ORIGINS OF ANIMOSITY
The importance of newspapers in nineteenth-century British politics has long been recognized by historians. Lord Palmerston understood keenly the power of the press and cultivated good relations with a number of papers. This article will elucidate more thoroughly than heretofore his early forays into the world of press intrigue. Palmerston did not, however, earn the regard of The Times, at least not until much later in his career. The Times, edited by Thomas Barnes from 1817 until his death in 1841, was the most powerful newspaper of the era. This article will examine the origins of its long-running feud with Palmerston, demonstrating the personal and political differences at the heart of its inception.
The Whigs and the Press, 1800-50
Arthur Aspinall’s book, Politics and the Press, c.1780–1850, where all studies of political journalism during that period must begin, overflows with accounts of whig suspirations and complaints about the party’s inability to manage the press.1 Subsequent studies either reiterate these lamentations or harp on the aristocratic indifference and political ineptitude of the whig leadership. Stephen Koss’s influential Rise and Fall of the Political Press attributed the party’s ‘failure’ to ‘limitations of Whig traditionalism’ and plain ‘incompetence’.2 Ian Newbould’s study of the whigs in the 1830s also embraces what may be called the dinosaur theory.3 Helpless, hapless, and behind the times the flawed Fox, meandering Melbourne, aloof Grey, and brittle Russell are portrayed as incapable of or uninterested in embracing techniques of press management required by a new political era.4 Whig agents employed to arrange matters with the newspapers during the 1830s, such as Denis LeMarchant, also complained: ‘the Press has been treated with utter indifference, most of the Ministers agreeing in what one of them told me: ‘‘that the less we had to do with it the better’’ ’.5 In addition the whigs, once in office, seemed reluctant to rescind the tory ‘taxes on knowledge’ against which they had railed when in opposition. Three problems underlie this image of hand wringing, aimlessness, hypocrisy, and sloth. First, the whigs were no fools. Earl Grey was one of the most skilled politicians of the nineteenth century. By any standard Brougham, Holland, Grenville, Althorp, Russell, Melbourne, Stanley and Clarendon were able and successful men. Nor were magnates among the second echelon of whig parliamentarians such as the fifth Earl Fitzwilliam, the seventh duke of Bedford, the third Earl Fortescue, and the third earl of Bessborough out of touch bumblers. These were men devoted to the detailed management of their estates, which in some cases entailed the administration of great industrial enterprises, and there is no evidence that they disdained either hard work or middle class associates.6 The party’s men of business, such as Edward Ellice and Joseph Parkes, were astute and keen to win.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.