ABSTRACT

This chapter addresses social status as a crucial factor in analyzing the periodical’s conjectured readership community, taking into account the wider social and economic context in which the Athenian Mercury flourished. A clearer idea of who was reading the periodical is needed in order to understand more fully the nature of the relationship between its authors and readers, and the extent of the Athenian Mercury's influence in its own time. Definitive statements about the de facto readership community are impossible to make without a large number of first-hand accounts by readers. We have already seen that such documents are scarce. The history of reading practices, however, tells us that texts themselves can yield information about their conjectured or implied readers.1 One inroad into the problem is thus to scrutinize the text of the Athenian Mercury itself to find out more about its conjectured readership from what Roger Chartier has called its ‘internal structures’.2 The Athenian Mercury contains two distinct internal structures which are considered in this chapter: first, the advertisements, and secondly, the main body of the question-and-answer text. We shall also be looking at how the Athenian Society’s approach to compiling the Athenian Mercury was shaped by their ‘implicit idea of the reader’.3 The authors expected to have mutual points of reference with their readers in social, geographical, and educational terms. From a close study of these, it is possible to construct the plausible hypothesis that the over-arching commonalty between the authors of the Athenian Mercury and their readers was a stake in the concerns of the middling sort.4 What,

1 Wolfgang Iser, for example, uses the term ‘implied reader’ to mean ‘both the prestructuring of the potential meaning by the text, and. . . the reading process’. In The Implied Reader: patterns of communication in prose fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore, 1974), pp. xii-xiii and passim. See also Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Grossman (eds), The Reader in the Text: essays on audience and interpretation (Princeton, 1980). 2 Roger Chartier, ‘Texts, printing, readings’, in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History (Berkeley, 1989), p. 156. 3 Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: the construction of femininity in the early periodical (London, 1989), pp. 47, 61-71. 4 Margaret Hunt, The Middling Sort. Commerce, gender, and the family in England, 1680-1780 (Berkeley, 1996); Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: business, society and family life in London, 1660-1730 (London, 1989); John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English culture in the eighteenth century (London, 1997), pp. 3-55; Vivien Brodsky Elliott, ‘Mobility and marriage in pre-industrial England’ (University

however, were the parameters of the periodical’s readership beyond the middling sort at the higher and lower ends of the social scale? Contemporary writers suggested that the Athenian Mercury was popular among lower social groups and younger readers, in particular male and female apprentices and servants. At the other end of the social spectrum, the number of persons of ‘quality’ (men and women of gentry status or higher) who read the periodical was likely to have been small, but exaggerated by Dunton in order to increase the Athenian Mercury's prestige. The Athenian Mercury was eager to draw upon the widest range of readers and portrayed this broad appeal as one of its greatest virtues, but this belied its reliance upon the middling sort as the core of its readership community.