This fragment of contemporary history shows that if there were no regular newspapers to supply the people with illustrated news they obtained it in the shape of cheap fly-sheets and broadsides—the form in which it was supplied to them before newspapers began.
Macaulay describes the unlicensed press at this period as being worked in holes and corners, and producing large quantities of pamphlets which were a direct infraction of the law subjecting the press to a censorship. ‘There had long lurked in the garrets of London a class of printers who worked steadily at their calling with precautions resembling those employed by coiners and forgers. Women were on the watch to give the alarm by their screams if an officer appeared near the workshop. The press was immediately pushed into a closet behind the bed; the types were flung into the coal-hole, and covered with cinders; the compositor disappeared through a trap-door in the roof, and made off over the tiles of the neighbouring houses. In these dens were manufactured treasonable works of all classes and sizes, from halfpenny broadsides of doggerel verse up to massy quartos filled with Hebrew quotations.’[1] The pamphlet I have just quoted probably issued from a press of this kind; but he must have been a bold printer who dared to put his name and address to a work wherein Jefferies was openly referred to as ‘that bloody and cruel Judge Jefferies.’
Large broadsides continued to be the favourite form of illustrated journalism for some time after this. One gives a ‘true and perfect relation’ of a great earthquake which happened at Port Royal, in Jamaica, on Tuesday, June 7th, 1692, and is illustrated with a large woodcut. On the death of Queen Mary, the consort of William III., an illustrated broadside was published, plentifully garnished with skulls and cross-bones, entitled, ‘Great Britain’s Lamentation; or the Funeral Obsequies of that most incomparable Protestant Princess, Mary, of ever Blessed Memory, Queen of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, who departed this life the 28th of December, at Kensington, 1694, in the Thirty-second Year of her Age. She Reigned Five Years, Eight Months, and Seventeen Days. And was conducted from Whitehall to Westminster Abbey, in an open Chariot of State, on black cloath, by the Nobility, Judges, and Gentry of the Land, on Tuesday, the 5th of March, 1694-5.’ The large woodcut shows the funeral procession, and I have copied that part of it containing the funeral car, with the body of the deceased queen resting under a canopy.
| FUNERAL OF QUEEN MARY, 1695. |
In a few years after the Revolution newspapers began to increase rapidly. The censorship of the press ceased in 1695, and was immediately followed by the appearance of great numbers of periodical papers. At first they were small in size, were wretchedly printed on the commonest paper, and each number contained only a small quantity of matter. The art of wood-engraving, the readiest and least expensive method of illustration, was now in the lowest possible condition; and the newspapers at the end of the seventeenth century contain scarcely any illustrations, except, perhaps, a heading of a rudely executed figure of a man blowing a horn, flanked by a ship or a castle, and numerous small woodcuts to advertisements.
[1] History of England.
