The 18th century was a scandalous age; no one disputed that. People behaved in flamboyant ways and others eagerly observed it, read, and gossiped about it. The juicy on-dits made the rounds of the fashionable world and trickled down to hoi polloi in no time. Even the illiterate and poor—those who couldn't afford newspapers—could view the graphic cartoons posted for sale in the print shop windows illustrating the outrageous antics of the bon ton. It was a public and dirty trough, filled to the brim daily by the gossip columnists and caricaturists, the Georgian paparazzi. (Prices for these caricatures started at sixpence.) Those who could read enjoyed the thinly-veiled remarks in the newspapers—every newspaper reported at least a line or two of gossip—or more detailed articles in one of the period's many burgeoning general interest magazines.

One of the most successful print shops had an intimate connection to arguably the most outrageous of these caricaturists, James Gilray. This was the shop of Hannah Humphrey, with whom Gilray had been living since 1793, first in Old Bond Street and later on New Bond Street the next year, and finally on St. James's Street beginning in 1797. Gilray's relationship with Humphrey was exclusive both personally and professionally. His Hannah Humphrey's Print Shop, or, Very Slippery Weather, drawn in 1808 and showing a gentleman falling in front of a bow window full of Gilray caricatures, insured immortality to both the little print shop and to the daring artist.

Women are routinely and carelessly tarred with the gossip brush, but London gossip seems to have had its start in the men's coffee-houses. Loose talk originating there, according to Roger Wilkes in his Scandal: A Scurrilous History of Gossip (2003) migrated to the tabloids for publication, Most newspaper gossip columnists masked their identities with pen names else they faced being attacked in the streets, as was Dr. James Hill, a newspaper personality almost on par with Henry Bate, the controversial editor of several gossip-filled London newspapers. Hill wrote under the nom de plume of "The Inspector," producing a gossip column for the London Advertiser, and Literary Gazette. He was described as "a rakish figure in his early thirties [who] criss-crossed fashionable London in a magnificent chariot, picking up paragraphs and sowing mischief in his daily column…He made many enemies along the way, and his column was…littered with retractions and apologies."

Captain Philip Thicknesse—a writer of travel and gardening pieces—became another notable gossip columnist, but, unlike Bate and Hill—whom people could identify—he was well hidden behind the pseudonym "A Wanderer" in the St. James's Chronicle and "Polyxena" in the Gentleman's Magazine. Thicknesse not only wrote truly scurrilous material but was a blackmailer; he was paid handsomely to keep gossip from his columns. Even the unscrupulous Henry Bate thought him no gentleman but a "hoary offender [who] has menaced public men [and] held numerous families in apprehension and horror."

Even James Boswell, the noted biographer of his friend Dr. Samuel Johnson, stooped to write gossip between 1777 and 1783 for the London Magazine, under the pseudonym of "The Hypochondriack." Wilkes described Boswell's columns as akin to modern gossip writing, as they were "brief and chatty…often dashed off at great speed, against a deadline, or thrown together from scraps of things he had read. He was interested in ideas and oddities alike [and his] columns read like information being delivered…as though Boswell himself, glass in hand, had met the reader at a party packed with his acquaintances."

A great source for gossip of the anonymous sort was the tete-a-tetes feature—full name, Histories of the Tete-a-Tetes—in the Town and Country Magazine. They were, in fact, THE most popular feature of the magazine. Town and Country Magazine was published by Archibald Hamilton, Jr., to whom their concept was attributed. Archibald Hamilton, Sr., his father, was the editor of the influential Middlesex Journal and evening advertiser. The tete-a-tetes were said to have been edited by a man named Beaufort, who held court at a coffee house near to where the Town and Country Magazine was printed, at St. John's Gate in London. Beaufort was said to have been aided and abetted by a mysterious Italian Count named Caricoli or Carraccioli. (Read Cindy McCreery's essay, Keeping up with the Bon Ton: the Tete-a-Tete series in the the Town and Country Magazine, for a full and detailed history of this tabloid phenomenon.)

