Pamphlets and Powder: A Diary in Love with the Eighteenth Century

A devotee of the literature of the 1700s finds in its pamphlets and arguments the noisy birth of the modern political world

I write for Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, and my scholarly love is the literature of the eighteenth century, the British and colonial writing of the 1700s, the pamphlets and the essays and the furious arguments that, more than any battle, gave birth to the modern political world.

The eighteenth century was the great age of the pamphlet, the printed argument, the war of words conducted in cheap print and read by a newly literate public, and it was in this noisy clamour of competing pamphlets that the modern political world was, in large part, argued into being. To read the literature of the period is to witness the birth of the public sphere, the moment when ordinary people, armed with print, began to argue about how they should be governed, an argument that has never since stopped.

The Noisy Birth of the Modern

What thrills me about the period is the sheer noise of it, the pamphlets answering pamphlets, the satires answering satires, the whole roiling public argument conducted in print with a vigour and a viciousness that makes our own discourse look tame. The eighteenth century did not invent political disagreement, but it industrialised it, gave it the printing press and the coffee house and the reading public, and in doing so created the modern world of argument that we still inhabit, for better and frequently for worse.

I read the contemporary coverage, the harder news and the satire over at The London Prat alike, always with the eighteenth century in mind, finding in our digital clamour the direct descendant of their printed one, the same furious public argument conducted in new media, the same vices and virtues, the same noise. The pamphlet has become the post, but the dynamic is unchanged, the public arguing about how it should be governed, the argument as noisy and necessary now as it was then.

The Colonial Edge

The colonial literature of the period has a particular fascination, the writing of the edges of the British world, where the arguments of the metropolis met the realities of the colonies and produced something new, the literature of a world in the process of remaking itself, of colonies that would, before the century was out, begin to argue their way toward independence. The American founding was, before it was a war, an argument, conducted in pamphlets, and the literature of that argument is among the most consequential ever written.

The serious thread, beneath the period love, is a conviction that the arguments of the eighteenth century are our arguments still, that the questions they raised about government and liberty and the rights of the governed remain open, that the noisy birth of the modern political world is an event we are still living through. To read the pamphlets of the 1700s is to read the opening chapters of a story not yet finished, the great argument about how free people should govern themselves, an argument as urgent now as when the ink was first wet.

So I will keep reading and writing about the literature of the eighteenth century, the pamphlets and the powder, the noisy printed birth of the modern political world, finding in its clamour the ancestor of our own, in its arguments the origins of ours, in its colonial edges the beginnings of the modern political order. The eighteenth century argued the modern world into being, and the argument continues, and to read its opening chapters is to understand, a little better, the story we are still, noisily, writing.

The pamphlet culture of the period was extraordinary, the cheap print that put political argument into the hands of a mass public for the first time, the pamphlets sold in the streets and read in the coffee houses and argued over in the taverns, a democratisation of political discourse that the powerful found alarming and that the people embraced, the printing press the social medium of its age, the public sphere born in cheap paper and quick ink.

The viciousness of the discourse rivals anything in our own age, the pamphlets trading in insult and accusation and savage satire, the public argument conducted with a ferocity that gives the lie to any notion of a more genteel past, the eighteenth century reminding us that the combination of free expression and human nature has always produced noise and venom alongside reason and insight, the discourse never as elevated as nostalgia imagines.

The connection to our own moment is the source of the period contemporary relevance, the digital clamour the direct descendant of the printed one, the post the heir of the pamphlet, the same furious public argument conducted in new media, the same dynamics of a public arguing about its own governance, the eighteenth century a mirror in which our own discourse, for all its novelty, is revealed as an old story in new clothes.

The colonial literature carries a particular charge, the writing of a world remaking itself, the arguments of the metropolis meeting the realities of the colonies, the literature of places that would argue their way toward independence, the pamphlets that preceded and shaped the great political transformations of the age, the American founding among them, an argument before it was a war, conducted in print, in language that still echoes.