This chapter will focus on the transatlantic literary journalism available in newspapers and magazines rather than that found
in pamphlets, such as Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722) or Benjamin Franklin’s Narrative of the Late Massacres (1764), which today might fall into the category of “literary journalism.” After briefly considering the formative contexts
of literary journalism, the chapter will discuss perhaps the best-known transatlantic practitioner of literary journalism
in the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin, whose writings appeared in North America, Britain, and Europe in his lifetime
and in many countries around the globe (and on the internet) since. The chapter will conclude with suggestions for future
work in the field.
In the eighteenth century, newspapers and magazines crossed the Atlantic Ocean, westward and eastward, and were much more
frequently and widely circulated than books. Newspapers were lighter than books and easy to stow aboard ships (in packets,
with letters
, or among clothing), and they were written for a wider readership than most books. Literary journalism, the stuff upon which
most newspapers survived and which magazines primarily purveyed, was sometimes dismissed by effete contemporary readers, but
it was probably the most widely read medium of expression at this time.
2We might assume that eighteenth-century literary journalism
moved mostly from the metropolitan center to the peripheries, taking news, essays on manners and government, and ephemeral
fare such as stories of other cultures from the cosmopolitan elite to the provincial masses. This was often the case, but
Britons in North America and the Caribbean knew that their writings could likewise reach the London center and the European
continent. The most famous instance of a London paper’s use in the colonies was probably Benjamin Franklin’s mention in his
autobiography that he had learned to write by imitating Addison’s and Steele’s prose in the London
Spectator. “I met with an odd Volume of the Spectator,” he wrote. “I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with
it. I thought the Writing excellent, & wish’d if possible to imitate it.”
3 About 1833, James Madison likewise expressed admiration of the
Spectator in his memoir
, avowing that he had read it in 1763, when he was twelve, and found it “to be peculiarly adapted to inculcate in youthful
minds, just sentiments, an appetite for knowledge, and a taste for improvement of the mind and manners.”
4 Madison’s remark shows the impact and resilience of this London literary periodical for well over a century after its publication
and demonstrates how literary journalism traveled from the metropolitan center to British colonies.
Britons in North America also had an impact on the culture of the metropolis. Indeed, British North Americans assumed they
were part of a transatlantic network of Britons concerned with the well-being and best functioning of the empire. An example
of this again relates to the literary journalism in the
Spectator, which was, unexpectedly, also read by provincial Puritan divines such as Cotton Mather. Mather and others assumed that,
if presented as literary journalism, their observations would stimulate as much interest in metropolitan circles as London’s
literary journalism did in the colonies. For instance, Mather confided in his diary on August 4,
1713, that “Perhaps, by sending some agreeable Things, to the Author of,
The Spectator, and,
The Guardian, there may be brought forward some Services to the best Interests in the Nation.”
5 What these services were remains unclear, but at the time of writing, Mather hoped to prompt a global return to Christianity.
Perhaps he thought his goal for an empire for Christ would appeal to the British audience of the
Spectator and
Guardian or at least to their editors, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Mather here illustrates the way colonial Americans in the
elite group or in leadership positions considered themselves part of the network of correspondents in a literate, polite commonwealth.
Such colonists were followed with interest by readers in Britain, thus illustrating the transatlantic circulation of information
and culture. After his election to the Royal Society,
6 for instance, Mather became a news item in the
London Journal when someone threw a fireball at his home during the height of the smallpox controversy in New England.
7 This notice appeared in the issue of the
London Journal (January 27, 1721) which also reprinted one of “Cato’s Letters” on the essential value of preserving liberty and property:
“They write from Boston in New England, Nov. 24. That upon the Tuesday before, some Hours before Day, a Grenado-Shell, loaded
with combustible Matter, with a lighted Fuse to it, was by some unknown Person, thrown into the House of the Reverend Dr.
Cotton Mather.” All Britons in North America obviously did not receive such notice in London papers, but quite a number did,
which calls into question the too-frequent supposition that news and culture flowed only one way, from metropolitan center
to colonial periphery.
Exchange of ideas between Britons in Britain and in North America was important to British and British-colonial political
interests, to trade in goods and information (especially scientific information), and in this era of nascent state formation,
to the formation of a common political culture.
Literary journalism was remarkably successful in the North American colonies too. Once James Franklin adapted the method of
Addison and Steele in the
Spectator by using a club of writers and imagined personages to speak about local colonial matters, newspapers throughout the colonies
adopted the method as their own.
