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First Impressions: Newspaper Advertisements and Early Modern English Body Imaging, 1651–1750

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Mark S. Dawson
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , April 2011 , pp. 277 - 306
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2011

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References

1 Judging by the verbal parallels between press coverage and her testimony, Underwood read issues of London Evening Post, 4 and 20 December 1740, 23 July 1741; and/or London Daily Post and General Advertiser, 6 and 22 December 1740, 21 February 1741. Issues are referenced by the first date printed in the masthead.

2 See Old Bailey Proceedings Online, hereafter OBP (http://www.oldbaileyonline.org, last accessed 15 October 2010). The Proceedings were published excerpts of court testimony (referenced hereafter with t plus date and file number). Biographies of the capitally condemned, taken by the Ordinary of Newgate prison, might follow (referenced hereafter with OA plus date). So, in this instance, OBP, 16 September 1741, conviction of John Stevens alias Henry Cook (OA17410916).

3 London Evening Post, 23 July 1741.

4 OBP, 28 August 1741, trial of John Stevens, alias Henry Cook[e] (t17410828–3).

5 Thomas, Keith, “Numeracy in Early Modern England,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 37 (1987): 103–32Google Scholar. Notices providing height measures and assessments of stature consistently considered men at about five feet five inches or above to be “tall” (e.g., London Gazette, 26 August 1706; Post-Boy, 13 October 1713). Those who were five feet four inches or less were deemed “short” (London Gazette, 1 June 1702; Evening Post, 4 October 1725). There was less frequent reference to those of five foot five to seven inches as “middling” (London Gazette, 29 December 1707; London Evening Post, 4 March 1749); otherwise they were also judged “short” (Daily Journal, 24 February 1732; London Gazette, 6 August 1745).

6 Compare OBP, 15 October 1740, trial of Henry Cook (t17401015–61).

7 See Sutherland, James, The Restoration Newspaper and Its Development (Cambridge, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Black, Jeremy, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1987)Google Scholar; Harris, Michael, London Newspapers in the Age of Walpole: A Study of the Origins of the Modern English Press (London, 1987)Google Scholar; Sommerville, C. John, The News Revolution in England: Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information (Oxford, 1996)Google Scholar.

8 For instance, Gowing, Laura, Common Bodies: Women, Touch, and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, CT, 2003)Google Scholar; Fissell, Mary, Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar; Cody, Lisa, Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons (Oxford, 2005)Google Scholar.

9 See, most recently, Hug, Tobias, Impostures in Early Modern England: Representations and Perceptions of Fraudulent Identities (Manchester, 2009), 7, 110–29, 209–10Google Scholar.

10 These studies have been inspirational: Styles, John, “Print and Policing: Crime Advertising in Eighteenth-Century Provincial England,” in Policing and Prosecution in Britain, 1750–1850, ed. Hay, Douglas and Snyder, Francis (Oxford, 1989), 55–112Google Scholar; Prude, Jonathan, “To Look upon the ‘Lower Sort’: Runaway Ads and the Appearance of Unfree Laborers in America, 1750–1800,” Journal of American History 78, no. 1 (June 1991): 124–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Waldstreicher, David, “Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly 56, no. 2 (April 1999): 243–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Campbell, Jill, “Domestic Intelligence: Newspaper Advertising and the Eighteenth-Century Novel,” Yale Journal of Criticism 15, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 251–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morgan, Gwenda and Rushton, Peter, “Visible Bodies: Power, Subordination and Identity in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World,” Journal of Social History 39, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 39–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Snell, Esther, “Discourses of Criminality in the Eighteenth-Century Press: The Presentation of Crime in The Kentish Post, 1717–1768,” Continuity and Change 22, no. 1 (May 2007): 13–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 The early modern importance of humoral thinking is much noted by historians. The evidence of the newspapers allows us to extend the social horizon of that thinking. Compare Churchill, Wendy, “The Medical Practice of the Sexed Body: Women, Men, and Disease in Britain, circa 1600–1740,” Social History of Medicine 18, no. 3 (2005): 3–22CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Harkness, Deborah, “Nosce Teipsum: Curiosity, the Humoural Body and the Culture of Therapeutics in Late Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century England,” in Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to Enlightenment, ed. Evans, Robert and Marr, Alexander (Aldershot, 2006), 171–92Google Scholar; Paster, Gail, “The Pith and Marrow of Our Attribute: Dialogue of Skin and Skull in Hamlet and Holbein’s The Ambassadors,” Textual Practice 23, no. 2 (2009): 247–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sowerby, Scott, “Of Different Complexions: Religious Diversity and National Identity in James II’s Toleration Campaign,” English Historical Review 124, no. 506 (February 2009): 29–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Or, more exactly, 10,673 individuals apparently born in England, Wales, Scotland, or Ireland. A smaller tally of foreigners (740) is the subject of ongoing investigation and initial discussion below.

13 See Early English Books Online (http://eebo.chadwyck.com); 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers (http://www.gale.cengage.com/DigitalCollections/products/Burney/).

