Wow, it has been half a year since my last post. Well, life gets in the way sometimes. It isn’t like I haven’t been doing a lot of writing anyway. In short, my wife is pregnant and we are expecting in about a month, we bought a house about a month ago, and I have been working furiously on my dissertation to try to get as much done as possible. It won’t be be done before the baby arrives, but I just have one chapter, an introduction, and revisions left. So there is that.
I recently (two days ago) made a rather significant discovery. I’ll have more on that in the future, but for now I’ll just say that Mabbott made a very serious attempt to control the news industry during his career as licenser. I would only call if half successful, but it was brilliant nonetheless. And it really pissed off Henry Walker.
So I now have chapters 1, 2, 3, and 5 completed. I am currently working on the chapter focusing on the Moderate and some of the other parliamentary newsbooks, looking for signs of news sharing or anything else that might be of interest. This is somewhat worn territory, but since my interests are more specific, it will hopefully still yield something useful. I am trying to track Mabbott’s political and career development in the period.
I will try to post something of what I’ve done for the other chapters in the next week or two. Maybe I’ll review some of the articles I’ve read recently. I had to do some thinking about the public sphere and its relation to my research, so that might interest somebody out there.
Gilbert Mabbott 