Lady Hesketh as his intermediary. ‘Annus Memorabilis 1789: A Poem Written in
Commemoration of His Majesty’s Happy Recovery’ was apparently published in the Morning
Herald in March or April of 1789 (though no copy has been found),26 and on 15 June 1789 his
poem ‘On the Queen’s Nocturnal Visit to London, March 17, 1789’ appeared in The Times.27 In
July 1789, responding to detailed reports of the royal family’s holiday at Weymouth, Cowper
wrote ‘On the Benefit Received by his Majesty from Sea-Bathing’; the poem appeared in the
Whitehall Evening Post for 16-18 July 1789, which also provided a casual snippet of information
from Paris, ‘The Palace of Versailles is guarded by three lines of soldiers’ – an ironic
conjunction of Revolutionary simmerings abroad with royalist pride at home.
A handful of Cowper’s poems were inspired by affecting tales from the provinces which
were reprinted in the London religious press (publications such as the Arminian Magazine and
the Spiritual Register) and thence made it into the mainstream London papers as well as other
provincial organs (local news often in this way became gradually national). He was attracted to
tales of cruelty to animals or of wicked people miraculously struck dead in their tracks by divine
wrath (‘The Cockfighter’s Garland’ and ‘A Tale, founded on a Fact, which happened in January,
1779’), and also wrote ‘A Tale’ inspired by a report of a chaffinch nesting on a Scottish ship; the
manuscript of the poem incorporates a pasted clipping of the newspaper story.28
8
Some of Cowper’s interventions were motivated by more personal concerns. In 1792, he
sent a sonnet in praise of Wilberforce to the Northampton Mercury in order to quell a rumour
which had originated in Olney gossip and spread as far as London, presumably via the
newspapers, that he had become a supporter of the slave trade.29 The Wilberforce sonnet
appeared in the Northampton Mercury for 21 April 1792, prefaced by a letter in which Cowper
entreats the editor ‘to take an early opportunity to insert in your paper the following lines, written
… expressly for the two purposes of doing just honour to the gentleman with whose name they
are inscribed, and of vindicating myself from an aspersion so injurious’.30 The next number of
the newspaper (28 April 1792) published a sonnet signed ‘S. M’Clellan’ complimenting Cowper
on his own poem; Cowper took this as evidence that his sonnet has ‘answer’d its purpose’.31
Cowper’s sonnet pays detailed attention to reports in, for instance, the General Evening Post of
Wilberforce’s speech in the House of Commons on 2 April; and his modifications to the sonnet’s
closing lines reflect the setback Wilberforce suffered on 26 April when a suggested amendment
by Dundas to abolish slavery gradually (by 1800) was adopted.32
If the Wilberforce sonnet shows us Cowper standing up for principles as well as
defending his own reputation, other of his entanglements with the press were less noble. In May
1786, he rather naughtily wrote a riposte to a critical letter on his Homer translation which had
appeared in the Public Advertizer; he arranged for General Cowper in London to send the letter,
thus disguising its origins, and signed it, ‘a Well-Wisher to the New Translation’.33 He describes
this ruse in a letter to Lady Hesketh with no apparent qualms about his own duplicity.34 In
November 1783, he reveals in a letter to Hill that ‘I send nothing to the papers myself, but Unwin
sometimes sends, for me. His receptacle of my squibs is the Public Advertiser’, a confession
which suggests an unknowable quantity of such interventions.35 And we know that he was not
above using fake initials, for instance, ‘T. H.’ for the sonnet on Henry Cowper’s role in the
Hastings trial.36
Not surprisingly for a poet who wrote so many poems in response to contemporary
events, Cowper comments in his letters on many things which he reads about in the newspapers.
