The appearance of the current number of “The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit” will not add to the happiness of retrospections. Where is that Boston committee, where the renowned getters-up of the City Hotel dinner and the ball at the Park Theater, with its tableaux vivants, its splendid decorations, and tickets at ten dollars each?
The scene is passing now before our memory—the crammed theater, full up to its third tier, the dense crowd opening a passage for Mr. Dickens and the proud and happy committee while he passes up the center of the stage amid huzzas and the waving of handkerchiefs, while the band is playing “God Save the Queen” and “See, the Conquering Hero Comes.” And our Irving, our Halleck, our Bryant passed around in the crowd, unnoticed and almost unknown. Shame! Let our cheeks crimson, as they ought.
The Sun itself was doing very nicely. On its tenth birthday, September 3, 1843, it announced that it employed eight editors and reporters, twenty compositors, sixteen pressmen, twelve folders and counters, and one hundred carriers. The circulation of the daily paper was thirty-eight thousand, of the Weekly Sun twelve thousand.
Mr. Beach owned the Sun’s new home at Fulton and Nassau Streets and the building at 156 Nassau Street which he had recently vacated, and which was burned down in the fire of February 6, 1845. He had a London correspondent who ran a special horse express to carry the news from London to Bristol. A Sun reporter went to report Webster’s speech on the great day when the Bunker Hill Monument was finished. He got down correctly at least the last sentence: “Thank God, I—I also—am an American!”
With a circulation by far the largest in the world, the Sun was obliged to buy a new dress of type every three months, for the day of the curved stereotype plate was still far off. Early in 1846 two new presses, each capable of six thousand Suns an hour, were put in at a cost of twelve thousand dollars.
The size of the paper grew constantly, although Beach stuck to a four-page sheet because of the limitations of the presses. Instead of adding pages, he added columns. From Day’s little three-column Sun the paper had grown, by April of 1840, to a width of seven columns. Of the total of twenty-eight columns in an issue twenty-one and a half were devoted to advertising, three to mixed news and editorials, two and a half to the court reports, and one column to reprint.
With the page seven columns wide, Beach thought that the two words—“The Sun”—looked lonely, and to fill out the heading he changed it to read “The New York Sun.” This continued from April 13 to September 29, 1840, when the proprietor saw how much more economical it would be to cut out “New York” and push the first and seventh columns of the first page up to the top of the paper. Then it was “The Sun” once more in head-line as well as body.
The paper is never the New York Sun, Eugene Field’s poem to the contrary notwithstanding. It is the Sun, universal in its spirit, and published in New York by the accident of birth.
Three years after that the Sun became an eight-column paper, and there were no more sneers at the blanket sheets, for the Sun itself was getting pretty wide.
It was in the reign of Moses Y. Beach as owner of the Sun, that Horace Greeley came to stay in New York journalism. He had been fairly successful as editor of the New Yorker, and his management of the campaign paper called the Log Cabin, issued in 1840 in the interest of General Harrison, was masterly. With the prestige thus obtained, he was able, on April 10, 1841, to start the Tribune.