Abstract

The struggle to win the right to report the doings of the secretive and corrupt parliaments of Georgian England is one of the grand narratives of Whig history and seen as crucial in the emancipation of the English press and the construction of the Georgian and early Victorian public sphere. Nikki Hessell’s extraordinarily interesting study bridges this period of 70 years from the 1760s to the 1830s during which parliamentary reporting moves from the disguised reporting of the Gentleman’s Magazine, which attempted to deliver a reasonable sense of the content of debates, and such as a gentleman might want to know, based on scrappy notes or none at all and remarkable feats of memory, to the advent of morning newspaper accounts which aspired to a more thorough, complete and accurate reflection of what was actually said, in some cases based on shorthand. Her study focuses on four of the most celebrated men of letters and creative writers in English literature: Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt and Dickens.