8 Reading matter in the colonies was relatively scarce for the general population. Books were expensive, because imported (few
publishers took on book publication in an uncertain market), making newspapers, and particularly literary journalism, the
medium most frequently read, after the Bible. Literacy rates were relatively high in North America. Indeed, Richard Brown
notes that, in some areas, literacy levels reached 90 percent by the year 1800.
9 This indicates the frequency with which newspapers were likely read by women and men of all stations
and backgrounds. Whereas university culture was expressly designed for class
ical training, so that young men were taught to read Greek and Latin, newspapers, especially those employing literary journalism,
became the medium of exchange of news and cultural values for most people. Newspapers were the central vehicle for the circulation
of vernacular culture. Beginning in 1691 in Anglophone North America, newspapers numbered well over 2,100 by 1820; 461 of
them lasted longer than 10 years.
10Most newspaper publishers were their own writers of text, as well. Success in the trade meant that the publisher would have
to be an informed and able writer. As Benedict Anderson, following Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, has reminded us, it
was in colonial North America that publishers first hit upon the newspaper as a primary vehicle for making money in the absence
of a market for and the materials to produce a significant book trade. In Anderson’s words, “Printers starting new presses
always included a newspaper in their production, to which they were usually the main, even the sole, contributor. Thus the
print
er-journalist was initially an essentially North American phenomenon.”
11 Printers relied on postmasters for the circulation of the latest news, both incoming and outgoing, so ties between the postmaster’s
office and the printer’s store helped foster business. Thus, as Anderson says, “the printer’s office emerged as the key to
North American communications and community intellectual life.”
12 This does not mean that all journals were successful in fostering a common culture and a transatlantic sense of community.
Even Franklin, the most successful of colonial printers, could fail. Despite great success with his
Pennsylvania Gazette, his
General Magazine and Historical Chronicle, for All the British Plantations in America, begun in Philadelphia in 1741 (the January 1741 issue was published in mid-February), lasted for only six issues.
13 Franklin’s idea of using the press to consolidate colonial Britons was premature, indeed idealistic. But it reflected his
understanding of the extent to which newspapers – and in particular literary journalism – might be used to sway public opinion,
so that imperial subjects dispersed around the Atlantic Ocean might conceive of themselves as having a common interest and
common destiny.
Political consolidation, especially with regard to the North American colonies, was important to Britain during the eighteenth
century; but the political interests dominating the ministry and court life worked against the very possibility of forming
a system of common values that those in power would acknowledge as viable. The political situation tended to pit wealthy and
powerful groups (i.e., the aristocracy and growing mercantile class) against laboring people. Tory interests sought to overpower
Whig interests, and from the fray between them “Cato’s letters” emerged to foster the idea of political consolidation under
the notion of British “liberties” standing against French and Spanish tyranny and oppression. “Cato’s Letters” were printed
and reprinted in Britain and the colonies in the early eighteenth century. Written by John Trenchard (1662–1723), an Irish
commonwealthman and Whig propagandist educated at Trinity College, Dublin
, and Thomas Gordon (c. 1692–1750), a Scot, trained for the bar perhaps at Edinburgh, “Cato’s letters” were published in the
London Journal and later in the
British Journal from 1720 to 1723.
14 The initial letters were a response to the South Sea Bubble (an investment banking scheme that nearly bankrupted Britain’s
major shareholders and thus the commonwealth); but the 144 letters eventually covered most of the central tenets of liberal
thought. Written under the pseudonym Cato (95–46
BC), who had defended individual rights against the tyranny of Julius Caesar, the letters supported political and civil liberties
such as individual and constitutional liberties, freedom of the press, and freedom of conscience, and denigrated the idea
of standing armies and the powers associated with the established church. They reveal how literary journalism
was used as political propaganda, and marked a liberal tendency in political discourse for Britons globally situated.
