Recent years have witnessed a heightened interest in eighteenth-century literary journalism and popular culture. This book provides an account of the early periodical as a literary genre and traces the development of journalism from the 1690s to the 1760s, covering a range of publications by well-known writers and obscure hacks. The book's central theme is the struggle of eighteenth-century journalists to attain literary respectability and the strategies by which editors sought to improve the literary and social status of their publications.