Page:Notes by the Way.djvu/254

 184

��NOTES BY THE WAY.

��Disraeli Chancellor of

the

Exchequer : ousted by Gladstone.

��Napoleon III.

and his uncle Prince Jerome.

��The Field

brought by

Benjamin

Webster.

��Purchased by

Mr. Serjeant

Cox.

��postage free 17. 4$." The published price was six shillings per number. The memorable meeting of authors and booksellers at John Chapman's on the 4th of May, 1852, for the purposes of hasten- ing the removal of the trade restrictions on the commerce of litera- ture is graphically described in ' The Life of George Eliot.'

The news of the week is pithily told, and at a glance we get an idea of the world of 1853. Dizzy, who became Chancellor of the Exchequer, with Lord Derby as his chief, on the 27th of February, 1852, and thought he had " come to stay," set Messrs. Banting, the Government upholsterers, to work to make the official residence in Downing Street light and gay, and brilliant with modern furni- ture. Before Christmas the fatal division came, and Gladstone reigned in his stead. " Farewell to the dawning visions of the resuscitated glories of a Holland House on the Conservative side, and all those intellectual coteries that might have assembled in that hitherto ' unused spot,' under the auspices of a literary Chan- cellor of the Exchequer." It is sad to relate that some ladies seemed to enjoy Dizzy's discomfiture. The Earl of Aberdeen becomes Prime Minister, and states in the House of Lords that " at home the mission of the Government would be to maintain and extend free- trade principles, and to pursue the commercial and financial system of the late Sir Robert Peel." Under music, regret is expressed that England possesses no School of Music. The news from France is the Emperor's decree that, should he die without leaving an heir to the throne, the succession shall pass to his uncle Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte and to his descendants, from male to male, by order of birth, and to the entire exclusion of the females. Prince Jerome's allowance was to be one million francs per annum, with the Palais Royal as residence ; Prince Napoleon's, 300,000 francs ; and the Princess Mathilde's (Demidoff) 200,000. Photography first appeared in the second volume, when the champion of the Thames was drawn from a daguerreotype by Mayall.

In November, 1853, The Field became the property of Benjamin Webster, of the Adelphi Theatre, but the change of proprietorship did not bring prosperity. It was, in truth, a very poor sixpenny- worth ; but, as the article in the Jubilee number states, newspaper enterprise in those days was hampered by the Stamp Act and by a monstrous paper duty.

Towards the end of the second year of its existence Mr. Serjeant Cox purchased the property, and in the number for November 25th, 1854, it was announced that the paper had passed into new hands. Its address stated that " The Field would be a family paper, sedu- lously weeded of whatever a gentleman should be unwilling to place in the hands of his children .... It will make no endeavour to become the newspaper of ' the man about town,' but to be that of ' the man out of town.' " Readers were invited " to

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