Almost every letter he writes makes some kind of observation on current affairs, and his range of
interests is enormous. The following list is by no means comprehensive, and cannot feasibly be
referenced in full, but serves to give a general sense of the things that he commented upon: the
American Revolutionary War and subsequent peace treaties; the trial of Warren Hastings;
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Parliamentary debates, especially over Reform and Abolition, and especially the speeches of
Burke; the rise of Pitt the younger and his unfair taxes; the illness and recovery of George III as
well as of his old school friend George Colman at Bath; the Gordon Riots and the Birmingham
Riots; the decadence of the Prince Regent;37 the French Revolution and its degeneration into the
Terror (‘I wait with trembling ears for the News from Paris’);38 the antics of Catherine the Great,
‘the Russian virago … an impertinent Puss’;39 the great earthquake in Southern Italy (‘What
havoc in Calabria!’)40 and the great West Indian hurricane, as well as bad weather in other parts
of England;41 the wonders of that new invention, the hot air balloon (‘I have been crossing the
Channel in a Balloon ever since I read of that atchievement by Blanchard’);42 the sinking of
ships, especially the Royal George; the settlement of Botany Bay and the African Colonization
Society’s attempts to resettle Sierra Leone;43 the debauchery of University life;44 promotions and
pensions awarded to his cousin Mr Madan and his old school friend Lord Thurlow, as well as
Thurlow’s unsuccessful request that the King increase Dr Johnson’s pension;45 and marriages or
deaths of friends, family and acquaintances. Even news of illnesses, if they afflict celebrity
friends, reaches Cowper via the papers, as we see in December 1785 when he learns of the
illness and later recovery of George Colman from ‘the News’, prompting him to write to Colman
after a silence of some twenty years.46
Often the letters evoke a more chastened response than the sense of voyeuristic
superiority which characterises ‘The Winter Evening,’ where Cowper enjoys being able ‘through
the loop-holes of retreat / To peep at such a world. To see the stir / Of the great Babel and not
feel the crowd’ (88-90); ‘sitting and surveying thus at ease / The globe and its concerns,’ feeling
‘advanced / To some secure and more than mortal height, / That lib’rates and exempts me from
them all’ (94-7). The slight smugness of this position seems unconsciously to be rebuked in a
letter he writes to Unwin in March 1785. He describes his vexation at not having received any
proof-sheets of The Task from Johnson recently, and being annoyed yet again when the
evening’s post brought nothing, but then chastises his self pity:
… none came, and I felt myself a little mortified. I took up the Newspaper however and read it.
There I found that the Emperor and the Dutch are, after all their negotiations going to war. Such
reflections as these struck me. A great part of Europe is going to be involved in the greatest of
calamities. Troops are in motion. Artillery is drawn together. Cabinets are busied in contriving
schemes of blood and devastation. Thousands will perish. … Well Mr. Poet, and how then? You
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have composed certain verses which you are desirous to see in print, because the impression
seems to be delayed, you are displeased, not to say dispirited. Be ashamed of yourself. You live
in a world in which your feelings may find worthier subjects. Be concerned for the havoc of
nations, and mourn over your retarded volume, when you find a dearth of more important
tragedies (Letters, II, 336-7).
A still more powerful such realization occurs in Cowper’s response to news which reached
England in December 1780, several months after the ‘late terrible Catastrophe in the Islands’
(otherwise known as the great West Indian hurricane). His meditations on the disaster might
resonate particularly today, as anxieties about politics and economics are rendered irrelevant by
climatic apocalypse:
… these irregular and prodigious Vagaries seem to bespeak a Decay, and forbode perhaps not a
very distant Dissolution. This thought has so run away with my Attention that I have left myself
no room for the little Politics that have only Great Britain for their Object. Who knows but that
while a thousand and ten thousand Tongues are employ’d in adjusting the Scale of our national
Concerns, in complaining of new Taxes & Funds loaded with a Debt of accumulating Millions,
the Consummation of all things may discharge it in a Moment, and the Scene of all this Bustle
disappear as if it had never been?47
Being Cowper, however, in other moods he can be highly invested in ‘all this Bustle’,
often with facetious self-interest. He writes to Joseph Hill in October 1779 that ‘The News Paper
