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ABSTRACT

This paper begins by exploring how in 1875 an issue of the London Gazette from the 1690s was used to support the provenance of some furniture that had apparently been made by Peter the Great on his visit to London. It uses this incident to consider how the Victorians treated late seventeenth-century newspapers and how newspapers (and in particular the London Gazette) were used to write histories of the seventeenth century in the nineteenth century. It ends by suggesting that looking back at the Victorians looking back at the seventeenth century might help us re-examine modern understandings of early modern periodical print culture.