Cover not available
Part of
Diachronic Developments in English News Discourse
Edited by Minna Palander-Collin, Maura Ratia and Irma Taavitsainen
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 6] 2017
► pp. 61–79

Chapter 4
Contemporary observations on the attention value and selling power of English print advertisements (1700–1760)

One of the most distinctive features of the early eighteenth-century English press was the substantial increase in advertisements. This increase in advertising did not go unnoticed by the leading writers of the day. Addison, Steele, Fielding and Johnson all comment on advertising discourse and its typographical presentation. This contribution analyses these contemporaries’ views within a theoretical framework that Leech (1966) and Gotti (2005) propose in relation to the communicative features and language of advertising discourse. Two of these characteristics are Attention Value and Selling Power. The analysis of eighteenth-century advertising is supported by reference to contemporary advertisements in the Newcastle Courant.
Keywords: eighteenth-century English press, advertisements, contemporary observations, Newcastle Courant
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Periodical print advertising (1620–1760)
  • 3.Data
  • 4.Research Framework
  • 5.Attention Value
  • 6.Selling Power
  • 7.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 29 August 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.6.04bro
References (22)
References
Online resources
The British Newspaper Online Archive. [URL]. (10 June 2016).
The London Gazette. [URL] (10 June 2016).
Secondary sources
Black, Jeremy. 1987. The English press in the eighteenth century. London: Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Brownlees, Nicholas. 2014/2011. The language of periodical news in seventeenth-century England. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
Elliott, Blanche. 1962. A history of English advertising. London: Business Publications Limited.Google Scholar
Ferdinand, Christine. 1997. Benjamin Collins and the provincial newspaper trade in the eighteenth century. Oxford: Clarendon Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fries, Udo. 1997. Electarum mirabile: Praise in 18th-century medical advertisements. In Jan Aarts, Inge de Mönnink & Herman Wekker (eds.), Studies in English language and teaching: In honour of Flor Aarts, 57–73. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
. 2007. Foreign words in early English newspapers. In Stefan Dollinger, Julia Hüttner & Ute Smit (eds.), Tracing English through time: Explorations in language variation. In honour of Herbert Schendl on the occasion of his 65th Birthday, 115–132. Vienna: Braumüller.Google Scholar
Gieszinger, Sabine. 2001. The history of advertising language: The advertisements in The Times from 1788 to 1966. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Görlach, Manfred. 2001. Eighteenth-century English. Heidelberg: Karl Winter Universitätsverlag.Google Scholar
. 2002. A linguistic history of advertising, 1700–1890. In Teresa Fanego, Belén Méndez-Naya & Elena Seoane (eds.), Sounds, words, texts and change, 83–104. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
. 2004. Text types and the history of English. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gotti, Maurizio. 2005. Advertising discourse in 18th-century English newspapers. In Janne Skaffari, Matti Peikola, Ruth Carroll, Risto Hiltunen & Brita Wårvik (eds.), Opening windows on texts and discourse of the past, 23–38. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Harris, Bob. 1996. Politics and the rise of the press: Britain and France, 1620–1800. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Keller, Caren auf dem. 2006. Changes in textual structures of book advertisements in the ZEN corpus. In Antoinette Renouf & Andrew Kehoe (eds.), The changing face of corpus linguistics, 143–162. Amsterdam: Rodopi. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey N. 1966. English in advertising: A linguistic study of advertising in Great Britain. London: Longmans.Google Scholar
Percy, Carol. 2012. Early advertising and newspapers as sources of sociolinguistic investigation. In Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy & Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre (eds.), The handbook of historical sociolinguistics, 191–210. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pettegree, Andrew. 2014. The invention of news: How the world came to know about itself. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Raymond, Joad. 1999. The newspaper, public opinion, and the public sphere in the seventeenth century. In Joad Raymond (ed.), News, newspapers, and society in early modern Britain, 109–140. London: Frank Cass.Google Scholar
Sairio, Anni & Minna Palander-Collin. 2012. The reconstruction of prestige patterns in language history. In Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy & Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre (eds.), The handbook of historical sociolinguistics, 626–638. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tierney, James. 2001. Advertisements for books in London newspapers, 1760–1785. Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 30(1): 153–164.Google Scholar
Walker, Robin B. 1973. Advertising in London newspapers, 1650–1750. Business History 15(2): 112–130.Google Scholar
Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Brownlees, Nicholas
2021. “Just Published”: Advertising Books of Instruction, Misfortune, South Sea Affairs, and Entertainment inThe Post Boy(1721). English Studies 102:7 ► pp. 901 ff. DOI logo
Peikola, Matti
2020. Chapter 8. Patterns of reader involvement on sixteenth-century English title pages, with special reference to second-person pronouns. In Voices Past and Present - Studies of Involved, Speech-related and Spoken Texts [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 97], ► pp. 114 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 25 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.