informs me of the Arrival of the Jamaica Fleet. I hope it imports some Pine Apple Plants for me’,
and confides his hopes in a letter to Lady Hesketh that his old schoolfriend Lord Thurlow will
continue in office as Chancellor, so that something ‘can be squeezed out of the Wooll-sack in the
shape of emolument for me’.48 The papers provide him with useful literary information, via
advertisements, letters, and gossip; for instance, he discovers with pleasure in ‘the public prints’
in February 1788 that Hannah More is about to publish a poem on ‘Slavery’, so he feels no
pressure to write any more anti-slavery poems himself;49 and in February 1792 an unidentified
newspaper reported that both Cowper and Hayley were working on biographies of Milton; as
Cowper puts, it ‘we seem’d to be match’d like two racehorses against each other’.50 In fact,
Cowper was working on translating Milton’s Latin poems, but the fake news had the happy
11
effect of prompting Hayley to write to Cowper and initiate a long and productive friendship. The
various volumes of his own works are both advertised and reviewed in the papers, which also
carry readers’ fan letters or critical remarks.51 Several of his letters reveal that he is anxiously
scanning the papers for advertisements of the imminent publication of his own works, and he
often thanks his correspondents for sending along clippings of reviews.52
Lady Hesketh frequently sent him cuttings and entire papers if she thought he’d find them
interesting, and especially if they were from papers he was unlikely otherwise to see. 53 In
February 1790, she sent him a copy of The World, one of the so-called ‘West-End Sheets’
disparaged for their ‘ridiculous’ coverage of the beau monde. 54 She must have selected this issue
of The World (17 February 1790) – which remains in the Museum’s archive, one of the few
contemporary newspapers to do so – because it carried a prominent and highly scandalous story
about Cowper’s relative, the notorious Earl Cowper.55 She must also have sent a copy of the
promised follow-up issue, since in a letter to her dated 26 February Cowper declares ‘Should the
wretch be detected who has aspersed Lord Cowper in this second instance, and should I learn his
name, Birth, parentage and education, I may perhaps find an opportunity to pay him in my way.
Should that happen, he shall not complain that he is overlook’d’.56 This is a startling passage,
suggesting that Cowper was not above aspersing others in print if they seemed to deserve it.
Despite his occasional indignation at snippets of fake news peddled by the more
disreputable newspapers, Cowper seems, like most readers of his day, to have accepted the basic
truthfulness of the papers while allowing for errors due to poorly gathered information or
inevitable timelags in the conveying of facts. He has a general sense that certain papers are more
ministerially managed than others, and seems to understand what later historians have confirmed
about Pitt’s deft manipulation of the press; he writes to Lady Hesketh on 7 May 1793, thanking
her for ‘the cuttings of news paper, which because they came from thee I read. Otherwise I never
read an article for or against the minister, sensible that both the praise and the blame are bought
and paid for, and at a price far greater than they are worth’.57 Modern scholarship suggests that,
aside from this kind of party-political manipulation, the economics of the newspaper trade in
Cowper’s day meant that editors relied heavily upon sales and advertising revenue, and hence on
satisfying their readers by offering generally reliable information; they were ‘far less subservient
to politicians than has been assumed’.58 The daily interchange between Parliament and press was
12
surely another factor in the general reliability of political information, as Cowper himself
explains in a letter to Newton in February 1784:
I will not apologize for my Politics or suspect them of error, merely because they are taken up
from the newspapers. I take it for granted that those Reporters of the Wisdom of our
Representatives, are tolerably correct and faithfull. Were they not, and were they guilty of
frequent and gross misrepresentation, assuredly, they would be chastized by the rod of
parliamentary Criticism. […] He that reads what passes there, has opportunities of information
inferior only to theirs who hear for themselves and can be present upon the spot. Thus qualified I
take courage, and when a certain Reverend neighbor of ours curls his nose at me, and holds my
opinions cheap merely because he has passed through London in his way to Wiltshire, I am not
altogether convinced that he has reason on his side.59
This confidence in the truth of the papers co-exists, however, in Cowper’s worldview
with the tendency very much to ‘curl his nose’ at those without access to London information via
