1720+-+Yohana

__ Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer - ____ 1720 __

The **//Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer//** //,// printed by James Read, began on 5 February 1715. The newspaper began with six folio pages, but the 1725 Stamp Act forced it to reduce these to four. The issue for 1 May 1725 carried the notice 'Readers are desir'd to excuse the Coarseness of the Paper' and the promise that 'we shall continue to entertain them with the same Variety of Intelligence...in a less Compass' available at the same price as before. In this form, with an essay and perhaps a poem on the first page, foreign and domestic news inside, and a small number of advertisements on the last page, the **//Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer//** ran until 1730. On 15 August 1730 the same issue was printed both under that title and as //Read's **Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer** .// Following the title change, the newspaper's content remained much the same, although the front page was more often taken up with serialized books (which had been introduced as a regular feature during the 1720s), book reviews or letters. The two columns per page of its predecessor became three and then four. In 1761 //Read's Weekly Journal// was purchased by Henry Baldwin (1734-1813) alongside other newspapers including the //London Spy.// Baldwin merged the two to form the //London Spy and Read's Weekly Journal.// The last issue of Read's newspaper appeared on 2 May 1761.

In the early 1700’s London witnessed with mixed emotions the triumphal procession through its streets of the newly crowned George I. It was a city divided by politics and religion. Jacobitism and anti-Catholicism sat side by side, leading to both anxious government policy and popular unrest. In the decades that followed, economic instability (characterised by the South Sea Bubble), fitful population growth, fear of crime, and crime itself, all contributed to a heady mix of disappointment and possibility. It was around 1720 that English fiction came of age, when the shape of the first British Empire was set and the lineaments of an Imperial state outlined. By 1760 there were still fragments of an older, medieval City behind every facade, but the direction of change was established.

From a population of around 630,000 in 1715 the city grew to approximately 740,000 in 1760. But this growth was spasmodic and uneven. In around 1720 a period of gradual expansion gave way to relative stagnation until the end of the 1740s. This in turn was followed by a period of strong population growth during the 1750s. Throughout this period the population remained subject to short term economic depressions and subsistence crises. The late thirties, for instance, witnessed a sustained period of bad weather, which went down in collective memory as "the hard winter of 1739", and led to rising poor rates and widespread destitution.

London in 1720 was at one and the same time Britain’s largest manufacturing centre, its largest port, and the centre of governance, the professions, trade, and finance. Perhaps a third of the population was directly involved in manufacturing, and the capital formed the centre of many trades (perhaps most notably the silk industries). The numbers of medical and legal professionals, in particular, grew strongly from the last quarter of the seventeenth century through the 1740s when the number of professionals began to level off. Employed in an ever growing number of hospitals and institutions, in the plethora of courts (both civil and criminal) and in the army and navy, by around 1720 there were perhaps 15,000 men employed in the law, medicine, the church and the military; while during the same period around one in nine Londoners kept a shop; and a further ten percent worked in the transport sector.

Perhaps more than any other period or place, London between 1715 and 1760 is associated with the creation of many of the characteristics of a "modern" culture. The coffee houses of the late seventeenth century had, by 1715, matured into a network of venues for open political debate. The newspapers which flourished following the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695, had, by the same time, become an unstoppable stream of daily, bi-weekly, weekly and monthly publications to suit every pocket and political inclination. And in the shadow of this torrent of newsprint, new genres and forms of literature seemed to emerge every decade. The novel grew to a new centrality with the publications of Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (many of which were inspired by the published trial accounts in the **Proceedings**). Scientific literature, humour, popular medicine, travel accounts, biography and autobiography all took a newly sophisticated or at least variegated format. John Gay, with his **Trivia** (1716) and **The Beggars’ Opera** (1727); Alexander Pope, with his **Dunciad** (1728); and Samuel Johnson, with **The Dictionary of the English Language** (1755); essentially created new forms of literature, and did so in dialogue with a London that fed both their imaginations and their scholarship.

This is also the year the Haymarket Theatre was born. The First Haymarket Theatre or Little Theatre was built in 1720 by John Potter, carpenter, on the site of//The King's Head Inn// in the Haymarket and a shop in Suffolk Street kept by Isaac Bliburgh, a gunsmith, and known by the sign of the Cannon and Musket. It opened on 29 December 1720, with a French play //La Fille a la Morte, ou le Badeaut de Paris// performed by a company later known as 'The French Comedians of His Grace the Duke of Montague'.

In the absence of strong leadership from the City of London, the Middlesex and Westminster Bench, in the form of three generations of magistrates led by Sir John Gonson, Sir Thomas De Veil and Henry and John Fielding, responded to these periodic "crime waves" by creating an increasingly professional police and justice system from the rag-tag collection of thief-takers and Reformation of Manners inspired vigilantes of the 1720s, eventually creating a structured service centred on Bow Street, just east of Covent Garden.

In response to many of these same pressures, this period also witnessed a remarkable flowering of institutional responses to poverty and social problems. Parish workhouses, many designed by architects such as Nicholas Hawksmoor, came to characterise local responses to poverty, while new hospitals such as the Westminster Infirmary (1719), Guys Hospital (1725), and Middlesex Hospital (1745), gradually blanketed the capital with a new wealth of medical care. And following the establishment of the Foundling Hospital in 1741, a new series of associational charities both redirected large amounts of public resources towards London’s perceived problems and created new venues for elite sociability.

A play that opened in 1720, aside from something that we read, was John Leigh’s //Kensignton Gardens/The Pretenders//. While my journal of choice didn’t touch much on theatre, the play covered issues that were relevant in the year 1720. Issues from culture to business were discussed in this play.

Works Cited
 * Porter, Roy, **London: a Social History** (London, 1994)
 * George, Dorothy, **London Life in the Eighteenth Century** (London, 2nd edn, 1966)
 * Hitchcock, Tim, **Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London** (London, 2004)
 * O'Connell, Sheila, **London 1753** (London, 2003)
 * Schwarz, L.D., **London in the Age of Industrialisation: Entrepreneurs, Labour Force and Living Conditions, 1700-1850** (Cambridge, 1992).
 * ** British Gazetteer ** (London, England), January-December 1720 (not including summer months)
 * *Gale Document Number: ** Z2001586742
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 * *Gale Document Number: ** Z2001586719