Even a cursory search for Cato’s letters in eighteenth-century newspapers reveals their wide circulation throughout the British
commonwealth. Ireland
, Scotland
, North America, and England all printed and reprinted the letters – sometimes with editorial glosses indicating the importance
of the letters to this or that local social or political matter, frequently with no editorial gloss whatsoever. The
Letters were especially popular in the colonies, where trade restrictions and local problems over church and town governance caused
fiscal unhappiness, ecclesiastical power contests, and political rancor. They were first published in British North America
in James Franklin’s
New-England Courant in 1721, and then reprinted throughout the eighteenth century, in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut,
New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina. The
Letters’ appeal to the colonists is understandable, given the colonies’ political subordination
to England. Colonial administration and the Navigation Acts affected matters of trade and manufacture, local self-governance,
military impositions, and taxation. Thus,
Cato’s Letters on individual liberties and freedom of conscience were particularly important to the colonists, fostering a liberal republican
message that the colonists absorbed through the medium of journalistic prose. Because of the open exchanges of ideas available
through
“Cato’s letters” and other writings on society and politics in the journalistic media, Britons in North America came to understand
the fractures in the supposedly common political discourse, especially the discourse of civil and religious liberty
, in the British commonwealth.
Some have argued, following Clinton Rossiter, that “Cato’s letters” more than any other texts were the central reading matter
of the American
revolutionary generation. As Rossiter famously phrased it, “no one can spend any time in the newspapers, library inventories,
and pamphlets of colonial America without realizing that
Cato’s Letters rather than Locke’s
Civil Government was the most popular, quotable, esteemed source of political ideas in the colonial period.”
15 This assumes that newspaper media had so permeated the cultural fabric that a fundamental shift in the circulation of ideas
had occurred, from manuscript
to print and from books and pamphlets to serial publication. Serial production enabled readers to participate more widely
in what Benedict Anderson calls an “imagined community,” an idealized formative relationship between the self and one’s community
that laid the basis for nationalism
.
16 Cato’s Letters could be taken as a preeminent vehicle for assisting the formation of national values that would later facilitate the state
formation of British North America as the United States. Jefferson’s language in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold
these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable
rights [and] that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” has resonance with Cato’s letter no. 45, “Of
the Equality and Inequality of Men,” which opens: “Men are naturally equal, and none ever rose above the rest but by force
or consent: No man was ever born above all the rest, nor below them all.”
17 This exemplifies the extent to which individuals could call into being a nation, based on an understood common cultural and
political link to others in the same imagined community that was initially consolidated by the serialized circulation of print.
No printer-publisher-shopkeeper in the first half of the eighteenth century was more successful than Benjamin Franklin, who
began printing while a youth working in his brother James’s printshop, and who essentially (although he eventually sold his
Philadelphia printshop to his partner, David Hall, and “retired”) never stopped printing. Late in his life, during his diplomatic
mission to France, Franklin had a press at Passy, near Paris. Using it for brief jeu d’esprit (for his personal pleasure)
and for his diplomatic work, Franklin bought type, wrote literary journalism, and published notes, bills of exchange, and
political propaganda.
18 In an era of political instability (and thus political intrigue), the Paris printers could
not be trusted not to sell or give away the colonial Americans’ news, so print
ing materials on Franklin’s Passy press created security for the many diplomatic communications written before and during
the negotiations that became the Treaty of Paris of 1783. Franklin made of printing a distinctive trade, a vocation and avocation
both, and his success accrued in large measure to his achievements as a writer of literary journalism who knew how to adjust
his prose style to capture the interest of people, from members of the intelligentsia in the Republic of Letters and the French
women he famously flirted with to those with whom he had worked as a tradesman.
Benjamin Franklin was a self-taught writer, whose lessons were first learned by imitating the
Spectator, if we can take Franklin’s
Autobiography as fact.
19 But Franklin also surely learned from the young men associated with his brother James’s print shop, where Franklin was apprenticed.
These young men were interested in changing the printing scene in Boston. The writing style they chose arose from club culture
in London, where James had gone to secure his printing equipment, and carried over into their literary journalism. James Franklin
was the first to adopt this
Spectator style for his newspaper, and he gathered about himself writers from different arenas who were familiar with London culture.
Whether or not Benjamin Franklin taught himself to write by imitating the
Spectator, his earliest writings evince a style characteristic of what has sometimes been called the “middle” style of the
Spectator’s journalism. This style, associated with the fashionable discourse of London club life, reflected clever wit and learning
without the highly self-conscious linguistic conceits and pompous erudition more typical of upper-class
bookmen, and it avoided vulgar (unrefined or openly offensive and coarse) language and content. This is not to say that Franklin’s
early writings avoided offense in their critique of Boston’s cultural milieu, but to point out that the vernacular language
Franklin used was what might be described as “homely” or “homespun,” relatively simple and designedly accessible to a secular
reading audience. Indeed, the linguistic guise assisted the critique in which he was engaging.