private sources. Time and again he writes to London correspondents for their version of events,
and clearly enjoys this sense of access to privileged information, for instance informing Newton
in March 1780 that ‘I am sorry to learn, not from the Newspaper, but by a Letter from a very
intelligent Person in London [Hill], that arbitrary power is the aim of the Court, and Rebellion
upon the point of breaking out against it’ (he is also here poking fun at Hill’s anti-Court
politics).60 At many points in the letters he asks London-based friends for their versions of
parliamentary debates, for London gossip or opinions on Pitt, for fresh information on the
Revolutionary War, the Gordon Riots, or abolitionist legislation.61 Many letters pose questions
such as ‘but is it true?’ or ‘Can you give us any news of …?’62 He thanks Unwin in 1778 for his
‘Political Intelligence’ and for providing ‘such Information as cannot be learn’d from the
Newspaper’.63 Assuming Unwin has attended the trial of Lord Gordon in February 1781,
‘because you was in town so lately’, he badgers him for information – ‘Tell us all that pass’d’ –
even though the evening newspaper will bring a full report.64 In January 1784 he writes to Hill
that ‘I wish you had more leisure that you might oftener favor me with a page of Politics. The
Authority of a newspaper is not of sufficient weight to determine my opinions, and I have no
other documents to be set down by. … But your Politics have weight with me, because I know
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your independent Spirit, the justness of your reasonings, and the opportunities you have of
information’.65
Living as she did in the heart of the West End, Grosvenor Square, Lady Hesketh was a
major source of high society gossip and ‘political Intelligence’;66 in February 1789, Cowper
thanks her for ‘all your politics and anecdotes of political persons’, and reassures her, halfjokingly,
‘that all the treason and treasonable matter with which you shall entrust me, shall be
committed to the flames’.67 He appeals sometimes to her and sometimes to other friends and
relations in London for corroboration or denial of newspaper reports about the misfortunes or
deaths of his acquaintance. In January 1772, he is troubled by reports in the General Evening
Post that his uncle, Ashley C——r, is missing and reported to have fled to the Continent; in fact,
the missing person turns out to be his younger cousin, but in any case Cowper complains to Hill
that ‘It would have been kind in some of my many Relations, if they had not left me to learn such
melancholy Intelligence from the Public Prints’.68
The extent of Cowper’s engagement with the news is not only an essential component of
his personal and poetic sensibility; it also makes him an invaluable historical case study, and
prompts many questions (beyond the scope of this essay to answer) about how typical a reader he
was. The late eighteenth century is often identified by historians as the beginning of mass media
coverage as we know it – an era in which the distribution of generally credible information on a
large scale began to create a homogeneous reading public amongst the middling sort.69 As early
as August 1780, several papers carried a letter claiming that newspapers gave ‘our Country
Villagers, the Curate, the Exciseman, and the Blacksmith … the Self-satisfaction of being as
wise as our first Minister of State’.70
We find a close echo of this sentiment (again, Cowper seems to be riffing upon ideas he’s
gleaned from the newspapers themselves) in a letter Cowper writes Newton in November 1781:
‘for aught I can see, you and we by our respective firesides … can make as probable conjectures,
and look forward into futurity with as clear a sight, as the greatest man in the Cabinet’.71 But this
cheery view of the newspapers as purveyors of wisdom to every corner of the kingdom needs to
be complicated by a renewed appreciation of ways in which readers such as Cowper took their
news with a substantial pinch of salt and often felt moved to query it, especially if they had
access to other sources. Writing to Hill in March 1778, for instance, Cowper observes that ‘The
last Paper made mention of the Death of Sir Thomas Hesketh’, but protests that ‘I cannot upon
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Occasion of so interesting an Event be contented to receive no other Account than what that
uncertain Vehicle convey’d to me’.72 Cowper’s busy social network in and near to London,
derived from his impressive family and school connections, gave him access to many sources of
alternative facts, which often compete with the newspapers in a physical race to reach
Buckinghamshire first via the shared infrastructure of the Post Office – more than once in his
letters, Cowper remarks on how news he reads in a letter from London contradicts what he reads
