Albers Commentary

Albers Commentary

Justine Albers

Anderson's "Imagined Communities" and the relationship between the newspaper and the novel inspired me to create a mock 18th century newspaper cover page for my experimental description. Sir Herbert Croft's epistolary novel includes a series of fictional letters between Martha Ray, the mistress of the Earl of Sandwich, and her lover, James Hackman, who ends up murdering her. Though the characters in the novel were real people, the letters are not. However, during my research, I learned that at the time of publication, many people did at first believe the book contained the actual correspondence of Ray and Hackman.
Given this information, and the fact that many 18th century novels were released serially in newspapers or magazines,  I thought it would be interesting to represent the novel in the different sections of the paper, and to think about what kind of "imagined community" I could create with this type of representation. The headlining article is meant to represent Croft's presentation of the novel to the public. I follow this with an obituary for Martha Ray, and then a fictional letter to the editor from the Earl of Sandwich expressing concern that the public was reading the letters as though they were real. I also found an newspaper clipping anouncement about the publication of the novel at the front of the digital facsimile and included this, as well as another about the publication of the memoirs of Hackman (again, fictional) by another author that I found online. Finally, I have an excerpt from one of the letters in the novel as well as the poem included in the dedication in the last column of my paper.

Inspired by newspaper clippings I found at the front of the digital facsimile, I have created a mock-18th century newspaper cover page to emulate the relationship between the newspaper and the novel and further explore Anderson's idea of imagined communities that are created through literary works.