Cheap Print and Street Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century

Abstract

It would not be entirely fair to claim that the street literature of the eighteenth century has been totally ignored, but only recently has increased online access to original materials helped open up interest in a period that has been overlooked in comparison with, say, the early modern period or the nineteenth century. It is a premise of this collection of case studies that, in fact, the eighteenth century represents a critical period both of continuity and of transition between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The essays themselves begin with the period around the lapse of the Printing Act in 1695, which opened the way for printing outside of London, and also saw the transition from the use of black-letter to white-letter typefaces for items of cheap print. They then extend through to the end of the wooden hand-press period, in the first couple of decades of the nineteenth century.