Abstract
In the elections of November 1710, the unequivocal Whig majority elected only two years previously was resoundingly overturned. Observers estimated that the Tories now outnumbered the Whigs by at least two to one, an estimate that exaggerates the size of the majority but accurately reveals the perceived magnitude of the changes the election wrought.1 Delariver Manley claimed a role in securing this surprising victory. In letters to Robert Harley, she nominated New Atalantis as ‘the first public attempt made against those designs and that Ministry, which have been since so happily changed’ and proclaimed its success in ‘exposing the enemies of our constitution’ and ‘open[ing] the eyes of the crowd’.2 Although she freely asserts the Atalantis’s role in persuading the crowd of Tory principles in these letters, Manley’s subsequent secret history, Memoirs of Europe (1710), is critical of the operation of public opinion in contemporary politics. The reading public, which is neither imagined nor invoked in the New Atalantis, figures prominently in Memoirs of Europe, as do the schemes of the Junto politicians and the ‘mercenary scribblers employed on their behalf. The propaganda sponsored by the Whig Junto ‘quickly Poison d the unwary Multitude and serious issues, such as the right of resistance and passive obedience, becomes the ‘sport of crowds’.3
Every Man that Prints, Appeals to the People who Read, and ought to be content, to hear them pass their judgement — Nor is it unjust for any Man to Answer, Censure, or Animadvert, upon a Printed Paper, provided only that his Answers, Censures, or Animadversions, are but themselves to be defended in the nature of them.
Daniel Defoe, A Letter to Mr Bisset […] In Answer to his Remarks on Dr Sacheverell’s Sermon, 1709
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Notes
For these estimates, see W. A. Speck, Tory and Whig: The Struggle in the Constituencies, 1701–1715 (London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 110.
Delarivier Manley, Memoirs of Europe, Towards the Close of the Eighth Century, in The Novels of Mary Delarivier Manley, ed. Patricia Köster (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1971), vol. 2, pp. 448
Delarivier Manley, The Selected Works of Delarivier Manley, eds Rachel Carnell and Ruth Herman (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005), vol. 1, pp. 23–6.
Annabel Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 185.
Gilbert Burnet, Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Times, (London, 1725’34), vol. 6, p. 1068.
See J. A. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 116
Geoffrey A. Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973), pp. 74–5.
Tatler no. 232 (3 Oct. 1710), edited by Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), vol. 3, p. 200. F. F. Madan lists over five hundred titles in A Critical Bibiliography of Dr Henry Sacheverell, ed. W. A. Speck (Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1978).
Wendy Motooka, The Age of Reasons: Quixotism, Sentimentalism and Political Economy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 50.
Geoffrey A. Holmes, ‘The Sacheverell Riots: The Crowd and the Church in Early Eighteenth-Century London’, Past & Present 72 (1976): p. 55.
Hoffmann’s dispatch of 5 May 1710, as quoted in Edward Gregg, Queen Anne (London: Routledge, 1980), p. 306.
See John Louis Lucaites, ‘Constitutional Argument in a National Theatre: The Impeachment Trial of Dr Henry Sacheverell,’ in Popular Trials: Rhetoric, Mass Media, and the Law, ed. Robert Hariman (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1990), p. 200n3.
William Cobbett, Parliamentary History (London: T.C. Hansard, 1810), vol. 7, p. 210.
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), p. 52.
Maximillian E. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 179–95.
For Defoe’s authorship of Memoirs of Scotland, see P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998), p. 174
Daniel Defoe, The Secret History of the Secret History of the White Staff,(London, 1715). The text was advertised as ‘this day published’ in the Post-Man and Evening Post for 4 Jan. 1715;the third and final part of The Secret History of the White Staff was advertised as ‘this day published’ in the St James’s Evening Post for 28 Jan. 1715. For Defoe’s authorship of The Secret History of the Secret History of the White Staff, see Furbank and Owens, A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe, p. 150, entry 67. See also P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 167–9.
Steven N. Zwicker, ‘The Constitution of Opinion and the Pacification of Reading’, in Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 300–1.
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© 2009 Nicola Parsons
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Parsons, N. (2009). Reforming Reference: Trials and Texts. In: Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century England. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230244764_4
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