Nathaniel Mist

Nathaniel Mist (died 30 September 1737) was an 18th-century British printer and journalist whose Mist's Weekly Journal was the central, most visible, and most explicit opposition newspaper to the whig administrations of Robert Walpole. Where other opposition papers would defer, Mist's would explicitly attack the government of Walpole and the entire House of Hanover. He was a Jacobite of strong convictions and pugnacious determination who employed various authors writing under pseudonyms, from Lewis Theobald to Daniel Defoe, and was frequently tried by the government for sedition.

His early years are obscure, and he first enters the public record and public eye as the owner of a successful printing press in 1716. As owner and master of the press, he began immediately to publish his own journals. His first effort, The Citizen, ran to only nine issues in 1716. His second effort was to take over Weekly Journal, or, Saturday's Post in December 1716. This would later, in May 1725, become Mist's Weekly Journal (the Weekly Journal published by Mist). In 1717, he attempted Wednesday's Journal, but that ran to only five issues, and The Entertainer in 1718 ran successfully to 38 issues before being taken over by another press. Mist's Weekly Journal, however, was an enormous success and reflected the editor's personal political vision.

Nathaniel Mist's paper was frequently prosecuted, as was its owner and editor, for libel, and yet it published successfully from 1716 to 1737 (without Mist himself for the last three years). Mist was able to stay in business, and at liberty, generally, by being very aware of the line between the allowable and the prohibited speech. He would discuss current scandals, literature, and events frankly, but when the subject was political or touching the affairs of the peerage, he would employ allegory or fictional history. He would print authors talking about lands far away, for example, but readers would understand that the land was actually England. He would have an account of a particular episode in history, such as the Restoration, and imply, of course, that the return of the Stuarts was appropriate. He would publish an account of famous regicides, where the king was a tyrant, and imply that the public needed to take action against the Hanoverian "usurper." Fictions of corrupt ministers would be commentaries on Robert Walpole. Informative stories about how pirates organize their ships would be an analogy to Walpole's running of the British House of Commons. Furthermore, as the government found out (and complained of in 1722), every time they arrested and tried Mist, the popularity of his Journal would increase. There is no way to know what Mist's average weekly circulation was, but it may have been around 8,000 - 10,000 copies a week (Chapman 379).

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