ABSTRACT
It was in the first decades of the eighteenth century that a ‘news network’ can be seen meaningfully to emerge between Scotland and England. In Scotland, the manufacture of ‘literary’ periodicals (serial publications whose main business we may define not as political news but as literary and, more broadly, cultural reportage) responded more quickly than the manufacture of newspapers to the need to accept 1707 as a watershed in the relationship between Scotland and England. A 1711 Scottish version of The Tatler will show how an exchange of values—values associated with serial publication, the publication of current affairs and moral immediacy—was established. Before a meaningful interchange of ‘news’ publications between Scotland and England was established (that had to wait until the second decade of Union) a moral, literate and, crucially, polite network was in place in Anglo-Scottish serial publication.