20Franklin’s Silence Dogood essays marked his entrance into literary journalism. Silence, the persona Franklin adopted, speaks
to the form that literary journalism should take – that it should be situated in the ordinary world – even though her background
was not typically found in newspaper writing: Silence is a widow of small means, lacking formal education, with
utilitarian goals and opinions. The irony in her observation that readers would wish to know whether she was, in fact, “a
Schollar or a
Leather Apron Man” acknowledges the very condition of her appearance on stage as the product of that “leather apron man,” Benjamin Franklin.
Silence’s prose is rich with gentle humor and subtle irony masked in commonplace turns of phrase. Franklin used Silence to
critique snobbery, foppery, hypocrisy, courtship rituals, and the elitist yet faulty formal education offered at Harvard College
(nos. 2, 4, 9); anti-women discourse, sexism, and class
prejudice (nos. 5 and 6); self-consciously erudite “literary” writings (no. 7); and drunkenness (no. 12), among other things.
Silence Dogood’s lines of argument were ones Franklin took up again and again in his literary journalism, when he was not
writing political propaganda. For instance, in the “Speech of Miss Polly Baker,” his 1747 hoax, Franklin criticized the gender
ed double standard on extramarital pregnancies and a court system that always tried the woman, not the man, for breaking laws
against fornication. The “Speech” was immensely popular and widely reprinted in journals in England, Scotland
, Ireland
, the colonies, and France. In England and France, it was taken for truth by many people, including the Abbé Raynal, who in
his popular
Histoire Philosophique et Politique (1770) used it as an illustration of the severity of laws in New England.
21 Like Silence Dogood, Polly Baker is audacious, ironic, and pragmatic, and her voice speaks to the growing controversies about
women’s stations and rights in a public culture expressing greater and greater interest in individual rights.
Regarding the growing sense of individual rights and Franklin’s early days, it is useful to return to Silence Dogood in Boston.
When authorities attempted to shut down James Franklin’s newspaper (for criticizing public leadership and oppressive politics)
by putting the printer into jail, Benjamin Franklin’s Silence spoke out in an open excoriation of oppression. Silence quoted
directly from “Cato’s Letters”: she cited Letter 15 on freedom of thought and speech in Paper no. 8 and Letter 31 on religious
hypocrisy and deception in Paper no. 9. Here Benjamin Franklin made his mark in journalism, as the first open proponent, in
behalf of his brother James, for a free press and for the free and public examination of controversial ideas. With the literary
journalism of the opening numbers of the
New-England Courant and Benjamin Franklin’s contribution of Silence Dogood, we begin to see the vernacular thrust and liberalizing tendencies
of the newspapers credited as a singular contribution to the formation of liberal culture in the British North American colonies,
a thrust that had traveled across the Atlantic from the circles of Whig discontent in London. That thrust would eventually
reach back across the Atlantic, by mid-century, in
the series of protests about the rights of Britons in North America as they faced the threatening economic dysfunction foisted
upon them by Britain’s punitive “Intolerable Acts.”
It is one thing to see what was printed in the papers and quite another to consider whether it had an impact on the readership
being addressed. We can gain insight into the impact of this new culture of literary journalism
by examining the diaries of people whose lives were changed by the appearance of papers carrying messages different from
typical fare. In Boston, James Franklin’s incarceration by the General Court was recorded in an artisan’s diary. Joshua Blanchard,
who laid the cornerstone and built the walls of the Old South Church, wrote in his diary in 1722 that “this year one mr James
Franklin was put in prison twice once for printing in his Courant Something that was taken as a joke upon ye general Court
then Setting and the other time for printing something which was pretended to be a reflection on religion.”
22 He added that “Aboute this time there was great disputing aboute perogative and libirty and property the Rich opress the
poor complain.”
23 Surely Blanchard was remarking on the appearance in the
New-England Courant of Cato’s letters and of similar materials from the pens of the Franklins’ writing circles.
When Benjamin Franklin stole himself from his brother’s indenture and traveled to live and work in Philadelphia, he took the
idea of printing Cato’s Letters with him; they were reprinted there and elsewhere in the colonies. The circulation of Cato’s letters in British North American colonies marks a crucial shift in public culture. It would become commonplace, by mid-century, for Britons in colonial North
America to assume that they ought to have a voice in political decision-making, commonplace too to assume that individual
readers might wish to see arguments and think for themselves, rather than have town or metropolitan leaders tell them what
to think, read, and speak about.
