Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England

Jason McElligott's study is centred on the royalist newsbooks published between September 1647, when Mercurius Melancholicus and Mercurius Pragmaticus first appeared, and June 1650, when the last survivor—The Man in the Moon—was suppressed by the Commonwealth authorities. During this period, more than 530 issues of 51 separate titles, some very short lived, were produced clandestinely in London. These ephemeral items of cheap print have largely been overlooked as a historical resource and it is claimed by McElligott that an analysis of their content, authorship, production, readership, and distribution obliges us to re-think both ‘the nature of political allegiance during the Civil Wars’ (p. 2) and ‘the currently accepted model for the relationship between government and the press in early-modern England’ (p. 210). The neglect of royalism as a subject for historical enquiry is rather overstated in a polemical introduction, which is particularly ill-judged in its dismissal of recent work on royalist print-culture as too narrowly confined to ‘canonical authors and poets with connections to the royal court’ (p. 4) and insufficiently aware of the contexts in which royalist material was ‘produced and circulated’ (p. 8). ante, cviii [1993], 197)—wrongly cited as Secret Rites and Secret Writings—which foreshadows arguments in the present book about uncertain and composite authorship, secret networks of writers and printers, the distinction made between open and oblique opposition by the Interregnum licensing authority, and the role of the Stationers’ Company in searching out illegal printers and publishers

Allegiance · Art · Audience measurement · Dismissal · Literature · Media studies · Parliament · Political science · Politics · Royalist · Sociology · Subject (documents · Classics · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Scottish History and National Identity