10,000 Not Out: The History of the Spectator 1828–2020 by David Butterfield (review)

David Butterfield's 10,000 Not Out is the latest in a long line of publications marking milestones in the 193-year history of the Spectator, including William Beach Thomas's Story of the Spectator, 1828–1928 (1928); special issues of the paper on the centennial (November 1928), the six thousandth issue (June 1943), the 125th anniversary (1953), and the 150th anniversary (September 1978); and Simon Cortauld's To Convey Intelligence, the Spectator 1928–1998 (1999). Like its predecessors, Butterfield's book celebrates the newspaper-cum-magazine's virtues: its recognition for excellence among its contemporaries, its important social and political stands, the quality of its contributors, and the cultural importance of its voice. It is not a scholarly book, nor does it try to be. Rather it is, as Michael White terms it in his review of the book, "a romp through its history" ("A Magazine or a Cocktail Party?," Literary Review, June 2020, 7). Butterfield is informal, chatty, gossipy. He relates anecdotes like Charles Dickens's referring to the founder and editor of the paper, Robert Rintoul, with the rhyming appellation "Squint-owl" (36), and he refers to H. H. Asquith as "Ol' Squiffy" (63). Rintoul's arrangement to allow his daughter to continue to live in the Spectator attic after Meredith Townsend took over the paper prompts Butterfield to ponder drily, "What Townsend's reaction was to finding this rather highly-strung thirty-something pining in the rafters is unknown" (47). Thus, 10,000 Not Out is an enjoyable, readable survey of the weekly over its long and storied history. It contains innumerable nuggets of information about contributors, editors, finances, circulation, contested political and social positions, and the actual process of printing. Until about 1900 the paper was still issued with pages uncut, for example (73). Who knew?

Butterfield surveys the remarkable influence of the paper during its first hundred years, examining the role of the four owner/editors: Rintoul, Richard Holt Hutton, Townsend, and John St. Loe Strachey. The editors and a handful of staff critics wrote most of the copy for every issue until the turn of the century, although they occasionally recruited leading statesmen, scholars, thinkers, writers, and artists who either submitted essays or debated issues in the correspondence column. Until 1922 leaders and most columns were anonymous; from the mid-1920s on, signed columns revealed that some of the most important figures of the century were contributing to the paper: Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, Jean Paul Sartre, T. S. Eliot, and others between the wars; Kingsley Amis, John Wain, and Kenneth Tynan in the 1950s and 1960s. From the 1970s on, celebrated artists and writers for the most part were displaced by regular columnists. Butterfield lists them all; in fact, his lists of contributors are an important contribution of the book.

For a variety of reasons, the Spectator morphed from weekly newspaper to weekly magazine in 1953. Butterfield describes in some detail the new opportunities that the revised structure provided. He also surveys the various owners in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the carousel of editors, and the slow evolution of the paper's politics from somewhat liberal and independent to stoutly Tory, closing his account in 2020. The lean to the right has been most pronounced in the last several decades as the magazine and Tory leadership carried on a somewhat incestuous relationship, culminating with the ascension of former editor Boris Johnson to Ten Downing Street.

Because it avoids much of the apparatus of a scholarly study, Butterfield's book is sometimes annoyingly incomplete. He cites most of his sources, and the endnotes are accurate as far as I could tell. But he fails to include a bibliography, and his index is woefully incomplete. Thus, when looking for information about a citation for, say, Robert Tener or Marysa Demoor, one is forced to read through the 1,200 endnotes for the original citation because the bibliography (which would...