page_title: Restoration literature
section_title: Journalism
hierarchical_section_title: Restoration literature / Prose genres / Journalism
context_page_description: Restoration literature is the English literature written during the historical period commonly referred to as the English Restoration, which corresponds to the last years of Stuart reign in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. In general, the term is used to denote roughly homogenous styles of literature that centre on a celebration of or reaction to the restored court of Charles II. It is a literature that includes extremes, for it encompasses both Paradise Lost and the Earl of Rochester's Sodom, the high-spirited sexual comedy of The Country Wife and the moral wisdom of The Pilgrim's Progress. It saw Locke's Treatises of Government, the founding of the Royal Society, the experiments and holy meditations of Robert Boyle, the hysterical attacks on theatres from Jeremy Collier, and the pioneering of literary criticism from John Dryden and John Dennis. The period witnessed news become a commodity, the essay develop into a periodical art form, and the beginnings of textual criticism.
  The dates for Restoration literature are a matter of convention, and they differ markedly from genre to genre.
context_section_description: During the Restoration period, the most common manner of getting news would have been a broadsheet publication. A single, large sheet of paper might have a written, usually partisan, account of an event. However, the period saw the beginnings of the first professional and periodical (meaning that the publication was regular) journalism in England. Journalism develops late, generally around the time of William of Orange's claiming the throne in 1689. Coincidentally or by design, England began to have newspapers just when William came to court from Amsterdam, where there were already newspapers being published.
  The early efforts at news sheets and periodicals were spotty. Roger L'Estrange produced both The News and City Mercury, but neither of them was a sustained effort. Henry Muddiman was the first to succeed in a regular news paper with the London Gazette. In 1665, Muddiman produced the Oxford Gazette as a digest of news of the royal court, which was in Oxford to avoid the plague in London. When the court moved back to Whitehall later in the year, the title London Gazette was adopted (and is still in use today). Muddiman had begun as a journalist in the Interregnum and had been the official journalist of the Long Parliament (in the form of The Parliamentary Intelligencer). Although Muddiman's productions are the first regular news accounts, they are still not the first modern newspaper, as the work was sent in manuscript by post to subscribers and was not a printed sheet for general sale to the public. That had to wait for The Athenian Mercury.
  Sporadic essays combined with news had been published throughout the Restoration period, but The Athenian Mercury was the first regularly published periodical in England. John Dunton and the "Athenian Society" (actually a mathematician, minister, and philosopher paid by Dunton for their work) began publishing in 1691, just after the reign of William III and Mary II began. In addition to news reports, The Athenian Mercury allowed readers to send in questions anonymously and receive a printed answer. The questions mainly dealt with love and health, but there were some bizarre and intentionally amusing questions as well (e.g. a question on why a person shivers after urination, written in rhyming couplets). The questions section allowed the journal to sell well and to be profitable. Therefore, it ran for six years, produced four books that spun off from the columns, and then received a bound publication as The Athenian Oracle. He also published the first periodical designed  for women "The Ladies' Mercury".
  The Athenian Mercury set the stage for the later Spectator, Gray's Inn Journal, Temple Bar Journal, and scores of politically oriented journals, such as the original The Guardian, The Observer, The Freeholder, Mist's Journal, and many others. Also, The Athenian Mercury published poetry from contributors, and it was the first to publish the poetry of Jonathan Swift and Elizabeth Singer Rowe. The trend of newspapers would similarly explode in subsequent years; a number of these later papers had runs of a single day and were composed entirely as a method of planting political attacks (Pope called them "Sons of a day" in Dunciad B).•	Later Romantic writers, who valued the idea of originality, also prized the meaning of "revolution" which signified a violent break with the past and often represented their work as offering just such a break with tradition. However, changes to literary forms and content occurred much more gradually than this use of the word "revolution" might suggest.
caption: A detail of the frontispiece to The Athenian Oracle, a collection of The Athenian Mercury
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