Fake News: Fictions in a Newspaper Frame in Renton Nicholson’s Town

• Arthur Charlesworth

Lennard J. Davis identifies a “unique attitude towards fact and fiction” that distin¬guishes Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724) from earlier narratives. Drawing on Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis (1974), Davis shows how Defoe’s preface frames his fiction as fact. Readers are compelled to “split [their] perception [into] two”, creating “the knowing reader who winks conspiratorially and the gullible, belief-suspending reader”. In the following article, I reapply Davis’s model to explore the overlooked, London-centric Town (1837–42) newspaper. Legislative constraints and the editorial strategies of Renton Nicholson (1809–61) meant this superficially factual format framed unusually large amounts of fiction. Beyond this mirroring of Defoe’s prefatory fabrication, the Town’s content was itself defined by competing and often contradictory claims of veracity. While broadening the newspaper’s appeal, this elevated the individual, knowing reader – defined against the gullible other – capable of navigating the Town’s fabrications and those of the city it represented.