Lingering over Benjamin Franklin’s entrance into his printing and writing career enables us to highlight the content and method
of his literary journalism, the transatlantic distribution of literary journalism, Franklin’s work in particular, and the
fostering of the liberal agenda that marked political expression for more than half a century prior to the American and French
Revolutions. While it would be difficult to substantiate that the late-century revolutionary agitation arose from the rise
and development of vernacular political culture through news media and literary journalism, we can nonetheless see why scholars
like Benedict Anderson have attributed to newspapers and literary culture the power of consolidating a liberal political ideology
fostering new approaches to state formation.
Literary journalism significantly contributed to the formation of spheres of influence, both conservative and progressive,
which were made possible, indeed encouraged, by the transatlantic exchange of information, ideas, and political ideologies.
Yet as we attempt to trace the complex process of political formulations as they impacted state formation, it is useful to
keep in mind Anthony D. Smith’s point that “tracing complex processes” is “never easy to periodize,” because there is a longer
timeframe, prior to nation
-formation, that can be identified as a “period of gestation.” In this longer, preceding moment, it is useful to consider
how language works to foster nationalist symbolism.
24 Smith also argues that the concept of national character arose from new outlooks in Europe, derived from its “enlightened
and competing states,” from a “new concern with history and social development,” and from a resuscitation of classical thought
that “provoke[d] historical comparison with the civilizations of the past.”
25What Smith leaves out is the fostering of “national” character through the pen and printing press of Benjamin Franklin, as
it crossed the Atlantic with him to England, traveled to France, and returned to assist in the Constitutional Convention that
defined what would become the United States of America. When he was in London on his long diplomatic mission in behalf of
the American colonies, Franklin wrote many fictional and factual pieces to explain British North Americans’ views on political
self-representation in line with their rights as Britons. None was more alarming (for those who took it seriously) than his
widely circulated, ironic hoax, “An Edict by the King of Prussia” (1773), which was printed in England, North America, and
France and frequently mistaken as an actual effort by the King of Prussia to take over England.
26 As the editors of Franklin’s papers have pointed out, Franklin “had the pleasure of seeing it taken at face value,” which
added to Franklin’s sense that the British North American colonial grievances he was presenting to the ministry and England’s
public under the guise of a potential attack by the King of Prussia
on England were not understood or taken seriously by Britons in Britain. Written after the manner of Jonathan Swift, Franklin’s “Edict”
used as its material several of the statutes devised against American colonial trade and manufacture, which it mimicked in
the claim that the German king had every right to seize English lands and revenues.
27 The “Edict” concluded with a clearly ironic statement about British national character, referring to Britons as “a People
distinguish’d for their
Love of Liberty, a Nation so
wise, so
liberal in its Sentiments, so
just and equitable towards its
Neighbours” that it would not engage in “mean and
injudicious Views of
petty and immediate Profit.”
28Franklin also used literary journalism for political propaganda when a diplomat in France, as the articles of peace were developed.
On his own press at Passy in 1782, he printed a complete newssheet, as if it were an “extra” from Boston’s
Independent Chronicle. The recto (front side) story related to purported war
time atrocities fomented by the British and their Indian allies. A supposed letter from a militia officer, it was “sent” along
with packets containing scalps of British colonists attacked by British troops and their Indian allies. The verso article
(on the back side) spoke to the wartime imprisonment of colonial Americans in another hoax letter, this time supposedly from
John Paul Jones to Sir Joseph Yorke, about the privateers Yorke had prevented Jones from retrieving in the Netherlands. The
“letter” highlights Franklin’s consistently frustrated efforts to get American prisoners released from their captivity. Marcus
Cunliffe noted the angry quality of Franklin’s satire, remarking that “[s]uch violently accusatory language was typical of
the war years.”
29 But this hoax newspaper sheet is of a kind with some of Franklin’s earliest writings where injustices are unmasked. Its “literary”
quality as satire marks Franklin’s mature sense that Britons in Great Britain did not understand the situation of the colonists
and, worse, didn’t care to understand the precariousness of the British state. George III was “[l]ike Nero and all other tyrants,”
surrounded by “his flatterers, his addressers, his applauders.” Franklin continued,
Pensions, places, and hopes of preferment, can bribe even bishops to approve his conduct: but, when those fulsome, purchased
addresses and panegyrics are sunk and lost in oblivion or contempt, impartial history
will step forth, speak honest truth, and rank him among public calamities. The only difference will be, that plagues, pestilences,
and famines are of this world, and arise from the nature of things: but voluntary malice, mischief, and murder are from Hell:
and this king will, therefore, stand foremost in the list of diabolical, bloody, and execrable tyrants. His base-bought parliaments
too, who sell him their souls, and extort from the people the money with which they aid his destructive purposes, as they
share his guilt, will share his infamy.
