Nathaniel Mist

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Nathaniel Mist (died 30 September 1737) was an 18th-century British printer and journalist whose Mist's Weekly Journal was the central, most visible, and most explicit opposition newspaper to the whig administrations of Robert Walpole. Where other opposition papers would defer, Mist's would explicitly attack the government of Walpole and the entire House of Hanover. He was a Jacobite of strong convictions and pugnacious determination who employed various authors writing under pseudonyms, from Lewis Theobald to Daniel Defoe, and was frequently tried by the government for sedition.

His early years are obscure, and he first enters the public record and public eye as the owner of a successful printing press in 1716. As owner and master of the press, he began immediately to publish his own journals. His first effort, The Citizen, ran to only nine issues in 1716. His second effort was to take over Weekly Journal, or, Saturday's Post in December 1716. This would later, in May 1725, become Mist's Weekly Journal (the Weekly Journal published by Mist). In 1717, he attempted Wednesday's Journal, but that ran to only five issues, and The Entertainer in 1718 ran successfully to 38 issues before being taken over by another press. Mist's Weekly Journal, however, was an enormous success and reflected the editor's personal political vision.

Professor Arne Bialuschewski also showed that Mist probably wrote under the pseudonym "Captain Charles Johnson" to create A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates.^[1]