Leona Rostenberg and the career of “Robert Stephens, Messenger of the Press”

Conditions of access to primary materials have always shaped the scholarship conducted in archives. Today, the increasing availability of whole archives through digital subscription services presents opportunities to reexamine, and often to extend, the materials drawn on by earlier generations of scholars. This bibliographical note provides a case in point and traces the sources of Leona Rostenberg’s classic account of the career of “Robert Stephens, Messenger of the Press” (1955) so as to provide new evidence that may let us redate the beginning of Stephens’s career, adding to our understanding of how two roles that have often since been conflated, Messenger in Ordinary and Messenger of the Press, were understood at the time. Through a new digital search of the archives in which Rostenberg’s pioneering scholarship took her in person—the State Papers and the archives of the Stationers’ Company, London—this note argues that we can see the creation of the role of Messenger of the Press as a specific initiative of Roger L’Estrange in the period at the start of 1679 in which control of the press was increasingly lacking; a transcript of TNA SP 29/391 f.140 is included. It seeks to confirm that suggestion by drawing on a newly identified petition made by Stephens in 1686 in the correspondence of Archbishop Sancroft, now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. In concluding, this note briefly identifies future avenues for research in the archival detail of press control in the 1680s and 1690s.