Walk down onto the Thames foreshore in central London at low tide and you’ll see many things you might expect from two millennia of urban history. The shoreline is a broken mass of bricks, roof tiles and potsherds, the detritus left by countless generations of Londoners and numerous wholesale reconstructions of the city itself. But there is one set of common objects which might surprise the uninitiated. Small pieces of lead typeface are scattered across the foreshore almost the whole length of the modern city in a bewildering variety of fonts and sizes. Amongst the community of ‘mudlarks’ searching the foreshore, there are various apocryphal stories as to how so many pieces of type found their way into the river. Some suggest they were dropped into drains by lazy print shop workers who were unwilling to sort them into cases and others, perhaps more plausibly, believe they were simply washed away during the cleaning of ink-stained print equipment. Regardless, the sheer number of these overlooked objects points to the fact that they have been one of the most significant enablers of radical change in the last three centuries.
By the early seventeenth century, the printing press – and knowledge of what it could do – were well-entrenched in cities like London, but the technology’s radical potential had yet to be fully realised. The ideas of the Reformation had largely spread via the printed word in the previous century, and civic authorities were not blind to the combination of readily available radical literature and around 25% literacy nationwide – roughly 10% higher than Scotland or France and set to rise further. As the number of presses and printers grew, with associated potential for unregulated, subversive publications, each press was required to gain a royal licence to operate. Moreover, the technology itself remained expensive. At the time of the Reformation the number of licensed printers sat only in the thirties across the whole city, and even accounting for numerous unlicensed print shops, there were simply not enough printed books and pamphlets in circulation to spread beyond a small, educated and relatively wealthy urban class.
It took until the 1620s for equipment to become affordable to more social groups, and the outbreak of civil war in the 1640s for licensing and censorship to effectively break down, with the Court of the Star Chamber – the royal court responsible for trying transgressors – shut down by Parliament. The result was that small print shops were now able to print and circulate with comparative impunity. Radicals such as Richard Overton and John Lilburn took full advantage of these new freedoms with pamphlets criticising both sides in the war. Short political pamphlets would be sold on street corners and a thriving second hand trade grew around them, with many being exported from major cities such as London to be read and displayed in rural communities. Movements such as the egalitarian Levellers, which might otherwise have been starved of political oxygen, thrived within this system and soon posed a large enough threat to the Commonwealth government that they were suppressed. Ultimately this free-for-all was not to last, with the rules being reimposed in 1644 and Charles II implementing the 1662 Licensing Act. But the genie was out of the bottle for printers and their equipment. The nature of the trade, with small shops producing regular, independent content and manned only by a few workers, made it near – impossible to retroactively police and the Act had lapsed by the 1680s. London’s printer’s type had won its first major battle.
Political pamphlets, for all their popularity, were a blunt instrument, and by the start of the eighteenth-century printers in major cities like London had turned their equipment to a rapidly growing medium: newspapers. Having perhaps recognised the destabilising potential of pamphlets the government now attempted to monopolise print output instead by establishing its own regular newspaper in 1665, soon becoming known as the London Gazette. But controlling the public narrative around news and associated political thought was not to be so easy. Urban centres, particularly London, were becoming the perfect environment to use print equipment in a subversive and politically radical way. Environments like coffeehouses provided open, relatively affordable fora in which a wide range of urban (though almost always male) professionals could discuss current affairs. It was a perfect environment for radical printing and publications like the Daily Courant, the Flying Post and the Post-Boy met this demand for news mainly with recycled coverage of foreign wars. Print shops remained small – and whilst this restricted each one’s capacity, the small number of staff and single key investment – type and a press – allowed unprecedented numbers of small shops to open with daily and weekly regular publications. The method and structure of urban printing therefore enabled an enormous diversity in what was being published and forced new tactics from the authorities seeking to control messaging. Criminal prosecution, targeting printers themselves over their equipment, became a key government tool.
Nathaniel Mist was one Londoner who exemplified this new age. A fervent Jacobite at a time when prominent sympathisers were often tried and imprisoned, he ran a succession of small newspapers including Mist’s Weekly Journal. The Journal used printing technology to disseminate an anti-government narrative beyond Jacobite circles, occasionally telling allegorical stories of tyrant kings and using printers’ common focus on foreign countries to make oblique attacks on the British administration. Mist himself was prosecuted on various occasions, the government choosing to target printers with accusations of libel and high taxes on materials rather than attempting to revive any licensing process. After being pilloried, imprisoned and eventually forced to flee to France Mist’s presses were destroyed, seen as a means to finally silence him. But the ready availability of presses and type meant such actions against individual printers failed to stem the demand for news and opinions which continued to feed the industry. By 1776 London was home to 53 regular newspaper with a wide range of views and across Britain, over eleven million copies of newspapers were sold in 1767. Radicals like Mist appeared to be beating the system.
The print shops of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in cities such as London paved the way for the free and often radical press of the modern era. The nineteenth century saw several legal and technical changes which allowed printers to vastly increase output: the abolition of stamp duty on printers’ materials, the 1835 Libel Act allowing provable truth as a defence, and the invention of the steam-powered printing press. This last innovation, patented in London and first purchased by the Times in 1814, allowed 1100 pages an hour to be produced, making information cheaper and more accessible than ever. Although authorities continued to push against radical publications, full control of print shops had become effectively impossible, and London’s Fleet Street became synonymous with the press. Humble printer’s type had, over the centuries, proved its ability to topple regimes, resist persecution and influence public opinion – with more recent innovations such as Iran’s National Information Network strongly reminiscent of the first efforts to licence presses. Perhaps it is not so surprising after all that it litters the banks of the Thames.