Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 1.djvu/370

 364

NOTES AND QUERIES.

[12 S. I. MAY 6, 1916.

Morning Herald to be patched up ; and Walter, who had until then excluded The Morning Herald from the system of Con- tinental expresses which he had magnificently organized, and in which he had allowed The Morning Chronicle and The Morning Post to participate, now invited Baldwin to share in the arrangement. Baldwin, seeking further to reduce expenses, arranged with Dilke to have The Daily News supplied with the news from India at the same time as his own papers ; but the arrangement did not work satisfactorily, and its termination was announced in the paper on the 28th of Octo- ber in the same year. The Daily News, being left to contend single-handed against .all the other papers, was obliged, owing to the great additional expense thus incurred, to increase its price to threepence.*

The great prosperity brought to The Morning Herald and The Standard by the railway mania was soon to end ; in the October of the following year, 1847, came the gigantic collapse. In Dasent's ' Life of Delane,' vol. i. p. 49, it is recorded how The Times exposed the mania, although by so doing the proprietors suffered " a vast pecuniary loss through the stoppage of advertisements, but the gain to prospective investors must have been incalculable." The Times had on November 17th, 1845, pub- lished an elaborate analysis of the competing

Writings of Charles Wentworth Dilke ' (Murray, 1875), gives a full account of the trouble with The Morning Herald, in which Dilke states that " there must have been treachery or concert some- where." Dilke, however, was not to be beaten. He fought bravely on, and often his Continental and Indian news was in advance of the other papers, which would copy his dispatches. To trap them in this, he would at times slip in some words of his own, and my father, who took an active part in pushing the sale and the advertisements, has told me how Dilke would enjoy a hearty laugh at their exposure. I may give an instance of Dilke's success in obtaining early news. The French Revolution broke out in Paris, and Louis Philippe and his family had to escape to England. I have a letter of the following day, dated from Southampton, thanking my father for the copies of The Daily News he had sent of that date, " con- taining the important intelligence from France, which was the first paper to arrive with the news," and adding that " steps had been at once taken to inform the principal bankers and merchants in the town." Dr. Lardner was at the time the Paris correspondent of the paper, to whom, no doubt, Dilke addressed his hearty thanks. Dilke's agree- ment with The Daily JVeto* terminated in the April following, and Mr. Wills, in his farewell letter in the name of the staff, wrote : " Without your energy and consummate skill, The Daily Neios would have died a few months after its birth."
 * 'The Papers of a Critic, selected from the
 * 22nd of February, 1848, was the ' day when the

schemes, which showed there were over twelve hundred projected railways seeking to raise in the aggregate over five hundred millions of money. When the crash came, the failure of company after company caused ruin in thousands of homes. One of the largest advertisement agents of the time has since told me that the debts on their books at the time of the panic swallowed up the entire profits the firm would have gained had all gone well. These long advertise- ments were not so profitable to the Govern- ment as the smaller ones, which got hustled out of the papers for want of space, as the advertisement tax was the same one shilling and sixpence on each. Curiously enough, Justin McCarthy, usually so accurate, writes in his ' History of Our Own Times,' vol. iii. p. 239 : " There was a considerable duty sixpence, or some such sum on every advertisement."

Not only did The Morning Herald, during the railway mania, gain large sums from its advertisement columns, but the sale also increased. During 1845 the daily average was 6,400 the highest it had attained since 1837, when the average was 6,600 daily. In the panic year 1847 it dropped to 4,800, and by 1854 it had fallen to 3,700. Its great rival The Times, however, for those years showed a considerable increase of sales : in 1837 its daily average was only 10,700, while in 1845 'it had reached 25,900 ; in 1847 the sale was 29,000, in 1852 it exceeded 42,000. The death of the Duke of Welling- ton in that year added considerably to the sale ; on the 1 5th of September, the day after his death, The Times contained a full memoir of twenty-one columns. The sale of The Morning Herald for the same year was over 4,100, not 3,200 as given in the return made to Delane (' John Delane,' by Dasent, vol. i. p. 153). In 1854, the year of the war in the Crimea, the sale of The Times exceeded 51,000 daily. It was during that year that a series of attacks on the Court, and especially on the Prince Consort, appeared in the press, and Greville states : " The Morning Herald and The Standard poured forth article after article, and letter after letter, full of the bitterest abuse and all sorts of lies." " The attack began in The Daily News and The Morning Advertiser, par- ticularly the latter. ' ' Disraeli was very angry about it, writing to Lord Henry Lennox : " I am disgusted with the silly Herald and the stupid Standard mixing themselves up in the mud. There were plenty of scavengers among the canaglia " (Monypenny, vol. iii. p. 530). I well remember the ridiculous