Not so very long ago, critics and historians were maintaining with increasing confidence that the system of patronage which had operated time out of mind was superseded in the later seventeenth century by a new relationship between author and publisher. It is likely that the publication in 1989 of the English translation of Jürgen Habermas's hugely influential The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (first published in German in 1962) contributed to this new-found confidence. Certainly, the awesome assurance with which Habermas articulated the thesis that a ‘bourgeois public sphere’ first emerged in Britain ‘at the turn of the eighteenth century’ can scarcely be overstated:

For a number of reasons, however, the notion that the system of patronage was superseded between 1680 and 1750 has fallen under increasingly intense scrutiny in recent years. Attention has been drawn to certain inadequacies in the thesis that the rise of the professional writer was facilitated by the expiry of the Printing or Licensing Act in 1695 (13 & 14 Car 2, c. 33), followed by the passing of the first ‘Copyright’ Act in 1709 (8 Anne, c. 8). While it is true that, after 1695, writings were no longer subject to pre-printing censorship, it is important to stress that ‘it is nonsense to suppose that England suddenly acquired a free press in anything like the sense in which the concept was understood in the liberal democracies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’.