10 - The invigoration of informal support

Summary

When newspaper advertisements made their first appearance in the early eighteenth century they soon began to announce a variety of charitable activities and events, including sermons and dinners, subscriptions and the occasional lavish donation offered by the affluent to the needy and the poor. From the 1740s, the London press also published appeals for the relief of individuals in dire circumstances – people imprisoned because of debt, clergymen in distress or young orphans left without the support of their kin. These private appeals calling for the aid of the public abounded for several decades, but, lacking the personalized interchange typical of the traditional letter of appeal, they failed to capture the attention of audiences for long, and by the mid-1770s had begun to dwindle and almost disappeared.

For all the shortcomings entailed in using newspapers and the anonymity of the marketplace for the purpose of soliciting private help, the new commercialized published appeals do point to the potentialities embedded in inducing donations and gifts via the marketplace. For several decades newspapers were employed for soliciting help and invoking the impulse of ‘generosity’, at times to good effect. These advertisements allowed petitioners a scope of exposure that the more private appeal lacked, enabling them to reach wider audiences and potential givers. Audience responses were invoked, moreover, through the manipulation of certain features typical of gift giving and the private appeal to benefactors – chronicling personal histories, allusions to named individuals that circumscribed the anonymity of the appeal and the offer of public acknowledgment, honour and gratitude.