The influence of The Times must essentially be judged from the accession to the editorial chair of Thomas Barnes in 1817. Before then it was settling down. In the late eighteenth century it was an information sheet, the lesser offshoot of a printing business. By 1795 John Walter I was tired of his enterprise and handed over first to his elder son, William, who had more literary taste than journalistic flair, and then in 1803 to his second son, John Walter II, who made the paper but fractured his relations with his father. John Walter I wanted to be a printer to the government and to the aristocracy. John Walter II wanted to run something approaching a modern newspaper. The circulation when he took over was about 1700 copies, having been up to nearly 3000 in the 1790s. The circulation of all others, including the influential Morning Chronicle, was still lower, however. Newspaper prices were formidable. The Times opened at 2½d and quickly went to 3d, the equivalent of nearly £1 today. By the time of the death of John Walter II in 1847 its circulation was nearly 50,000. In mid-century, just before the full repeal of newspaper taxes, The Times was the nearest paper to approach a mass daily. The Daily Telegraph, within a few days of its own launch, paid it a somewhat convoluted tribute: ‘The circulation of the Daily Telegraph’, it announced, ‘exceeds that of any London morning newspaper, with the exception of The Times.’
More important, however, was that John Walter II first rejected political subsidies and lived successfully without them both during his own editorship from 1803 to 1810 and during his joint editorship of the next five years with John Stoddart, a barrister and Hazlitt’s brother-in-law; and that he then got bored with exercising control from the proprietor’s chair and withdrew to Wokingham to become a Berkshire country gentleman, and subsequently MP for the county, leaving Thomas Barnes with the elbow room to become the first independent editor.
Barnes was only thirty-two when he was appointed. It was not his youth that made him exceptional. Times editors have often been young when they started. Of his notable successors Delane and Buckle started at twenty-three and twenty-nine, and Dawson and Rees-Mogg at thirty-eight. (They have also shown a regrettable tendency to die young, mostly while still in office.)
Barnes was the son of a Kent solicitor, educated at Christ’s Hospital and Pembroke College, Cambridge, of high intellectual gifts, who as a young man lived in the literary society of Leigh Hunt, Lamb and Hazlitt. He came to editorship by way of theatre criticism and parliamentary sketch writing.
He was considered a very advanced liberal at this time, and always wrote, and encouraged others to write, in a fairly rough tone. ‘Put a little devil into it’ was one of his prescripts for his own and other people’s writing. He was a full editor not merely by virtue of his independence of his proprietor but also because he orchestrated the whole paper. Leigh Hunt considered him to have placed it ‘beyond the range of competition not more by the ability of his own articles than by the unity of tone and sentiment which he knew how to impart to the publication as a whole’.
Barnes supported Catholic emancipation and the great Reform Bill, was generally favourable to the Grey administration, and was particularly close to the Lord Chancellor, Brougham. In 1834 he did a great switch of sides, and in so doing gave a most remarkable demonstration of the power of the instrument he had partly created. He quarrelled with the Whigs and provoked the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Althorp) into writing to Brougham a subsequently notorious letter requesting an urgent meeting to discuss ‘whether we should declare open war with The Times or attempt to make peace’.
Months later, when William IV in effect dismissed Melbourne, and Peel was being hurriedly summoned back from Rome (still taking almost exactly as long as Caesar would have done), Barnes attempted to lay down with Lyndhurst, the new Lord Chancellor, and (of all people) the Duke of Wellington, who were temporarily in charge in London, the terms on which he would support a Conservative government. They were: no going back on the Reform Bill or on other measures, such as the Tithe Act and the Corporations Act, already voted by the House of Commons, and a continuity of foreign policy. What is still more remarkable is that they were substantially accepted. The brief first Peel Government came into being, the Tamworth Manifesto was issued, and the way was paved for the creation of a Conservatism that could live with the railway age and the nineteenth-century middle-class. ‘Why,’ Lyndhurst reportedly said to Greville, ‘Barnes is the most powerful man in the country.’
Lyndhurst further endorsed Barnes’s importance by giving him a dinner party. This was regarded as being almost the most remarkable of this entire series of events, for Barnes rarely went into society and Lord Chancellors or other great officers of state did not habitually entertain journalists. Fortunately, perhaps, ladies were not included, for Barnes remained faithful to his early bohemianism by not being married to his ‘wife’, who looked to Disraeli like ‘a lady in a pantomime’.