of a wider public, and the progress in the art of advertising as applied to the Press. The following sections on the more important newspapers in London and the Provinces fill in the remaining details of the history of the British Press, so far as they are substantially important or interesting. Much that is in its nature ephemeral or trivial is necessarily passed over.
Modern London Newspapers.
The Morning Post (oldest of existing London daily papers) dates from 1772. For some years it was in the hands of Henry Bate (Sir Henry Bate Dudley), and it attained some degree of temporary popularity, though of no very enviable sort. In 1795 the entire copyright, with house and printing materials, was sold for £600 to Peter and Daniel Stuart, who quickly “Morning Post.” raised the position of the Post by enlisting Sir James Mackintosh and the poet Coleridge in its service, and also by giving unremitting attention to advertisements and to the copious supply of incidental news and amusing paragraphs. There has been much controversy about the share which Coleridge had in elevating the Post from obscurity to eminence. That he greatly promoted this result there can be no doubt. His famous “Character of Pitt,” published in 1800, was especially successful, and created a demand for the particular number in which it appeared that lasted for weeks, a thing almost without precedent. Coleridge wrote for this paper from 1795 until 1802, and during that period its circulation in ordinary rose from 350 copies, on the average, to 4500. Whatever the amount of rhetorical hyperbole in Fox’s saying—recorded as spoken in the House of Commons—“Mr Coleridge’s essays in the Morning Post led to the rupture of the treaty of Amiens,” it is none the less a striking testimony, not only to Coleridge’s powers as a publicist, but to the position which the newspaper press had won, in spite of innumerable obstacles at that time. The list of his fellow-workers in the Post is a most brilliant and varied one. Besides Mackintosh, Southey and Arthur Young, it included a galaxy of poets. Many of the lyrics of Moore, many of the social verses of Mackworth Praed, some of the noblest sonnets of Wordsworth, were first published in the columns of the Post. And the story of the paper, in its early days, had tragic as well as poetic episodes. In consequence of offence taken at some of its articles, the editor and proprietor, Nicholas Byrne (who succeeded Daniel Stuart), was assaulted and murdered whilst sitting in his office.
Up to about 1850 the history of the Morning Post offers little to record; with the Morning Chronicle and Morning Herald, and having a smaller circulation than either of them, it was being rapidly eclipsed in London journalism by The Times (see below), and in 1847 only sold some three thousand copies. Heavily in debt to Messrs J. and T. B. Crompton, the paper manufacturers, it had been taken over by them; and in that year the management was entrusted to Peter Borthwick (1805–1852), a Scotsman who, after graduation both at Edinburgh and Cambridge, had taken to politics in the Conservative interest and had sat in parliament for Evesham from 1835 to 1838 and from 1841 to 1847, when he was almost ruined by fighting an election petition in which he was unseated. Peter Borthwick took the task of reviving the paper seriously in hand, and in a few years was already improving its position when he fell ill and died; and he was succeeded in 1852 by his son Algernon Borthwick, afterwards Lord Glenesk (1830–1908). The later history of the paper is primarily connected with its practical re-establishment and successful conduct under the latter. Algernon Borthwick had been its Paris correspondent from 1850, and had shown social gifts and journalistic acumen of great promise. When he became managing editor in 1852 he devoted himself with such energy to the work that in seven years the debt on the business had been paid off. He gave the paper a strong political colour, Conservative, Imperialist and Protectionist; and in the ’fifties and ’sixties Borthwick was a keen supporter of Lord Palmerston. After the death of Mr Crompton, his nephew, Mr Rideout, the principal surviving partner in the paper manufacturing firm, was so impressed with Borthwick’s success that he vested the entire control of the paper in him for life; and on Mr Rideout’s death in 1877, Borthwick was enabled, by the help of his friend Andrew Montague, to buy the property and become sole proprietor. The Morning Post had now become, largely through Borthwick’s own social qualities, the principal organ of the fashionable world; but in 1881 he took what was then considered the hazardous step of reducing its price from threepence to a penny, and appealing no longer to the “threepenny public” with The Times but to a wider clientèle with the Daily Telegraph and Standard. The result was a ten-fold increase in circulation and a financial success exceeding all anticipations. Borthwick himself, who was knighted in 1880, and was created a baronet in 1887, had entered parliament in 1880 for Evesham, and from 1885 to 1895 sat for South Kensington, being finally raised to the peerage in 1895. His political gifts naturally increased the influence of the paper; he supported the “Tory democracy” and was an active worker for the Primrose League, of which he was three times chancellor; and the Morning Post, under his control, became one of the great organs of opinion on the Conservative side. From 1880 onwards he devolved the editorial duties on others, at first Sir William Hardman, and then successively Mr A. K. Moore, Mr Algernon Locker, Mr James Nicol Dunn (from 1897 to 1905; afterwards editor of the Manchester Courier) and Mr Fabian Ware; under them the literary standard of the paper was kept at a high level, and constant improvements were introduced; and the staff included a number of well-known writers, notably Mr Spencer Wilkinson (b. 1853), who in 1909 was appointed professor of military history at Oxford. From 1897 till his death in 1905, at the age of thirty-two, Lord Glenesk’s son, Oliver Borthwick, had much to do with the managerial side. On Lord Glenesk’s own death on the 24th November 1908, the proprietorship passed to the trustees of his only surviving child, a daughter, who in 1893 had married the 7th Earl Bathurst.
