Essay On the Acta Diurna of the Old Romans (1740) as the Point of Origin in the Historiography of English Journalism

Abstract

It is widely believed that the first English works devoted to history of journalism, such as The Fourth Estate: Contributions Towards a History of Newspapers by F. K. Hunt (1850) and The History of British Journalism by A. Andrews (1859) appeared in the middle of the XIX century and were the result of the public interest originated at least a half century earlier. Contrary to this, this study suggests that the origin of this interest may be traced down to the essay On the Acta Diurna of the Old Romans, published as the preface to the annual volume of The Gentleman’s Magazine for the year 1740. Belonging to the pen of Philip Yorke, second Earl of Hardwicke (1720–1790), the essay is notable for several reasons. It includes probably the first English translation of two supposed extracts from Acta Diurna, widely known as «fragmenta Dodwelliana», but even more interesting feature of the essay is the attempt by P.Yorke to trace the origin of contemporary newspapers all the way down to the Acta Diurna of Ancient Rome, despite of all their acknowledged dissimilarities. Based on the idea posed by B. Anderson in the preface to the second edition of his book The Imagined Communities we put forward the hypothesis that the essay of P.York constituted the very first attempt in fulfilling the need for a new narrative of identity naturally resulted from rupture in the history of the English press during the last decades of the XVII century.