14 For instance, OBP, 14 January 1686, trial of William Hartly (t16860114–32), who claimed he was not abetting a crime but holding a French fugitive advertised in London Gazette, 7 December 1685. OBP, 23 February 1715, trial of William Clark (t17150223–21), who testified he had stolen nothing but was hawking the Evening Post. OBP, 10 May 1722, trial of John Hawkins (t17220510–3 and OA17220521), with general reference to London Gazette and his own description in Daily Courant, 26 April 1722.

15 The database records approximately 560 occurrences of such passing description which are excluded from the sample because reference to physical features is partial or illegible, and individuality of the notice cannot be established with certainty.

16 Sutherland, Restoration Newspaper, 216–17; Harris, London Newspapers, 58–59. For incomes, Wrightson, Keith, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven, CT, 2000), 308–20Google Scholar.

17 For metropolitan occupational profiles and their reconstitution, compare Earle, Peter, A City Full of People: Men and Women of London, 1650–1750 (London, 1994), 270–77Google Scholar. For the provincial situation specifically in relation to criminal prosecution, and conclusions similar to those formed here, King, Peter, Crime, Justice, and Discretion in England, 1740–1820 (Oxford, 2000), 36–41Google Scholar.

18 OBP, 16 May 1678, trial of [Elizabeth Tarlton] (t16780516–4) and London Gazette, 15 March 1678, for the notice placed by her master, a butcher, which found Tarlton at Oxford. OBP, 24 May 1694, trial of Joseph Bradshaw (t16940524–40) and London Gazette, 10–13 February 1690, where the prosecutor, Dr. Littleton, had targeted his footman Richard Johnson, who later falsely accused Bradshaw, a clerk, of the crime. OBP, 13 January 1727, trial of John Morgan alias Morley (t17270113–15), with London Gazette, 3 December 1726, and Daily Journal, 5 December 1726, notices placed by his master, a tavern keeper, which found Morgan at Guilford. OBP, 6–22 December 1738, trial and conviction of James Gardiner (t17381206–2 and OA17381222), who suggested that it was a misunderstanding that his master “advertised me in the next Day’s Papers, offering 10 Guineas Reward to the Person who should take me.”

19 For instance, OBP, 26 May 1737, trial of John Smith alias Simms (t17370526–1), who was a writing master’s apprentice apprehended at Lincoln courtesy of the Daily Advertiser. The notice survives in London Evening Post, 16 April 1737; Daily Post, 19 April 1737.

20 OBP, 25 April 1726, trial of John Farrel (t17260425–15) for taking money from his master, an alehouse keeper, and located courtesy of Evening Post, 23 April 1726. Ironically, Mr. Sarch, from whom Farrel tried to purchase a suit, initially believed that the boy was another runaway described in Mist’s Weekly Journal, 23 April 1726. OBP, 24 April 1734, trial of Thomas Evans alias Stevens (t17340424–5), who was indicted on both the evidence and reading of a nonextant issue of the Daily Advertiser by John Wingfield, linendraper. OBP, 10 July 1745, trial of Thomas Ford (t17450710–19) for theft from William Lambert, watchmaker, whose notice, Daily Advertiser, 16 May 1745, helped retrieve his property and arrest the defendant.

21 OBP, 28 July 1744, trial of Edward Moody and Edward Wandon (t17440728–12), who were advertised “in Saturday’s paper” by the Smithfield owner of the Red Cow. Examples of tradespeople hiring out horses, since stolen, are legion. See Post-Boy, 2 August 1709; Original Weekly Journal, 13 June 1719; Daily Advertiser, 4 July 1744.

22 For example, Daily Post, 4 October 1729; and cf. OBP, 8 December 1725, trial of Williamson Goodbarn (t17251208–55).

23 As one instance of this situation, compare notices for William Botrite alias Boatright, London Gazette, 18 March 1712; and Post-Boy, 3 May 1712. The features observed and the terms used to describe them were different, suggesting there was no modeling from a single, authoritative archive. See also Middlesex Sessions, Sessions Papers—Justices’ Working Documents, 18 October 1720, London Lives, 1690–1800, LMSMPS501890044 (www.londonlives.org, last accessed 15 October 2010), London Metropolitan Archives. Schemes to standardize documentation and allow better identification faltered. See, e.g., Council of State, 24 May 1652, in Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Interregnum, 1651–52, vol 24, ed. Green, Mary (London, 1877)Google Scholar, via British History Online (www.british-history.ac.uk, last accessed 15 October 2010); William Petty’s proposal for an “uncunterfitable Tickett,” in Durston, Gregory, Crime and Justice in Early Modern England: 1500–1750 (Chichester, 2004), 234Google Scholar; London Gazette, 10 September 1696; a rare pro forma from the early to mid-eighteenth century, Lincolnshire Archives, manuscripts of the Earl of Ancaster, 2ANC9/13.

24 Gaskill, Malcolm traces instances of the advertising of these offenses in Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000), 167–69, 267–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Some of the many examples include Lords Norfolk, Ashburnham, and Pembroke in, respectively, London Gazette, 21 February 1687; Post-Man, 16 April 1702; and Daily Courant, 11 January 1707; Daily Post, 22 September 1736.

26 Ferdinand, Christine, Benjamin Collins and the Provincial Newspaper Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1997), 95–124CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for the importance of tradespeople who moonlighted as agents in expanding distribution networks.

