1. The Athenian Gazette, or Casuistical Mercury, Resolving all the most Nice and Curious Questions proposed by the Ingenious first appeared on 17 March 1691 as a weekly, and continued almost without interruption, for the most part twice-weekly on Tuesdays and Saturdays, until 14 June 1697. Briefly in 1692 it appeared three times a week, stimulated by rivalry with Tom Brown’s London Mercury. There were two brief suspensions: in 1692, by order of the Licenser; and in 1696–97, for business reasons. There was a total of 20 volumes, 580 numbers, with 6,000 questions answered altogether. See Gilbert D. McEwen, The Oracle of the Coffee House: John Dunton’s ‘Athenian Mercury’ (San Marino, 1972) 3.
2. It took the form of a half-folio sheet, printed on both sides in double columns. For eloquent accounts of Dunton’s significance as a representative of ‘the new’, see J. Paul Hunter, ‘The Insistent I’, Novel 13: 1 (Fall 1979) 19–31, and by the same author, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York and London, 1990) especially 12–18, 99–106.
3. See Klein, ‘Coffeehouse Civility’, 46–7; D.W.R. Bahlmann, The Moral Reformation of 1688 (New Haven, 1957);
4. David Hayton, ‘Moral Reform and Country Politics in the Late-Seventeenth-Century House of Commons’, Past and Present, No. 128 (1990) 48–89; Craig Rose, ‘Providence, Protestant Union, and Godly Reformation in the 1690s’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 3 (1993) 151–69;
5. Tony Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge, 1996).