On Monday, the 21st, the Sun had the enterprise to print a map of the burned district. Copies of the special fire editions went all over the world. At least one of them ran up against poetic justice. When it reached Canton, China, six months after the fire, the English newspaper there classed the story of the conflagration with Locke’s “Astronomical Discoveries,” and begged its readers not to be alarmed by the new hoax.
The Sun had grown more and more prosperous. In the latter part of 1835 its four pages, each eleven and one-half by eighteen inches, were so taken up with advertising that it was not unusual to find reading-matter in only five of the twenty columns. Some days the publisher would apologize for leaving out advertisements, on other days, for having so little room for news. He promised relief, and it came on January 4, 1836, when the paper was enlarged. It remained a four-page Sun, but the pages were increased in size to fourteen by twenty inches. In announcing the enlargement, the third in a year, the Sun remarked:
We are now enabled to print considerably more than twenty-two thousand copies, on both sides, in less than eight hours. No establishment in this country has such facilities, and no daily newspaper in the world enjoys so extensive a circulation.
In the first enlarged edition Mr. Day made the boast that the Sun now had a circulation more than double that of all the sixpenny respectables combined. He had a word, too, about the penny papers that had sprung up in the Sun’s wake:
One after another they dropped and fell in quick succession as they had sprung up; and all, with but one exception worth regarding, have gone to the “receptacle of things lost upon earth.” Many of these departed ephemerals have struggled hard to keep within their nostrils the breath of life; and it is a singular fact that with scarcely an exception they have employed, as a means of bringing a knowledge of their being before the public, the most unlimited and reckless abuse of ourselves, the impeachment of our character, public and private; the implications, moral and political; in short, calumny in all its forms.
As to the last survivor of them worth note, which remains, we have only to say, the little world we opened has proved large enough for us both.
The exception to the general rule of early mortality was of course the Herald. In spite of this broad attitude toward his only successful competitor, Day could not keep from swapping verbal shots with Bennett. The Sun said:
Bennett, whose only chance of dying an upright man will be that of hanging perpendicularly upon a rope, falsely charges the proprietor of this paper with being an infidel, the natural effect of which calumny will be that every reader will believe him to be a good Christian.
Day had a dislike for Colonel Webb, of the Courier and Enquirer, almost as great as his enmity toward Bennett; so when Webb assaulted Bennett on January 19, 1836, it was rather a hard story to write. This is the Sun’s account of the fray:
Low as he had fallen, both in the public estimation and his own, we were astonished to learn last evening that Colonel Webb had stooped so far beneath anything of which we had ever conceived it possible for him to be guilty, as publicly, and before the eyes of hundreds who knew him, to descend to a public personal chastisement of that villainous libel on humanity of all kinds, the notorious vagabond Bennett. But so it is.