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Newspapers, Politics and Public Opinion in the Later Hanoverian Era

The concurrence of expanding readership, increased circulation, party conflict and international tensions during the later Georgian age led to renewed emphasis on the newspaper press as a critical organ of public opinion.1 Crises abroad or overseas, especially, were conducive to heightened press debate – the American and French revolutionary wars being prime examples of phases during which intensified press activity, evoking government vigilance and rebuttal, were evident: current affairs constituting a major topic of public and ministerial controversy throughout this period. Indeed, long a central component of the political system, the eighteenth-century press casts particular light on the pressures and ideas influential in the formulation of foreign/military policy and its articulation by parliament – the constitutional body responsible for providing the funds upon which the implementation of all government initiatives depended.2 Here the importance of the press – whether newspaper, magazine or pamphlet – was manifested in two ways: first in creating a climate of opinion which shaped foreign views of British intentions and capabilities; secondly, in affecting the views held on foreign developments by the nation, irrespective of rank or connexion, thereby ensuring governmental impact and response. As such, the press – by broadening the forum for the public discussion of political affairs – altered the context in which decisions were made and so, ultimately, changed the complex balance of socio-political relations that had made Hanoverian Britain more an integral part of Europe’s ancien régime rather than a liberal aberration from it.3 For most contemporaries it is precisely data extracted from newspapers which made possible ‘any kind of informed political debate; the essential prerequisite for