British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

While eighteenth-century print media in essence rested on the same technical apparatus as in previous centuries – letterpress printing, woodcuts, and intaglio prints – the growth in quantity created a media revolution. The effect was a qualitative shift in terms of literacy, growth of newspapers, the spread of images and distribution of knowledge, but also of misinformation and propaganda. In this volume eight scholars from three continents investigates various aspects of media and mediation in the history, culture, and politics of the eighteenth century.

Abstract This article provides an overview of the social history of the eighteenth‐century London subscription masquerade through a critical analysis of quantitative and qualitative data collected from a cohort study of newspapers in the Burney Collection. An examination of trends in prevalence, financial requirements and use of spatial and social boundaries indicates that the masquerade operated as a space of elite sociability. This new work on the masquerade provides a break from the traditional depiction of the entertainment as carnivalesque cultural trope and challenges the existing scholarship on leisure history and the history of consumer culture during this period.