About The Craftsman

The Craftsman

The Craftsman was a British opposition newspaper published in London from 1726 to 1752. It was established by Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, and William Pulteney at the start of their determined campaign of opposition to the administration of Sir Robert Walpole, and it was edited by Nicholas Amhurst, its chief contributor, under the pseudonym "Caleb D'Anvers". Also known at various points as The Country Journal or, The Craftsman, and as The Craftsman: Being a Critique on the Times, it became the longest-running and most famous opposition periodical of its period — the most effective journalistic attack on Walpole's ministry and a landmark of eighteenth-century political journalism.

The paper published letters and essays from Bolingbroke, and Bolingbroke and the Patriot Whigs used it to oppose Walpole and his Court Whig faction. Its campaign lasted a quarter of a century, outliving Walpole's fall in 1742 by a decade, and its printer, Richard Francklin, was arrested eight times in its first five years for the seditious libels it was accused of printing.

Foundation in December 1726

The Craftsman was founded in December 1726, in the political circumstances created by Walpole's long ascendancy. Walpole, often regarded as Britain's first de facto prime minister, had built a system of parliamentary management that his opponents denounced as corruption. Bolingbroke, the brilliant Tory exile returned from France, and Pulteney, the leader of the opposition in the House of Commons — whose supporters were estimated by foreign observers at nearly a third of the House — combined to create a paper that would carry their case to the public week after week.

Contemporary diplomatic correspondence recorded the launch plainly: in December 1726 the opposition had started the Craftsman, a paper chiefly inspired by Bolingbroke. The timing was deliberate. Parliament was to assemble in January 1727, and the new paper gave the opposition a permanent organ between sessions as well as during them.

Caleb D'Anvers and Nicholas Amhurst

The paper's presiding persona was Caleb D'Anvers, the fictional author through whom its editor, Nicholas Amhurst, addressed the reader. Amhurst, a satirical journalist, was the Craftsman's chief contributor and editor, and he ran the paper until his masters sought accommodation with the government in 1737. The persona allowed the paper's many contributors — politicians, essayists and wits writing behind a single mask — to speak with one voice.

The paper's writers were claimed to have included early satirists such as Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, although this was disputed, and the uncertainty was itself characteristic of The Craftsman: it was a collective enterprise of the opposition's literary talent, published under cover of a single invented craftsman who could never be produced in court.

The argument of the paper

From its earliest numbers The Craftsman developed the defence on which it would rely for twenty-five years: that it attacked vice and corruption in general, not particular persons. In its second number, dated 9 December 1726, it conceded that the practice of libelling was a thing of pernicious consequence, properly punished by the laws of all civilised societies — but argued that the misfortune was that neither the nature nor the forms of libel were ascertained by law, leaving patriots exposed to punishment as infamous libellers in bad reigns.

In number 31, in March 1727, it insisted that it had no other design than to expose vice in general, without alluding to particular persons. Writing as Caleb D'Anvers in number 88, in March 1728, Amhurst argued that so long as he confined himself to general expressions, or wrapped his invectives against vice in dreams, fables, parallels and allegories, he remained within the proper bounds of a satirist and should be exempt from prosecution. The argument was ingenious, and the paper built an entire rhetoric upon it: historical parallels, fictional dialogues and allegories whose application to Walpole's ministry every reader could make for himself, while the paper formally denied that any application existed.

Bolingbroke's essays and the Patriot opposition

Bolingbroke's letters and essays in The Craftsman gave the opposition a political philosophy as well as a newspaper. His writings for the paper attacked the Court Whig system — the septennial Parliament, the standing army, the excise and the web of placemen and pensioners through which, the opposition charged, Walpole governed — and set against it the ideal of a patriot politics standing above party. His Dissertation upon Parties, the work John Adams later praised in the highest terms, grew out of the same Bolingbrokean argument that The Craftsman had carried since 1726: that faction and corruption, not the old party divisions, were the real enemies of the constitution.

Pulteney's parliamentary opposition and Bolingbroke's journalism reinforced one another. The Craftsman kept the opposition's case before the coffee-house public while Parliament was not sitting, and gave the disparate groups opposed to Walpole — Patriot Whigs, Tories and independents — a common text.

Richard Francklin and the libel prosecutions

The legal risk of the enterprise fell, as usual, on the printer. Richard Francklin, The Craftsman's printer, was arrested eight times between 1727 and 1731, tried twice and convicted once on charges of seditious libel. His trials became landmarks in the developing law of the press: Francklin's trial in 1731 was among the first in which explicit appeals to a broad view of press liberty were made to a jury, in a line of argument later famous in the Zenger trial in New York in 1735 and the Junius trials of 1770.

The prosecutions shaped the paper's style. Because Crown lawyers increasingly subjected prosecuted texts to line-by-line scrutiny of ambiguous words and literary devices, writers determined to attack men in power required more subtle rhetorical weapons — the dreams, fables, parallels and allegories that Caleb D'Anvers defended as the satirist's proper tools. The Craftsman's indirection was thus not merely literary taste but legal strategy, developed under repeated prosecution.

Rivalries and the essay-paper world

The Craftsman operated in a crowded and unscrupulous market for political print. In April 1740 the opposition essay-paper The Champion complained that The Craftsman had lifted its advertisement and ten news paragraphs verbatim — a reminder that even allied opposition papers competed jealously, and that the copying of news matter between papers was common enough to be a public grievance. Government journalists, for their part, attacked The Craftsman on what it called the old beaten fallacy: that its papers were written against particular ministers now in power, whereas it maintained they were directed against vice and corruption in general.

The fall of Walpole and the paper's later years

Walpole resigned in 1742, after more than twenty years in power, and the opposition that The Craftsman had sustained since 1726 achieved its object. The paper nevertheless continued for a further decade, until 1752 — a measure of how completely it had become an institution rather than merely a campaign weapon. Amhurst himself had ceased to run it in 1737, when, as one scholarly account put it, his masters sought accommodation with the government; the paper that survived into the 1750s addressed a political world in which the great Walpole controversy was already history.

Its final closure in 1752 ended a run of twenty-six years, by far the longest of any opposition paper of the age. The collected editions of The Craftsman, reprinted and read for decades, carried its essays into libraries across Britain and America.

Legacy

The Craftsman was remembered as the model of the opposition journal: the paper that proved a ministry could be fought, week in and week out, in print, and that a fictional editor's persona could unite a coalition of real politicians and writers. Its influence ran through the century — through the jury arguments first heard in its printer's trials, through Bolingbroke's political writings, which American founders read with care, and through the very idea of a patriot opposition that it did so much to create.

Scholars continued to study it closely: Simon Varey's examination of the paper in Prose Studies, Michael Harris's study of London newspapers in the age of Walpole, and A. W. Ward's account of The Craftsman and its contributors in the Cambridge History of English and American Literature all treated it as central to the origins of the modern English press. Among defunct newspapers, few left a documentary record so rich, or a reputation so deliberately constructed by the paper itself.