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Laura Doak is impressed by Adam Fox’s ground-breaking study of early modern print culture
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This excellent book rests upon a wealth of comprehensive research. In part one, Fox explores the development of Scotland’s cheap print market.The ambitious chronology of 1500 to 1785 is divided by the 1660 Stuart restoration, which is treated by the author as ‘something of a watershed’ (p.390). Alongside establishing the conditions through which cheap print was produced, dispersed and read in pre-modern Scotland, these opening chapters give new insights into many central characters in Scottish print history, like the printers Robert Lekpreuik (fl. 1561-81) and Agnes Campbell (1637-1716). A welcome chapter on the book trade outside of Edinburgh exemplifies Fox’s consistent effort to reflect the decentralised nature of Scottish print. To conclude this part, chapter 5 places print networks within ‘the cacophony’ of ‘the civic soundscape’ by considering chapmen, ‘paper criers’ and those frequenting Scottish coffeehouses: people who increasingly placed cheap print on Scotland’s streets and in other public places.
Following the focus on trade and audience in part one, part two examines key ‘varieties’ of Scottish print ephemera. Most, such as almanacs and ‘prognostications’, have been little studied despite being recognised as ubiquitous and significant. Each chapter in this section thus makes an important contribution to the field. Fox accompanies the text with useful illustrations, and also pays enjoyable attention to ordinary Scots who appear in the examples he discusses, like ‘Colonel Sara’, famous for her kindness among the people of Leith.
Fox builds a persistent and persuasive argument that pre-modern Scotland had a ‘much more literary popular culture than has generally been acknowledged’ (p.54) and a market for cheap print that was ‘much larger and deeper’ than is presently appreciated (p.96). Archival evidence, such as printers’ catalogues, stock inventories and testaments, is used to demonstrate the disparity between the quantity of Scottish print ephemera that survives today and original rates of production and consumption. Some chapters support this argument more effectively than others. The chapter on handbills and placards leans almost exclusively on late-17th- and 18th-century source material. However, chapters on other genres, most notably that on ballads and songs, draw on evidence from throughout the period and provide an especially rich view of how cheap print was produced, used and consumed within early modern Scottish society.
Additionally, Fox traces the ‘creation’ of a Scottish market for ‘cheap and ephemeral reading matter’; ‘a public opinion and a popular culture that were informed and defined by the printed word’ (p.431). As Fox notes, this focus explains why the book concludes with a discussion of artist David Wilkie’s Village Politicians (1806), which also appears on the front cover, despite belonging to a later time. Again, this argument is traced with particular strength in Fox’s chapter on ballads and songs. Indeed, the transformation is often charted so convincingly that it perhaps draws into question Fox’s insistence that cheap print was so significant prior to 1660.
Those interested in Scottish print history will be well aware that there is limited work on this subject, which makes The Press and the People particularly valuable. Fox’s focus on the people who made and sold cheap print in early modern Scotland adds detail to the bibliographic focus of Alastair Mann’s Scottish Book Trade. Fox also successfully asserts Scotland’s place in European debates.Yet, given recent historiographic trends to explore the complex dynamics between printed ephemera, speech and writing in pre-modern societies, some readers may be surprised to
Fox builds a persistent and persuasive argument that pre-modern Scotland had a ‘much more literary popular culture than has generally been acknowledged’
find that Fox’s aim to write a ‘social history of its readership’ (p.4) extends most often to the Scots who created and sold this ephemera, rather than the ‘reading public’ he establishes in chapter one. However, this is perhaps reflective more of Fox’s formative importance to studies of popular literacy, as author of Oral and Literate Culture in England 15001700, rather than any weakness in this, his most recent work. The Press and the People is a robust exploration of cheap print’s creation and function in early modern Scotland, and the abundance of new evidence and insight Fox provides makes it a must-read for anyone interested in the period.
Laura Doak is a historian of political culture, specialising in 17th-century Scotland, and the current Charlotte Nicholson Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Glasgow.