Benjamin Disraeli and John Murray: The Politician, The Publisher, and The Representative by Regina Akel (review)

In the early nineteenth century, newspapers and magazines were a dynamic, rumbustious and sometimes dangerous business. On the one hand, growing literacy rates and a period of great political turbulence produced an ever expanding readership hungry for news and debate across a broad range of issues. Simultaneously, the intense political factionalism of the era permeated many spheres of culture, no matter how distant from political considerations they may now superficially seem, and so helped to generate bitter journalistic rivalries. The result was a 'hot house' atmosphere in which numerous ventures were launched but in many cases soon failed, with their rise and fall often accompanied—and their failure sometimes caused—by withering mockery and opprobrium from partisan commentators and rival publications. Thus money could be made in print journalism, but it could just as easily, and probably more quickly, be lost. Reputations might likewise swiftly rise and fall, in part because journalistic writing and the proprietorship of newspapers were activities which for many contemporaries sat awkwardly on the cusp between vulgar, commercial trade and respectable, gentlemanly profession. In some especially notorious cases, there were even fatalities. Most Romanticists will be familiar with the fate of John Scott, mortally wounded in a duel provoked by insults traded in print with fellow journalist John Gibson Lockhart.

Lockhart—best known today as an acerbic writer for Blackwoods and as the son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott—plays a significant role in Regina Akel's new book, which offers readers an intriguing case-study from this era of competitive, feuding journalism. Akel's subject is a short-lived, ill-fated foray into newspaper proprietorship by the famous publisher John Murray II, who in 1825 became involved in an attempt to establish a new daily paper. It remains unclear who originally conceived this project. Traditionally it has been assumed that the idea came from the young Benjamin Disraeli, the precocious son of Murray's close friend Isaac D'Israeli. Akel in contrast insists—though to my mind never really demonstrates with adequate evidence—that the paper was in fact the brain-child of 'a High Tory cabal' headed by the Duke of York and the Marquis of Hertford. Either way, it is clear that great hopes were entertained for the new publication—which would eventually emerge in 1826 as The Representative—and that Disraeli fils, fresh out of university, did much to drive the project forward in its early stages, setting the newspaper's tone and helping to establish its ambitions. The plan was to rival, and possibly even supplant The Times, with particular attention being paid to up-to-date coverage of international news. The paper's politics, Akel suggests, were intended to be ultra-Tory, making the Representative a counterpoint not only to contemporary liberal views but also to the more moderate Toryism of figures like the then Foreign Secretary George Canning. Once again, however, Akel floats this theory but never really works through in adequate detail how precisely this ultra-Toryism manifested itself in the paper's articles and editorial line.

What is clear is that the Representative was fairly disastrous for almost everyone connected with it. The paper ran for just a few months in 1826 before folding. Like the circumstances of its birth, the precise reasons for its demise remain somewhat obscure in Akel's account, but it is apparent that there was a degree of mismanagement and bad luck throughout the short-lived venture. The twenty-one-year-old Disraeli, who had absolutely no experience in the newspaper trade, in the planning stages inflated expectations and injected a note of grandiose melodrama by using code-names for likely collaborators and contributors. His professional and social clumsiness seems to have been one reason why Murray had difficulties finding an editor for the paper. Eventually this role was taken on by Lockhart, but his services were only...