27 For example, Earl of Peterborough and Sir Francis Child, goldsmith at Temple-Bar, London Gazette, 24 February 1701; Sir Stephen Lennard in Kent and Mr. Staples, upholsterer at the Castle in Southwark, London Gazette, 3 July 1701; Viscount Vane and Mr. Thomas Shut at the Black Swan Inn near Holborn-Bars, Daily Post, 12 October 1721; Person of Quality and master of the Royal Exchange alehouse in Adam’s Mews, General Advertiser, 5 February 1750.

28 OBP, 27 April 1720, trial of Lewis Vain (t17200427–59), whose stolen mount was spotted courtesy of a newspaper read at a Topsham coffeehouse, probably Evening Post, 3 December 1719. OBP, 16 October 1723, trial of Richard Whiteing and John Mackey alias Magie (t17231016–59 and OA17231106), whose loot was recognized by a goldsmith from a notice read at a Portsmouth coffeehouse in Daily Journal, 26 August 1723. OBP, 26 February 1729, trial of John Bowen (t17290226–79), taken in Oxford after thieving from his master, a Covent Garden grocer, and on the basis of Daily Post, 26 December 1728. OBP, 6 December 1738, trial of Robert Andrews (t17381206–23), which records how the victim’s loss, to a London pickpocket, had been encountered by his Somersetshire neighbors as newsprint, London Evening Post, 23 November 1738, prior to his returning home.

29 As one example, William Bonny launched Bristol’s first newspaper, the Post-Boy, in late 1702 but advertised his servant, John Sugar, in Post-Man, 5 May 1705. See Meldrum, Tim, Domestic Service and Gender, 1660–1750: Life and Work in the London Household (Harlow, 2000), 18–25Google Scholar.

30 For instance, Peter Williams in London Gazette, 21 June 1708; Henry Smith in Post-Boy, 19 June 1711.

31 Provincial advertisers often used relatives or London business contacts as go-betweens rather than write directly to the printer. For example, London Gazette, 6 October 1684; Parker’s London News, 5 April 1725; London Evening Post, 21 June 1739. Even so, epistolary draft notices await identification. See also the recent work of Susan Whyman on the Post, Royal, The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers, 1660–1800 (Oxford, 2009), 46–71Google Scholar.

32 Daily Courant, 17 November 1708.

33 OBP, 1 May 1728, trial of Elizabeth Lewis (t17280501–9), with Evening Post, 13 February 1728, and Mist’s Weekly Journal, 16 March 1728. A charwoman, Lewis stole from a Twickenham house where she had been casually employed. Her description in Mist’s registered with her next employer. OBP, 3 September 1740, trial of Peter Courtrie alias Courbee (t17400903–17), recognized by a watchmaker from Daily Advertiser (not extant).

34 Here I draw heavily on Beattie, John, Policing and Punishment in London, 1660–1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford, 2001)Google Scholar; and Griffiths, Paul, Lost Londons: Change, Crime, and Control in the Capital City, 1550–1660 (Cambridge, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Speaking to provincial scrutiny, of papers and people, are Harris, Bob, “Praising the Middling Sort? Social Identity in Eighteenth-Century British Newspapers,” in The Making of the British Middle Class? Studies of Regional and Cultural Diversity since the Eighteenth Century, ed. Kidd, Alan and Nicholls, David (Stroud, 1998), 1–18Google Scholar; King, Crime, 20–22, 57–75; French, Henry, The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England, 1600–1750 (Oxford, 2007), 89–140Google Scholar.

35 Pincus, Steve, “‘Coffee Politicians Does Create’: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture,” Journal of Modern History 67, no. 4 (December 1995): 815–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cowan, Brian, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven, CT, 2005), 169–92, 235–43Google Scholar.

36 Black, English Press, 12ff., 106ff.; Monteyne, Joseph, The Printed Image in Early Modern London: Urban Space, Visual Representation, and Social Exchange (Aldershot, 2007), 1–3, 30–72Google Scholar.

37 Ellis, Markman, “Coffee-House Libraries in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London,” Library 10, no. 1 (March 2009): 3–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 See n. 28.

39 OBP, 18 May 1738, trial of Joseph Hodson (t17380518–10).

40 OBP, 11 January 1712, trial of Charles Collins (t17120111–11), who read the Post-Man with fellow servants in his master’s home. OBP, 27 April 1720, trial of Zephaniah Martin (t17200427–8), who sought to distract a barber by taking up newspapers provided in the shop. OBP, 30 August 1721, trial of John Cooper and Elizabeth Reeve (t17210830–52), witness testified reading a newspaper, Daily Post, 8 August 1721, at the Black-Raven, Fetter-Lane, and he there discussed the notice with Cooper’s one-time associate.

41 For instance, Daily Courant, 26 September 1718; Post-Man, 21 November 1719; OBP, 17 January 1746, trial of James Woollard (t17460117–18), witness testified he was listening to a gentleman’s servant reading the Gazette outside a church before stopping Woollard for shoplifting. Also Griffiths, Lost Londons, 380–82; Styles, “Print and Policing,” 72–75.

