ABSTRACT

During the summer and autumn of 1765, the London Chronicle printed an exchange of letters between two anonymous political writers. One defended George Grenville, recently ousted from his position as Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury, while the other praised his successor, the Marquis of Rockingham, and his associates. The letter writers engaged in a debate open to a general audience through print; the letters thus provide a helpful test case for claims about print, people and the public sphere in eighteenth-century Britain. Did newspaper letters such as these contribute to an ‘imagined community’ or ‘rational public sphere’ in which readers came to see themselves as connected to other anonymous citizens through their participation in ongoing political discussion?1 I argue that these letters suggest that general, abstract ideas about citizenship and debate developed out of writers’ and readers’ more traditional, familiar and local experiences with politics. Each writer in this exchange argued for one ‘set’ of ministers, using character sketches, accusations and anecdotes to discredit the other side. Each claimed that the stakes were high and that the other’s party was controlled by the King’s favourite, the Earl of Bute, rather than by devotion to liberty and the good of the nation. Both assumed that the range of possible political changes stretched only across the set of aristocratic men who might be appointed to ministerial posts. We can see the letters as fi guring a public sphere only if we defi ne such a sphere as constituted by agonistic, rather than rational, discourse. Neither writer proposed investigating evidence according to rational laws; neither considered theories of representation or social contracts. Their confl icting, irreconcilable claims about the personal qualities of the men in each ministry appeared in issue after issue of the weekly London Chronicle, often juxtaposed in adjacent columns. This periodic, adjacent publication constituted a form of debate that neither writer acknowledged in words.