The Communications Broker and the Public Sphere

Abstract

Later eighteenth-century newspapers have been credited with shaping and reflecting readers' politics and growing sense of regional and national identity. However, historians have long ignored the role that newspaper proprietors played in the construction of those newspapers. Through a close study of one provincial proprietor, John Ware of Whitehaven, this article demonstrates that newspaper owners were shrewd operators in the public sphere. They were businessmen and women for whom the imagined community of readers was a real community of friends and business associates.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 16 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.