in the paper that arrives in the same delivery.73 Several other letters suggest that information
gleaned from ‘somebody late from London’74, or conversations in Olney High Street, or with the
town barber (from whom – ‘via tonsoris’ – he hears of Gordon’s acquittal in 1781),75 was as
reliable as anything the newspapers conveyed. In a 1783 letter to Newton, Cowper refers
facetiously to ‘the Quid nuncs of Olney’, ‘the best Intelligence at Olney—the Barber, the
Schoolmaster, and the Drummer of a corps quarter’d at this place’ whose ‘scene of consultation’
is ‘a Blacksmith’s shed’.76 Perhaps our own world of competing news sources, social media and
non-stop electronic conversation is a twenty-first-century version of the conversational and
epistolary cultures of Cowper’s day; his era and our own might be seen as bookends to the more
homogeneous nature of news during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Clifford Siskin and William Warner’s important manifesto and edited collection of
essays, This is Enlightenment (2010), defines Enlightenment as ‘an event in the history of
mediation’, and one might expect their project to illuminate the nature and role of 18th-century
newspapers.77 The rise of the newspaper in Cowper’s day absolutely reflects the four
interconnected changes which Siskin and Warner identify as enabling factors in Enlightenment:
improvements in infrastructure (the mail service, roads, gathering places); the emergence of new
genres and formats; new associational practices (coffee and tea gatherings but also epistolary
communities capable of daily interchange); and new protocols, especially the ‘postal principle’
whereby ‘groups and individuals can communicate regularly and securely by manuscript, letter,
and printed matter’.78 So far, so good. And yet the vision of This is Enlightenment – especially
the essay by Ann Blair and Peter Stallybrass, ‘Mediating Information, 1450-1800’, and Siskin’s
own emphasis on Enlightenment as systemization – doesn’t quite work for newspapers, as
Cowper’s complex relationship with news illustrates.79 Newspapers in fact figure hardly at all in
This is Enlightenment; Siskin’s master narrative of information gathering, stockpiling, filing and
indexing doesn’t really accommodate the daily mess of the newspaper – the higgledy-piggledy
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organization of the pages as well as the clutter of old copies on the parlour floor which
presumably at some point end up in the fire. The fact that the newspapers are often wrong is
another aspect of their somewhat dubious contribution to Enlightenment, as is the indiscriminate
pirating of information (whether true or false) between papers thanks to largely anonymous
authorship and cheerful disregard for copyright. Their transience is also problematic – by
definition, the daily newspaper is outdated almost as soon as it’s been read (‘A Newspaper dies
with the day, and its contents in general die with it. Not so the Gentlemans Magazine’, Cowper
writes in 1788).80 Monthly publications such as the Gentleman’s or the Monthly Review would
be collected, bound, and kept in libraries. In many ways, the newspapers, and the ways in which
they were read, point us towards a more chaotic kind of British Enlightenment, where authority
is profoundly unstable.
Another way of looking at the newspapers, especially in the decades in which Cowper is
reading them most avidly, the 1780s and 1790s (by 1780, 14 million newspapers were printed
annually in England),81 is to see their proliferation as reaching the point which Siskin and
Warner describe as ‘saturation’: ‘On the one hand, saturation means that more people have more
access to the technology; on the other, it indicates that, strangely enough, direct access is not
required—that even those lacking or refusing access are transformed by the ubiquitous presence
of the technology’.82 Cowper and his contemporaries clearly suffered from information
saturation, in ways that we can well understand today, when for many of us the overwhelming
ubiquity of information breeds weary scepticism even while we seem pathologically unable to
ignore the news. As Siskin and Warner observe, ‘This is the tale now being retold by the early
twenty-first-century advent of electronic and digital media. Whether individuals have the
technology or try to avoid it, everyone now has the sense that there is nowhere to hide from its
mediating powers; in fact, the desire to hide is itself an index to saturation and confirmation of
difference becoming a new norm’.83 These ideas may help us to understand in new ways why
Cowper’s engagement with the newspapers is so compelling today. His investment in news was
profound, pervasive, and multi-faceted; it influenced much of his poetry, informed his letters and
relationships, and shaped his complex sense of himself in the world.
