Sixpenny State? Cheap Print and Cultural-political Citizenship in the Onset of Modernity

Informed by integrational linguistics and effective semiotics, this essay converges histories of the production and circulation of print, of the social and cultural meaning of money, of reading, and of cultural citizenship. It does so to suggest that, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, certain kinds of print could be deployed by their purchasers, readers, and users to create certain kinds of cultural-political citizenship in the onset of modernity and formation of the modern state. Modernity is here understood as a contested discourse comprising self-reflexive personal identity able to engage in “pure” or ostensibly disinterested relationships of intimacy, conjugality, domesticity, and sociability. These in turn supposedly enabled success in managing modernity’s intensified relations of risk and trust, more complex abstract systems from finance to government, ever-changing chronotopes or configurations of time-space from home through “nation” to empire, and pressures to disembed from customary identities, relations, and locations and re-embed in new, unfamiliar, and ever-changing modern ones. “Cultural citizenship” has been used since the 1980s to indicate meanings made by certain people from and through social and cultural practices, including “consumption,” often as a basis for larger claims to political citizenship and other rights. For the onset of modernity, recent scholarship has focused more on political print’s role in assembling of a reformist agenda and “public sphere” than on cheap print’s wider uses in creating such a sense of cultural citizenship in formation of the modern constitutional state. There are various ways of taxonomizing print, but to explore such uses this essay considers print less in relation to authors, themes, ideas, innovations, engagements, reception, reviews, and so on than to leading producers and likely purchasers and users of print around a major “price point.” This was a price corresponding to certain purchasers’ material ability and socio-culturally established willingness to pay. During the onset of modernity, and indeed for generations before and after, one important such price point for a print object was sixpence. The United Kingdom’s 1971 transition to decimal currency soon flushed from English a pejorative meaning of the adjective “sixpenny” going back to the sixteenth century at least, as “worth only sixpence; paltry, petty” (OED). Such usage is found throughout the eighteenth century. The sixpence was a piece of money, when a labourer’s weekly wage would be five to ten shillings (or ten to twenty sixpences). Further, the epithet “sixpenny” could be merely descriptive, indicating a certain quantity, kind, size, or extent of goods or services, such as sixpenny worth of punch, a sixpenny brick, a sixpenny loaf, or a sixpenny coach ride. But money’s meaning is always social and cultural. The sixpenny price point was deeply imbricated in social and cultural difference and hierarchy, and so the descriptive could easily become pejorative. A sixpenny loaf was a common allotment to the poor or incarcerated. A “sixpenny trull” was the cheapest and implicitly most wretched of prostitutes. A “sixpenny fardle” was a peddler’s bundle of cheap goods. A “sixpenny ordinary” was a cheap eating and drinking house. A “sixpenny pricker” was a mountebank doctor. A “sixpenny bargain” was an insignificant commercial transaction. A “sixpenny pamphlet” was a common eighteenth- and nineteenth-century print object, but the phrase was often used disparagingly. With the crisis of the American and French Revolutionary wars and proliferation of controversial print alongside perceived growth in the reading public, the pejorative sense of “sixpenny” was increasingly applied to politics and print, together. Many among social elites came to associate sixpenny print with popularization, vulgarization, and demagoguery, indicating growing anxiety at convergence of increased literacy, cheap print, and plebeian political mobilization whether “loyalist” or “reformist.” …