42 London Gazette, 21 September 1693; British Apollo, 27 February 1708; Post-Boy, 8 November 1709; Daily Courant, 25 April 1719; Daily Post, 2 September 1743; Daily Advertiser, 3 April 1745.

43 Compare John Scarin’s notices for servant Sarah Cotes in Post-Man and Post-Boy, 10 September 1717 and 12 September 1717. For another example, which makes explicit mention of an earlier notice and letters sent to the author, see the situation of John Pareshall, London Gazette, 22 February 1694.

44 Beattie, Policing, 134–50, 172–97, demonstrates that this practice was becoming much more common.

45 Griffiths, Lost Londons, 90–93. OBP, 7 December 1726, trial of William Coreham (t17261207–46), who was tracked by two of his previously unsuspecting abettors, a victualer who read Coreham’s description in the newspapers and then called on a waterman who had been engaged by Coreham. OBP, 17 October 1727, trial of Sarah Griffiths (t17271017–6), who was stopped by a combination of a waggoner, tavern host, constable, and the notice of her master, a cheesemonger, in Daily Post, 18 September 1727.

46 OBP, 11 September 1735, trial of William Phillips alias Clark (t17350911–72), where stakeholder had advertised a stolen horse specifically to innkeepers. Ibid., 2 July 1746, trial of John Smith (t17460702–24) and reading of General Advertiser, 12–14 June 1746 at the Horse and Dolphin, Soho.

47 Daily Courant, 26 August 1720, carried a reminder of legal penalties. St James Evening Post, 1 August 1747, claimed wages or prizes an apprentice, run to sea, might earn. OBP, 3 August 1739, conviction of David Roberts (OA17390803), recognized making for France, courtesy of London Gazette, 29 August 1738.

48 Valenze, Deborah, The Social Life of Money in the English Past (Cambridge, 2006), 190–91Google Scholar.

49 Griffiths, Lost Londons, 56–63, 302; Beattie, Policing, 126–33, 150–54, 200–204, and also Styles’s argument that newspaper notices led to the early eighteenth-century decline of hue and cry warrants, “Print and Policing,” 82–86. Officers used the press to expedite their varied duties, e.g., London Gazette, 8 September 1670; Daily Post, 18 July 1729; General Evening Post, 1 September 1748; OBP, 14 October 1724, trial of Frances Slade (t17241014–68); OBP, 14 January 1737, trial of James Ryan et al. (t17370114–16). They might also be fined for not pursuing criminals, Valenze, Money, 192.

50 Valenze, Money, 196–99.

51 Beattie, Policing, 376–83, 401–17; King, Crime, 47–52.

52 Beattie, Policing, 226–56. Instances of Wild’s hand in the sample include Post-Man, 28 June 1715; London Gazette, 26 May 1716 with OBP, 10 October 1716, trial of John Rowland (t17161010–19); Original Weekly Journal, 14 December 1717. See too OBP, 14 October 1741, trial of John Glem Gulliford alias Culliford (t17411014–20). William Frankland, a Newgate debtor, insisted he had recovered property and arrested the defendant, who was not his own co-conspirator, after reading Daily Advertiser, 31 August 1741.

53 OBP, 11 November 1728, conviction of Stephen Burnet alias Barnham (OA17281111), who bragged of a reward for returning the proceeds of highway robbery. OBP, 4 December 1745, trial of Elizabeth and Susanna Newberry (t17451204–5), whom Daily Advertiser, 30 August 1745, advised a pickpocketed watch was sought.

54 OBP, 31 August 1692, trial of John Cole (t16920831–38), where a former acquaintance who confessed to murder was described, in the days after the killing, as “very much concerned, and would look into all Gazettes and News Papers, to see if he were not inquired after.” OBP, 18 May 1738, trial of Thomas Cross (t17380518–16), who, after publication, was warned by an accomplice to leave London disguised. That accomplice, Robert Ramsey, upon conviction, explained, in OBP, 13 January 1742 (OA17420113), how a waggoner arrested them having read London Evening Post, 11 March 1738. OBP, 18 July 1739, trial of David Roberts (t17390718–17), on whom John Carter informed when his own advertising, in London Gazette, 8 August 1738, and London Daily Post, 2 September 1738, compelled surrender. OBP, 13 January 1749, trial of Usher Gahagan (t17490113–28), who fled after recognizing himself in London Gazette, 18 October 1748.

55 Price, Jacob, “A Note on the Circulation of the London Press, 1704–14,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 31, no. 84 (November 1958): 215–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Snyder, Henry, “The Circulation of Newspapers in the Reign of Queen Anne,” Library 23, no. 3 (September 1968): 206–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Walker, Robin, “Advertising in London Newspapers, 1650–1750,” Business History 15, no. 2 (1973): 112–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 Curth, Louise, English Almanacs, Astrology and Popular Medicine, 1550–1700 (Manchester, 2007), 1–34, 136–83Google Scholar; Dawson, Mark, “Humouring Racial Encounters in the Anglo-Atlantic, c. 1580–1720,” in Old Worlds, New Worlds: European Cultural Encounters, c. 1000–c. 1750, ed. Bailey, Lisa, Diggelmann, Lindsay, and Phillips, Kim (Turnhout, 2009), 147–54Google Scholar.