The Times[1] is usually dated from the 1st of January 1788, but was really started by John Walter on the 1st of January 1785, under the title of The London Daily Universal Register, printed logographically. On its reaching its 940th issue its name was changed. The logographic or “word-printing” process had been invented by a printer named Henry Johnson several years “The Times.” before, and found a warm advocate in John Walter, who expounded its peculiarities at great length in No. 510 of his Daily Universal Register. In a later number he stated, very amusingly, his reasons for adopting the altered title, which the enterprise and ability of his successors (see Walter, John) made world-famous. Within two years John Walter had his share in the Georgian persecutions of the press, by successive sentences to three fines and to three several imprisonments in Newgate, chiefly for having stated that the prince of Wales and the dukes of York and Clarence had so misconducted themselves “as to incur the just disapprobation of his Majesty.” In 1803 the management was transferred (together with the joint proprietorship of the journal) to his son, John Walter (2), by whom it was carried on with extraordinary energy and consummate ability, and at the same time with marked independence. To Lord Sidmouth’s government he gave a general but independent support. That of Pitt he opposed, especially on the questions of the Catamaran expedition and the malversations of Lord Melville. This opposition was resented by depriving the elder Walter of the printing for the customs department, by the withdrawal of government advertisements from The Times, and also, it is said, by the systematic detention at the outports of the foreign intelligence addressed to its editor. John Walter the Second, however, was strong and resolute enough to brave the government. He organized a better system of news transmission than had ever before existed. He introduced steam-printing (1814) and repeatedly improved its mechanism (see Printing); and although modern machines may now seem to thrust into insignificance a press of which it was at first announced as a notable triumph that “no less than 1100 sheets are impressed in one hour,” yet the assertion was none the less true that The Times of 29th November 1814 “presented to the public the practical result of the greatest improvement connected with printing since the discovery of the art itself.” The effort to secure for The Times the best attainable literary talent in all departments kept at least an equal pace with those which were directed towards the improvement of its mechanical resources. And thus it came to pass that a circulation which did not, even in 1815, exceed on the average 5000 copies became, in 1834, 10,000; in 1840, 18,500; in 1844, 23,000; in 1851, 40,000; and in 1854, 51,648. In the year last named the average circulation of the other London dailies was—Morning Advertiser, 7644; Daily News, 4160; Morning Herald, 3712; Morning Chronicle, 2800; Morning Post, 2667; so that the supremacy of The Times can readily be understood.
Sir John Stoddart, afterwards governor of Malta, edited The Times for several years prior to 1816. He was succeeded by Thomas Barnes, who for many years wrote largely in the paper. When his health began to fail the largest share of the editorial work came into the hands of Captain Edward Sterling—the contributor about a quarter of a century earlier of a noteworthy series of political letters signed “Vetus,” the Paris correspondent of The Times in 1814 and subsequent eventful years, and afterwards for many years the most conspicuous among its leader-writers.[2] From 1841 to 1877 the chief editor was John Thadeus Delane, who had his brother-in-law G. W. Dasent for assistant-editor, and another brother-in-law, Mowbray Morris, as business manager. By the time of the second John Walter’s death (1847) the substantial monopoly of The Times in London journalism had been established; and under the proprietorship of the third John Walter the result of the labour of Delane as editor, and of the brilliant staff of contributors whom he directed, among whom Henry Reeve was conspicuous as regards foreign affairs,
- ↑ See the centenary number of January 2, 1888; the pamphlet by S. V. Makower, issued by The Times in 1904, “The History of The Times”; and the article by Hugh Chisholm on “The Times, 1785–1908” in the National Review (May 1908).
- ↑ See Life of John Sterling, by Carlyle, who says of him at this time: “The emphatic, big-voiced, always influential and often strongly unreasonable Times newspaper was the express emblem of Edward Sterling. He, more than any other man, . . . was The Times, and thundered through it, to the shaking of the spheres.” The nickname of “The Thunderer,” for The Times, came in vogue in his day.