30
Franklin was working to have American prisoners of war released from depressing and unhealthy conditions in British jails
and hoping for reparations to be made to Americans for their wartime losses. His sense of “impartial history” was, it seems,
on target, and his excoriation of the extent to which interest politics had trumped purported British liberties and the public
sense of British national character worked especially well to fan the flames of discord in Britain.
Examining Franklin’s career as a literary journalist, propagandist in behalf of early modern liberal values, scientist, and
politician illuminates
precisely the nascent moment in state formation that preoccupies scholars like Benedict Anderson and Anthony D. Smith. Franklin
took what he had learned in Boston about printing and what he believed about the essential nature of press freedom to Philadelphia,
where he established a successful newspaper business around the
Pennsylvania Gazette and devised his Poor Richard almanacs (famous for their vernacular aphorisms adapted from British and European models for
American consumption). His almanacs and government printing jobs made Franklin’s career as a printer viable and successful.
After a time, he was appointed official colony printer and then postmaster for the Pennsylvania colony and chosen as the colony’s
representative when disputes arose over the legal rights and obligations of the Pennsylvania Assembly in its disputes with
the Proprietors. Franklin knew how to gauge the needs and interests of common people, and he took that understanding into
the political realm, creating for his readers a new social imaginary in which they might participate actively as lateral citizens
rather than as citizens subject to the whims, caprices, and decisions of persons “above” them who had wealth or status. Franklin’s
social and political successes were tied to the success of his electrical experiments and to his business acumen and international
connections with printers
; but his initial printing success arose from his literary journalism
and especially from his ability to write provocatively (whether in literary journalism like the Silence Dogood essays, Polly
Baker’s “speech,” or his political propaganda) about British liberties, freedom of conscience and expression, and free trade.
In Franklin’s journalism from his London years and his years in Paris, we find mature formulations that would give rise to
Franklin’s prominence as a political strategist, social theorist, and international diplomat.
The study of early modern transatlantic literary journalism intersects with studies in several areas, including the history
of print media, especially newspapers and books; the history of reading; the study of cultural cosmopolitanism; general literary
history, especially of “high” and “low” forms; the formation of communities or publics as “imagined” communities; and theoretical
formulations about the rise of nation-states in the West. By focusing on transatlantic dialogue in these several areas, scholars
will come to understand the extent to which the nineteenth-century nationalist agendas of British, American, and European
theorists took shape during the
moment when print capitalism made possible the ready circulation of ideas among people unknown to one another.
Only a partial picture has been rendered in the instances provided here. Literary journalism, taken as a function of progressive
social impulses, demonstrates a liberal trajectory that speaks to national issues and nationalist interests as a positive
social value. This eschews the conserving tendencies of print journalism, just as it does not account for the opposing side
of the liberal argument that Franklin engaged. Transatlantic exchange was central to the formation of a range of social and
political views, both progressive and conservative, if we take into account the writings and careers of, say, Thomas Paine, Horne Tooke, Alexander Hamilton, J.
Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, and others whose lives were spent attempting to persuade masses of the population towards some
political view and/or national worldview. It would be fruitful to engage in a more complete study not just of Franklin’s and
these others’ writings and impact but of, for instance, Edmund Burke, whose support for the free trade and liberal freedoms
of Britons in North America was followed by dismay at the French Revolution. It would be fruitful, as well, to consider the transatlantic literary journalism of women, who have not even been mentioned, except pseudonymously, in this discussion. What of the impact of Hannah More,
Catharine Macaulay (Graham), Mary Wollstonecraft, Susanna Rowson, and Judith Sargent Murray, all of whom produced work that
was reprinted in newspapers as literary journalism during their lifetimes and afterwards?
Crucial to framing new studies in the field is the recognition that eighteenth-century writers and readers saw themselves
as engaging in a transatlantic exchange of concepts, capital, and nationalist discourse, not a transmission from metropolitan center to peripheries. By shifting
the line of inquiry to the circulation of ideas back and forth across the Atlantic, cultural historians, political historians,
and theorists about national identities can gain a much richer picture of the transatlantic flow of goods, capital, and identities.