57 Of the 10,673 descriptions, approximately 56 percent (or 5,971 notices) referred to skin and its coloration. For metonymy, compare Post-Man, 27 June 1704 and 8 July 1704, where Richard Batteson has “ruddy cheeks,” then a “ruddy complexion”; Fog’s Weekly Journal, 29 November 1729, and Craftsman, 3 January 1730, for Richard Hall’s “smooth’d [sic] Face” becoming a “smooth Complexion”; London Evening Post, 8 October 1743 and 1 December 1744, in which Robert Temple has a “swarthy long Face” then, having deserted a second time, a “swarthy complexion.”

58 Our sample of descriptions pivoting on characterizations of skin itself falls into two roughly equal portions. So pathological vs. ontological assessments occur in 3,172/2,799 descriptions, respectively.

59 London Gazette, 26 July 1735.

60 Post-Man, 4 July 1699; Daily Post, 17 February 1727. Notices used italics arbitrarily. In this essay all italics are the author’s unless indicated.

61 Daily Courant, 12 January 1719.

62 Daily Courant, 20 April 1711; London Evening Post, 16 July 1745, 1 June 1738, and 5 November 1741.

63 Evening Post, 21 August 1725.

64 Instances include London Evening Post, 10 January 1747; Mercurius Publicus, 4 December 1662; Post-Man, 20 August 1715; Weekly Journal, 26 January 1723; Mercurius Politicus, 21 August 1656; London Gazette, 8 September 1707; London Evening Post, 30 November 1738 and 16 July 1745; London Gazette, 4 March 1700, 8 April 1686, and 8 September 1709.

65 Craftsman, 27 May 1732; Weekly Packet, 3 May 1718; Daily Post, 6 August 1739; Daily Journal, 10 February 1730; London Gazette, 6 May 1710.

66 Whitehall Evening Post, 31 July 1750.

67 Publick Intelligencer, 1 November 1658.

68 Post-Man, 19 February 1706; London Gazette, 18 September 1722.

69 Severall Proceedings in Parliament, 20 January 1652; London Gazette, 21 July 1690; Daily Courant, 28 August 1706; Post-Boy, 19 December 1699; Daily Advertiser, 25 October 1731.

70 It was likely no accident that this was one of several industries using newspapers for marketing, manufacture, and perhaps communal reading during work. The editorial persona, Mr. Mist, harangued a rival and alleged poor circulation by asking, “How many Reams of his labour’d Slanders have gone to the more useful Application of Pastry Cooks and Chandlery?” Weekly Journal, 30 August 1718.

71 Publick Intelligencer, 4 April 1659; Whitehall Evening Post, 12 July 1748; London Gazette, 13 July 1696, 20 July 1723, and 26 May 1690; London Evening Post, 2 May 1745; London Gazette, 29 August 1710; General Evening Post, 16 June 1747; Daily Advertiser, 21 January 1744; Daily Advertiser, 10 February 1744; London Gazette, 29 July 1678. Also compare notices concerning the same individual but distant in time. For instance, Ralph Cooper might be described as “swarthy” in Daily Post, 14 June 1727, yet he had been “fresh” when advertised by Evening Post, 1 May 1725.

72 London Gazette, 14 March 1727.

73 Post-Boy, 17 August 1717.

74 Daily Post, 26 January 1727; and also Daily Journal, 29 January 1727.

75 Daily Courant, 30 January 1727; London Gazette, 31 January 1727; Evening Post, 2 February 1727. Other examples include Daily Courant, 28 August 1706 and 4 December 1706, where James Stone’s “Face pale” becomes “of a pale and wan complexion.” We learn that his “thick Legs” were also “looking dropsical.” Compare Post-Man, 1 January 1717, with Evening Post, 7 December 1717. These advertisements seem to target the same horse stealer for different thefts, yet “his Complection somewhat whitely” becomes “pale faced.”

76 Perfect Diurnall of Some Passages and Proceedings, 18 December 1654; Daily Post, 1 October 1722.

77 Craftsman, 22 May 1731; Daily Courant, 6 April 1719.

78 London Evening Post, 8 June 1749.

79 See Oxford English Dictionary for examples of these terms and those that follow.

80 Post-Man, 1 January 1710; Evening Post, 29 August 1723.

81 London Gazette, 25 September 1690.

82 London Evening Post, 2 August 1746.

83 General Evening Post, 10 August 1745.

84 Daily Advertiser, 5 April 1743.

85 Daily Post, 27 June 1730. For freckles, see, e.g., Evening Post, 21 April 1722.

86 London Evening Post, 9 May 1749; London Gazette, 12 July 1688.

87 For black as synonymous with sinful deviance, the locus classicus remains Jordan, Winthrop, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1968)Google Scholar. See also Lowe, Kate, “The Stereotyping of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe,” in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, ed. Earle, Thomas and Lowe, Kate (Cambridge, 2005), 17–47Google Scholar; Anu Korhonen, “Washing the Ethiopian White: Conceptualising Black Skin in Renaissance England,” in Earle and Lowe, Black Africans, 94–112. For the colonial context, compare Brown’s, Kathleen revisionist argument in Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996), 107–36Google Scholar.

