The Origins of a Free Press in Prerevolutionary ... - Web Publishing

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in England that the colony had a shortage of Bibles. Typical homes contained only
a Bible and perhaps a book of prayer, while more extensive collections were found
only in the studies of the learned elites. A few rare personal libraries included legal
and medical books, newspapers, and bound periodicals from England. Discourse on
many topics—from literary to professional to political—was likely to be common
only among the few who read regularly and broadly. As Warner suggested, print
culture was an important precursor to such civic debate, in which literary and
religious conversations typically prefaced political discussions. In early Virginia, such
discourse was normally limited to the elites. 12
The spread of printed works and the ability to read had brought
revolutionary changes to England, including emigration to the new world. When
German Johannes Gutenberg had introduced the printing press to Europe in the
mid-fifteenth century, the combination of the western alphabet and moveable
metal type led to a huge increase in the number of available books. 13 By the
seventeenth century, men and women of all economic strata in England—not just
the elites—were known to read. 14 Elizabeth Eisenstein described the printing press
12 Calhoun Winton, “Eighteenth Century Southern Book Trade,” in Amory and Hall,
Colonial Book, 242. Warner, Letters of the Republic, 1-41. Hall, “Chesapeake in the Seventeenth
Century,” 65-75, including estimate, quoting Philip Alexander Bruce, Institutional History of
Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Putnam, 1910), 1:440-441. Richard Beal Davis, A
Colonial Southern Bookshelf: Reading in the Eighteenth Century (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1979).
13 Of course, Gutenberg did not invent printing per se. He invented a printing press with
interchangeable metal type around 1450. Printing had existed for centuries in Korea and China.
T. F. Carter, “Paper and Block Printing—From China to Europe,” 83-94 and Walter Ong,
“Print, Space, and Closure,” 102-113, both in David Crowley, and Paul Heyer, eds.,
Communication in History: Technology, Culture, Society (New York: Longman, 1991). George
Gordon, The Communications Revolution: A History of Mass Media in the United States (New York:
Hastings House, 1977), 1-16.
14 Calhoun Winton, “Richard Steele, Journalist—and Journalism,” in Donovan Bond, and
W. Reynolds McLeod, eds., Newsletters to Newspapers: Eighteenth-Century Journalism, Papers
Presented at A Bicentennial Symposium at West Virginia University, Morgantown, West Virginia
March 31-April 2, 1976 (Morgantown, WV: School of Journalism, 1977), 23-29.