Early Modern Craigslist

While I was doing some work on early newsbooks at the Folger Shakespeare Library recently, one of my friends asked when papers first began to run classified and personal ads. As it happened, I had just taken some pictures of the London Gazette, from August 23, 1694, which is one of the first ones I've seen to include such ads.  As you can see in the picture below, the advertisements include a law dictionary, oil to ease the gout and other aches and pains, gunpowder for sale, several offers of rewards for the return of stolen horses, and a lady who lost a "long scarf, lace Tippet, a thin hood, a girdle," and some other items when she left them in a coach driven by a "little man with Pockholes in his face."

As you may be able to see, behind this page of the printed newsletter is another, manuscript newsletter. Interestingly, the two forms persisted together -- the printed version carrying news available to all, the manuscript version containing the most recent news (since it was quicker to write than to set print) as well as items that were considered to politically dangerous to print. Manuscript newsletters never contain classified ads -- presumably, you knew exactly who you were sending them to, or at least wanted to create a sense of intimacy, so it didn't make sense to send a message into the great unknown in the way these classifieds do.  Only in print, where the audience is imagined as truly large and unknown, did these ads emerge.

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