88 Dawson, “Humouring,” 144–45.

89 Daily Courant, 4 August 1720. For a further instance, London Gazette, 25 December 1744.

90 London Gazette, 13 May 1703. Similar examples include Daily Courant, 2 March 1714, Evening Post, 15 January 1719, or General Evening Post, 10 August 1745.

91 Compare London Evening Post, 8 and 11 January 1743.

92 Compare Evening Post, 29 October 1720; Post-Boy, 5 November 1720.

93 For the first and the last terms, see London Gazette, 7 July 1698 and 19 September 1687. These terms do, of course, appear in adjacent advertising for medical remedies.

94 Daily Journal, 29 December 1729. Another example would be referring to someone as “pale faced but plump,” London Gazette, 6 June 1689. This conformation too suggests phlegm rather than a sickly pallor.

95 Porter, Martin, Windows of the Soul: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 (Oxford, 2005), 172–206Google Scholar; Groebner, Valentin, Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe (New York, 2007), 117–48Google Scholar.

96 Indeed, one notice referred to “sanguine” hair: London Gazette, 1 December 1713; cf. Post-Boy, 29 October 1713. See Rosenthal, Angela, “Raising Hair,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 38, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 1–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fisher, Will, Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge, 2006), 83–158Google Scholar.

97 London Gazette, 22 September 1701, described simultaneously as “pale Complectioned.” Evening Post, 8 May 1718, where parallel syntax of a confederate’s description indicates hair was being described. Post-Man, 13 September 1716, use of the possessive adjective was a common shorthand to indicate that the subject did not wear a wig over hair already alluded to.

98 The Crafty Maids Invention. Or Her Council To all Young Maids How to Chuse Good Husban[d]s etc. (London, 1689), Pepys Ballad Collection, no. 5.228, English Broadside Ballad Archive (http://emc.english.ucsb.edu/ballad_project/index.asp, last accessed 15 October 2010). See also nos. 4.10, 4.96, 4.117. For bachelors, see The English Fortune-Teller. Being a Brief Direction to Shun All Strife, A Brief Instruction How to Chuse a Wife (London, ca. 1666–84), Pepys Ballad Collection, no. 3.152. See, too, nos. 3.51, 3.185, 4.104.

99 Weekly Journal, 10 August 1723.

100 London Gazette, 30 March 1717; Evening Post, 22 October 1724; Post-Man, 27 June 1717; Severall Proceedings of State Affaires, 21 September 1654; London Gazette, 6 September 1708; General Evening Post, 26 December 1747; British Gazetteer, 8 March 1718; Daily Gazetteer, 1 May 1736; Daily Courant, 19 April 1732; London Gazette, 8 September 1701, 4 September 1704; Evening Post, 19 July 1720; Daily Post, 24 February 1721; London Evening Post, 6 September 1740; London Gazette, 30 March 1717; London Evening Post, 5 November 1741; London Gazette, 23 August 1694; London Evening Post, 14 July 1747; London Gazette, 23 October 1722, 2 November 1714. See Porter, Windows of the Soul, 12–13, 176–77.

101 Porter, Windows of the Soul, 45.

102 Most notices employing these descriptors were for grand larceny or murder suspects. See, e.g., London Gazette, 31 August 1693 and 28 May 1734; London Evening Post, 29 January 1740 and 10 November 1748.

103 Most often applied to burglars and forgers. See London Gazette, 30 March 1682, 26 December 1687, and 17 February 1704; Post-Boy, 23 September 1712; Mist’s Weekly Journal, 14 January 1727; London Evening Post, 11 March 1738.

104 Several Proceedings, 19 February 1655; London Gazette, 18 November 1689, 30 July 1734; Whitehall Evening Post, 4 January 1750. Notices readily confirm Porter’s contention, Windows of the Soul, 177–78, that vocal timbre was also a part of physiognomic reckoning.

105 Post-Man, 12 June 1707.

106 Sometimes enforced via the pillory. See Shoemaker, Robert, The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 2004), 84, 249–58Google Scholar.

107 London Gazette, 30 November 1696.

108 Ibid., 8 May 1690.

109 See London Gazette, 7 August 1684, 6 July 1696, and 8 September 1709; London Evening Post, 27 January 1728; Whitehall Evening Post, 1 March 1748.

110 London Gazette, 21 April 1698. See, too, Domestick Intelligence, 27 January 1680; Mist’s Weekly Journal, 7 October 1727; London Evening Post, 3 July 1740.

111 English Post, 12 December 1701, Evening Post, 15 January 1719; Post-Boy, 26 May 1719.

112 Daily Post, 8 October 1724; London Evening Post, 25 September 1740; Daily Advertiser, 8 November 1742.

113 London Evening Post, 5 September 1741.

114 For example, Daily Courant, 21 October 1712; London Evening Post, 4 December 1739. See, too, weavers, London Gazette, 3 September 1709; Daily Post, 1 September 1726.

115 London Evening Post, 6 November 1742.

116 London Gazette, 4 December 1733.

117 See Loyal Protestant and True Domestick Intelligence, 4 May 1682; Daily Advertiser, 27 February 1731; London Gazette, 23 November 1736.

118 London Gazette, 20 April 1674; English Post, 12 December 1701.

119 Examples include London Gazette, 3 April 1679; Post-Boy, 18 October 1701; Evening Post, 10 May 1718, cf. 25 February 1720; London Evening Post, 5 July 1740.

