for debt, libel, or blasphemy—and have continued to edit their papers from behind prison bars.[1]
And the editor and journalist of every rank long sought his recreations in Bohemia. But thirty and more years ago, J. A. O'Shea wrote, "Bohemia is nearing the borders of Corinth,"[2]—a change that has been attributed in America to the introduction of typesetting machines that have done much to render "the ancient Bohemianism of the composing-room distasteful to the modern editor and obsolete with the better class of printers."[3] Sir Francis Burnand gives a significant account of the change in England from the Bohemia of the journalists of the middle of the nineteenth century to the Bohemia that, in the words of Layard, "has been captured by men whose tastes and habits have been formed at the public schools, or who at least have had their three years at Oxford or Cambridge."[4] The change of standards is everywhere noticeable to -day in the absence of all allusion to Bohemia,—even twenty-five years ago it was customary to refer to it as a matter of course in accounts of the press.
Emerging from Grub Street, and Bohemia, the editor developed in England into a Delane,—the confidant of ministers and of royalty; or into a member of the House of Lords, commanding vast wealth and high social prestige; or into a recipient of birth day honors. "There is scarcely a large city in Great Britain," says Porritt, "in which there is not a titled journalist,"—a system practically begun by Lord Salisbury in 1885 and continued by his successors.[5] In America he has more than once left the editorial sanctum to represent his country at foreign courts.
It was probably a somewhat superficial view of the social position of the editor that led De Tocqueville to say contemptuously, "The personal opinions of the editors [of American papers] have no kind of weight in the eyes of the public: the only use of a journal is, that it imparts the knowledge of certain facts, and it is
- ↑ W. Lee, Daniel Defoe, I, 84-85; Theophila Carlile Campbell, The Battle of the Press.
- ↑ Leaves from the Life of a Special Correspondent, II, 179.
- ↑ J. A. Porter, The Modern Newspaper, p. 9.
- ↑ G . S. Layard, A Great "Punch" Editor, Being the Life, Letters, and Diaries of Shirley Brooks, pp. 250- 251.
- ↑ E. Porritt, The Englishman at Home, p. 323.
