A TALE OF TWO NEWSPAPERS
The unusual gift arrived in a plain manila envelope. Inside was a yellowed copy of an obscure British newspaper dated Dec. 30, 1799. Baffled as to what to do with it, we turned to the Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec, where we were shown a co
What do you do with a very old newspaper?
The question arose when a plain manila envelope arrived in the mail. Inside was a yellowed newspaper, dated Dec. 30, 1799.
In an accompanying note, André Vézina of Verdun said he was donating his 216-year-old copy of a small British newspaper to the Montreal Gazette.
The name of the vintage paper is a mouthful: the Sussex Weekly Advertiser; or, Lewes Journal.
Contacted by phone, Vézina, 79, a retired radio broadcaster, said he wanted to find a new home for the rare journal, and Montreal’s only English daily seemed like an appropriate choice.
“I thought people would be interested in it,” he said. “It was just sitting around in my office collecting dust.”
The historic newspaper had been a treasured possession of his late father, Jean Vézina, he said.
The elder Vézina, a journalist at La Presse, served as a captain in the Canadian military during the Second World War. He was posted to a training camp in England, where he became friendly with a British officer.
The British captain said, “‘I’ve got something that would interest you, Captain. It’s a newspaper from 1799. I’ll give it to you because you’re a journalist,’” André Vézina recounted.
Jean Vézina died in 1952, leaving the newspaper to his son.
The unusual gift raised a number of questions.
How do you handle and store a 216-year-old newspaper? What is it worth? What can we learn from an obscure broadsheet, printed two centuries ago? Plenty, it turns out. Browsing through an old newspaper is like stepping into a time machine.
The densely printed columns tell of Napoleon’s coup d’état a month earlier; of a winter so harsh, the Thames froze over; of the fashionable bonnets worn by Parisian belles.
Life was rough and bawdy. A maidservant shows up at the home of her former employer while everyone is sleeping and gives birth to a bawling baby. Soldiers are sentenced to a whipping for stealing turnips. A bulldog bites a runaway horse on the mouth and hangs on by its teeth as the horse careens through the town, barges into a house and knocks over a table where a family is having tea.
The spectre of famine hangs over reports on the skyrocketing price of wheat and of philanthropists slaughtering livestock to feed the poor at Christmas.
Ads for patent medicines promise to cure everything from asthma to sciatica.
For guidance on how to handle and interpret the historic journal, we turned to Daniel Chouinard, a specialist in historic newspapers at the Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec.
When a Montreal Gazette team arrived at the BANQ’s newspaper archives in Rosemont, Chouinard had a surprise in store: a copy of the Montreal Gazette published on the very same date.
The two papers show how long it took for European news to reach Montreal and Sussex in an era dependent on sailing ships and stagecoaches.
“When we compare both newspapers, the Montreal Gazette and the Sussex Weekly Advertiser from Dec. 30, 1799, we see that they both are interested in foreign news,” Chouinard said.
News of European battles took three months to reach Montreal, while Sussex residents had to wait only a few weeks.
The papers show the world of 200 years ago was much more global than you might think. And newspapers were the link that tied that global village together.
Further delving turned up a surprising connection between the founder of the Montreal Gazette and the Sussex Weekly Advertiser’s most famous contributor.