The features—there were to be 312 tetes-a-tetes in total, and they ceased publication after the August 1795 issue—were compiled from information sent in by what today would be called stringers and who were then termed "correspondents," and were of doubtful accuracy at best, again, not so very unlike what surfaces in today's gossip sheets. Some were probably revenge pieces, such as the one that purported to detail a love affair between Horace Walpole and the actress Kitty Clive, but was instead full of innuendo about Walpole's possible homosexuality. (This one was thought to have been written by the poet Thomas Chatterton as payback for something Walpole had said about him.)

Servants were also a likely source of information about their employers and may have been bribed by these correspondents. McCreery suggests in her essay that a number of the correspondents could have been women, who were protected by the anonymity of the series. As with contemporary scandal and gossip, these juicy articles were read avidly and discussed widely, not only in London but in the smaller cities and into the far-flung provinces.

The scandalous doings of the ton supplied more than enough fodder for the series. It was an editor's and printer's dream. The editors boasted that monthly sales exceeded 11,000 copies and that—through shared copies—the readership was at least 30,000. (McCreery thinks a more reasonable estimate would be 2,000-3,000 copies and a readership of almost 5,000, but all this is hard to prove.) Two vis-à-vis engravings of a gentleman and his mistress normally illustrated the article, and these engravings were actually collected by readers, who cut them out and pasted them into albums, much as we would collect pictures into photo albums. (A vis-à-vis was also a kind of carriage in which the passengers faced each other.)

More aware readers noted the subtle body language between those depicted in the vis-à-vis engravings. Were they smiling at each other and gazing fondly, eye-to-eye, or was one of them looking away, distracted, or, worse, frowning? There were all kinds of attitudes displayed which could be interpreted as clues to the relationship. In the engraving illustrating the piece on one such couple whose relationship came to a sorry end, the adulterous wife Grace Dalrymple Elliott and her paramour, the equally married Arthur Annesley, Lord Valentia, Grace is shown in profile looking at the viscount, who is full face, but blatantly ignoring her. In a later article showing the same Mrs. Elliott with her new lover, George James, Lord Cholmondeley, they're both in three-quarter view, but, while she's turned towards him, he's looking away from her. Again, clues to where the relationship is going are clearly given by the lack of communication implied.

Political and personal satires often went hand-in-hand, as the line between politics and personal lives in the 18th century was at all times thinly drawn. Not so very different from today, when politicians' private lives are also fodder for the masses. McCreery asserts in her article that:

"These three aspects of the tete-a-tetes—its topicality, its appeal to both fashionable and middle-class elements of society, and its place within an ongoing commentary on gender roles and relations between the sexes—explain its remarkable success in the highly changeable world of gossip columns, and reflect eighteenth century society's preoccupation with comparing individuals' private lives with their public characters."

Contemporary literature—plays and novels—did not ignore these pervasive and popular gossip features promulgated by Town and Country Magazine. In his play School For Scandal, the playwright Sheridan has his character Snake rightly say of Mrs. Clackit, "Nay, I have more than once traced her causing a Tete-a-Tete in the Town and Country Magazine, when the Parties, perhaps, had never seen each other's Faces before in the course of their Lives." (School for Scandal, I, I;1775) In another popular play, She Stoops To Conquer, Goldsmith's character Mrs. Hardcastle, who lives in the country, avows, "All I can do is enjoy London at second-hand. I take care to know every tete-a-tete from the Scandalous Magazine." (I, ii;1773). Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who was part of the Prince Regent's inner circle, knew more than most of whereof he spoke. In Hannah Cowley's comedy, The Belle's Stratagem (1781), a character named Crowquil is introduced as a writer of tete-a-tetes in the magazines. A servant exclaims, "Oh, oh, what! you are the fellow that has folks nose to nose in your sixpenny cuts, that never met anywhere else." (I, ii)