120 For instance, the location of warts is detailed by Post-Man, 12 September 1702, and London Evening Post, 1 May 1740. Post-Boy, 4 February 1707 and 3 September 1711, describe burns, while London Gazette, 25 February 1703, and Daily Courant, 19 October 1720, remark on wounds. Tumors could be a humoral signifier. See Stein, Claudia, “The Meaning of Signs: Diagnosing the French Pox in Early Modern Augsburg,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 80, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 627–36CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

121 London Gazette, 27 March 1707.

122 Evening Post, 16 March 1723.

123 True Protestant Mercury, 2 August 1682.

124 Daily Journal, 11 November 1731.

125 Post-Boy, 20 June 1700.

126 Daily Post, 15 May 1729.

127 Daily Journal, 25 February 1723, even though the subject in this case was wellborn and would not be expected to be working, readers were perhaps meant to look for this very reason.

128 Daily Advertiser, 14 March 1743.

129 See, e.g., Saunders, Richard, Physiognomie and Chiromancie, Metoposcopie, the Symmetrical Proportions and Signal Moles of the Body Fully and Accurately Handled, with Their Natural-Predictive-Significations (London, 1653)Google Scholar; Capp, Bernard, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs, 1500–1800 (London, 1979), 211Google Scholar.

130 Post-Man, 3 February 1709; Daily Courant, 1 May 1724; Fog’s Weekly Journal, 22 February 1729 and 22 January 1732.

131 For delicacy, see London Gazette, 26 August 1689, 4 December 1690, and 2 November 1714; Post-Man, 4 March 1704 and 16 March 1704. For whiteness, see London Gazette, 14 October 1689, 6 February 1693, 9 December 1746; Mist’s Weekly Journal, 1 June 1728; London Evening Post, 5 March 1743. Compare Perfect Diurnall of Some Passages and Proceedings, 3 October 1653, which stated simply that two laborers “may be known by the hardnesse of their hands.”

132 Daily Courant, 15 October 1715; General Evening Post, 14 November 1745; Daily Courant, 15 October 1734; London Evening Post, 10 February 1743.

133 London Evening Post, 12 May 1744.

134 Post-Boy, 9 September 1697.

135 Provincial newspapers at least were used to refute rumors that local communities were facing a smallpox outbreak. For example, Newcastle Courant, 21 June 1735; Northampton Mercury, 29 March 1736. See Fumerton, Patricia, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2006), 17–22Google Scholar. Porter, Windows of the Soul, also charts surges in physiognomic publication during plague times, 103–5.

136 Hindle, Steve, “Technologies of Identification under the Old Poor Law,” Local Historian 36, no. 4 (November 2006): 220–36Google Scholar.

137 Or, in the terms of a classical, Aristotelian natural philosophy, the color of the humors within, and their native balance, was no longer “transparent.” Either the skin itself was tainted, for example by overexposure to the sun, or the humoral balance was agitated in such a way that the skin reflected this change superficially rather than revealing a color “ingrained”; for instance, a surge in the sanguine humor ruddied one’s face. See London Gazette, 28 May 1705 or 12 March 1743; Smith’s, Bruce discussion of color and its sensing, The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (Chicago, 2009), 11–84Google Scholar.

138 Wear, Andrew, “Place, Health, and Disease: The ‘Airs, Waters, Places’ Tradition in Early Modern England and North America,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 444–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

139 British Gazetteer, 8 March 1718; Craftsman, 17 November 1733.

140 London Gazette, 25 August 1687; Evening Post, 8 September 1722.

141 For examples, and early modern Europeans’ “confusion” about the “color status” of Jews, see Schorsch, Jonathan, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (Cambridge, 2004), 171–91Google Scholar. Schorsch suggests that in some contexts this confusion was receding as Jews themselves asserted their whiteness. See, too, Shapiro, James, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York, 1997), 167–94Google Scholar.

142 Parker’s Penny Post, 5 July 1727. Also OBP, 28 April 1731, trial of Francis Woodmash (t17310428–72). Notices identifying Jews were few. Of ten, all apparently concerning foreign-born individuals, two discerned swarthy skin: Post-Man, 20 July 1710; Daily Advertiser, 12 February 1745. As common were remarks about fair complexions or fresh coloring: Daily Courant, 5 January 1711; Daily Post, 14 October 1724 and 23 December 1727; London Evening Post, 31 October 1730.

143 Similar reevaluation would be possible for the “swarthy” or “tawny” appearance of other groups. For the Roma, see London Gazette, 12 July 1688; London Journal, 24 March 1731; Eliav-Feldon, Miriam, “Vagrants or Vermin? Attitudes towards Gypsies in Early Modern Europe,” in The Origins of Racism in the West, ed. Eliav-Feldon, Miriam, Isaac, Benjamin, and Ziegler, Joseph (Cambridge, 2009), 276–91Google Scholar. In the case of the nomadic Indian, whom most Atlantic colonists had yet to categorize as red, compare London Gazette, 6 August 1685; Vaughan, Alden, “From White Man to Redskin: Changing Anglo-American Perceptions of the American Indian,” American Historical Review 87, no. 4 (October 1982): 917–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the Moor, see London Gazette, 21 June 1688; Mist’s Weekly Journal, 3 August 1728; Bartels, Emily, Speaking of the Moor: From “Alcazar” to “Othello” (Philadelphia, 2008), 1–20Google Scholar.

