THE MORNING CHRONICLE.
The Morning Chronicle was, with one exception (The Public Ledger, which started in 1760), the oldest of the daily papers up to the period of its discontinuance March 19, 1862. The latest number in the British Museum is dated Dec. 31, 1861.
It was established on Whig principles, 28th June, 1769, by William Woodfall, who carried it on with great success till 1789.
Woodfall, in addition to other talents requisite to the success of a newspaper, possessed two, which were of essential service to it, namely, his prodigious memory, which enabled him to report Parliamentary Debates without the aid of notes, and the excellence of his Theatrical Criticisms, which, as Mr. Fox Bourne, in his copious and valuable work on English Newspapers, 2 vols., 8vo., 1887—one to which the editor of the present publication has been under frequent obligations—says, “are a neglected mine of wealth for students of Theatrical History”.
On Woodfall’s death, in 1803, it was sold to James Perry, who borrowed £500 from Ransome & Co., the bankers, and some more from Bellamy, the wine merchant—who was also caterer and doorkeeper to the House of Commons—and entered into partnership with a Charterhouse schoolmaster named Gray, who had just received a legacy of £500. With that joint capital, the two bought The Chronicle, the Duke of Norfolk making Perry a present of a house in the Strand, which he converted into a new publishing office. A few other influential Whigs, also, contributed a further sum, which, as the late Sir Robert Adair, who is so often satirized in The Anti-Jacobin, and who was a subscriber to the fund, informed the editor of the present work, was £300.
Perry was on good terms with his contributors, and made The Morning Chronicle a more prosperous and influential journal than had ever before been known in England. Gray provided the heavy articles, Perry those of lighter sort; and after Gray’s death, which happened when he had been part proprietor for only a few years, other writers were employed, among them Jas. Mackintosh and Sheridan, and in later times T. Campbell and T. Moore, who contributed verse, and John Campbell, then a young barrister, who was the Theatrical Critic, and was still so in 1810. T. Campbell, on coming to London in 1802, was engaged as a political writer, but this not being his forte, he, with great judgment, confined himself to poetical pieces, among which were Ye Mariners of England, and The Exile of Erin. Perry had another and equally famous contributor. In Sept., 1793, S. T. Coleridge, then aged nineteen, “sent a poem of a few lines to Perry, soliciting a loan of a guinea for a distressed author,” which prayer was immediately granted. In 1796, he accepted an offer of Perry’s to write in it, but the arrangement was never carried out. In later years, Coleridge wrote some other poems for The Morning Chronicle, and his friend Charles Lamb was an occasional writer of prose for it.
Perry continued as the general manager of the paper till his death on 6th Dec., 1821; but before this he had left much of the editing to others, his first assistant after Gray’s death being Robert Spankie, ultimately attorney-general of Bengal. The next was John Black, who had joined him in 1810; and upon him, when Perry died, the entire management devolved.
After Perry’s death the paper was purchased for £42,000, by William Clement, by whom it was held till 1834, when it was sold to Sir John Easthope for £16,500.
In 1843, John Black was dismissed to make way for Andrew Doyle, who had been Foreign Editor, and had married Sir John’s daughter. Black died in 1855.
On 26th July, 1847, Sir John Easthope, who had been carrying on the paper at a loss for some time, sold it to the Duke of Newcastle, W. E. Gladstone, Sidney Herbert, and other influential Peelites. Its new Editor was John Douglas Cook, who had for some time been one of the reporters of The Times, and who gathered round him a brilliant staff of contributors, including George Sydney Smythe, afterwards Lord Strangford, Gilbert Venables, Abraham Hayward, William Vernon Harcourt, and Thackeray. Its business manager was William Delane, the father of the clever young editor of The Times, John Thaddeus Delane.
The Chronicle lingered on as a would-be Peelite organ till the autumn of 1854, when by a curious arrangement, the paper, with all its plant, was sold to Serjeant Glover, for £7500, on the understanding that, if he continued to support in it the Peelite policy, he should have the money back with interest, being paid £3000 a year for three years. That contract soon fell through, as Glover preferred to draw a subsidy from Louis Napoleon, and to make other experiments. At the close of 1854, the circulation of The Morning Chronicle averaged only about 2500, while that of The Morning Post was about 3000, that of The Morning Herald about 3500, that of The Daily News about 5300, that of The Morning Advertiser about 6600, and that of The Times about 55,000.
The last number of The Morning Chronicle appeared March 19, 1862, when what at one time had been the most influential journal in the country altogether ceased to exist.
Of this paper Sheridan speaks in The Critic, and to it Byron addressed a Familiar Epistle. For its columns W. Hazlitt wrote some of the finest criticisms in our own or any other language. Some of the early Sketches by Boz appeared in it, but they were really commenced in the old Monthly Magazine. Dickens’s father was one of the staff. Hazlitt also contributed to it Parliamentary Reports, as at a later period did C. Dickens.
Among other distinguished writers in The Morning Chronicle were Lord Brougham, the Duke of Sussex, David Ricardo, Cyrus Redding, Albany Fonblanque, James and John Stuart Mill, John Payne Collier, Eyre Evans Crowe, Charles Buller, Lord Holland, Joseph Parkes, Michael Joseph Quin, George Hogarth, James Fraser, W. Hazlitt, secundus, Lord Melbourne, W. Johnson Fox, Henry Mayhew, Lord Palmerston, A. B. Reach, Alex. and Charles Mackay, Tom Taylor.