144 Of course, Christian apologetics considered Jews condemned to wander the earth in condign punishment. Within this stereotype the otherwise temporary reconditioning, or swarthing, of skin would persist because Jews roamed ceaselessly. See Felsenstein, Frank, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660–1830 (Baltimore, 1995), 40–89Google Scholar. And change in one’s environment was not solely about geography or weather. Foods inappropriate to one’s native temperament could throw it off balance. Hence opponents of coffee drinking suggested that this exotic habit would mortify English bodies, making them as “swarthy” as those of its Arab inventors. See Matar, Nabil, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge, 1998), 92–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

145 Recent studies include Parent, Anthony, Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660–1740 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003), 105–34Google Scholar; Foote, Thelma, Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City (New York, 2004), 88–123CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Amussen, Susan, Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640–1700 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007), 11–12, 43–71, 174–75Google Scholar. Compare the more cautious assessment of Nightingale, Carl, “Before Race Mattered: Geographies of the Color Line in Early Colonial Madras and New York,” American Historical Review 113, no. 1 (February 2008): 48–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

146 For racial whiteness as a creation of early Restoration Londoners, see Taylor, Gary, Buying Whiteness: Race, Culture, and Identity from Columbus to Hip Hop (New York, 2005)Google Scholar, especially 139–42, 261–67.

147 Unequivocally positive uses of “white” in the sample are Evening Post, 19 June 1722; London Evening Post, 10 February 1743 and 2 April 1745. A similarly small number might be construed this way; see London Gazette, 7 October 1680 and 11 November 1700; Post-Man, 8 March 1709; Daily Courant, 23 August 1721; Daily Journal, 17 July 1730. If we were also to factor in references to whiteness when describing foreigners, there are just two: Impartial Protestant Mercury, 16 December 1681; Daily Courant, 24 January 1711. None of the partial descriptions excluded from the sample allude to whiteness.

148 So Kathleen Chater has recently suggested that the number of Africans settled in England, including London, was modest and most were well integrated socially. Therefore “what happened in the colonies” in terms of a racially prejudiced subjugation was aberrational, Untold Histories: Black People in England and Wales during the Period of the British Slave Trade, c. 1660–1807 (Manchester, 2009), 85, and 35–73, 159–75Google Scholar.

149 Examples of colonial reporting include Daily Post, 27 November 1721; Daily Journal, 9 September 1723. See Molineux, Catherine, “Pleasures of the Smoke: ‘Black Virginians’ in Georgian London’s Tobacco Shops,” William and Mary Quarterly 64, no. 2 (April 2007): 327–56Google Scholar.

150 For instance, Habib, Imtiaz, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible (Aldershot, 2008)Google Scholar; French, Middle Sort, 81–86.

151 Daily Post, 19 August 1730.

152 Admittedly women make up a fraction of the sample—some 6 percent were subjects, even fewer named subscribers. The gendered double standards regarding publicity, employment, and crime itself all explain this underrepresentation. That said, there is no obvious slant to the coloring of feminine complexions. Women were as likely to be “brown” as opposed to “fair,” “black” rather than “pale.”

153 Stuurman, Siep, “François Bernier and the Invention of Racial Classification,” History Workshop Journal 50 (Autumn 2000): 1–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dawson, Mark, “‘Cast thy humble slough, and appeare fresh’: Reappraising the Advent of Early Modern English Whiteness, c. 1600–1750,” in Historicising Whiteness: Transnational Perspectives on the Construction of an Identity, ed. Boucher, Leigh, Carey, Jane, and Ellinghaus, Katherine (Melbourne, 2007), 355–62Google Scholar.

154 For example, Daily Gazetteer, 14 April 1738.

155 Daily Journal, 8 May 1734 and 13 January 1725.

156 For example, Zafran, Eric, “Saturn and the Jews,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 42 (1979): 16–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

157 London Gazette, 20 May 1686.

158 Wheeler, Roxann, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia, 2000), 6–11, 21–33, 94–101Google Scholar; Wahrman, Dror, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT, 2004), 83–153Google Scholar; Brown, Kathleen, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (New Haven, CT, 2009), 42–43, 68–69, 132–37, 357–64Google Scholar.

159 By contrast, scholars of the Renaissance prefer to consider the seventeenth century as critical for an emergent, modern racial hierarchy. See Floyd-Wilson, Mary, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge, 2003), 1–19Google Scholar; Iyengar, Sujata, Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England (Philadelphia, 2005), 10–15, 126–27, 220–28Google Scholar. Also notes 87, 141, and 145.

160 For this contrast between a premodern humoral mutability versus a modern racial fixity, see, e.g., Floyd-Wilson, English, 48–54; Iyengar, Shades, 99, 221–27; Wheeler, Complexion, 22–28; Brown, Foul Bodies, 9. For the cultural “shock” of the Americas, see Taylor, Whiteness, 81–82 and passim.