However, he maintained a considerable style of life, first in Great Surrey Street, over Blackfriars Bridge, and then, after his salary had been raised to the considerable sum of £2000 (augmented by a one-sixteenth share in what he had made a very profitable enterprise), in a fine house in Soho Square. There he indulged his high taste for wine and food, was much called upon by politicians, and died in May 1841. ‘The Thunderer’ had achieved its soubriquet under his reign.
John Thadeus Delane, the son of W. F. A. Delane, manager of The Times, had been with the paper for about a year, mainly on parliamentary reports, when he succeeded Barnes. He was appointed what can perhaps best be described as ‘lieutenant editor’. John Walter II moved back to take substantial responsibility and Delane did not assume Barnes’s full authority until that chief proprietor’s death in 1847.
Delane was more of an operator, less of a scholar than Barnes. He was more social, dined out a good deal with the grand, instead of waiting for them to call upon him, and quite often stayed with them in the country, where he could indulge his passion for hunting. In London, however, he worked immensely hard, never lived more than a mile away from Printing House Square, and habitually stayed in the office until five in the morning. The Times was the whole of his life in a way that it was not with Barnes. The Dictionary of National Biography offers some pointed and not wholly expected comments: ‘Though never erudite, Delane was very quick in mastering anything which he took in hand … He was not a finished scholar; he was not as brilliant as Barnes; he hardly ever wrote anything except reports and letters, both of which he wrote very well … He saw 13 administrations rise and fall … he met all statesmen on equal terms … Lord Palmerston, whom he resembled in temperament, was the statesman he liked best, Lord Aberdeen was the one he most respected.’
In the Barchester novels Trollope portrays Delane under the name of Tom Towers, editor of the Jupiter, in terms that are more a tribute to his influence and grandeur than to his judgement or humanity. In The Warden (1855) Towers played some considerable part in driving the good Mr Harding out of his somewhat archaic benefice. In Barchester Towers (1857) he is an occasional ally of the oleaginous and scheming Reverend Obadiah Slope. But it is in Framley Parsonage (1861) that he reaches his apogee. He appears at an evening party given by Miss Dunstable, the patent medicine heiress, who was none the less in the centre of fashionable society and a lady who combined astringent comment with a heart of gold: That the two great ones of the earth were Tom Towers and the Duke of Omnium need hardly be expressed in words,’ Trollope wrote.
The paper was tolerably disposed towards the great Peel Government and particularly towards its foreign policy, because it was conducted by Aberdeen, but was uncharacteristically detached on the great mid-century issue of the Corn Laws. Lord John Russell was a man Delane could never abide and his 1846-52 administration was therefore treated coolly, even while Palmerston was Foreign Secretary, for Delane’s love affair with his alter ego (if the DNB is to be believed) did not begin until about 1857. When the Russell Government fell in early 1852 as a result of Palmerston’s ‘tit-for-tat with Johnnie Russell’ and the first of the several brief Derby-Disraeli administrations came in, Delane was much courted by Disraeli. But the courtship was not very successful. When Disraeli led his government to defeat in the House of Commons by proclaiming in a phrase more memorable than sensible, that ‘England does not love coalitions’, The Times answered that ‘Nothing suits the people to be governed and the measures to be passed so well as a good coalition.’ It quickly got what it wanted, in the form of one headed by Aberdeen. And it received its reward by being able to publish exclusively on Christmas Day, 1852, a full list of the unannounced Cabinet appointments, a tribute as much to the regularity of The Times’s nineteenth-century publication as to the quality of its sources.
Its influence, however, was set immensely high. Cobden claimed it never entered his house, but Clarendon in 1853, while complaining that ‘I can’t understand why it should be considered the organ of the Government’ and expostulating that ‘The ways of The Times are inscrutable’, nevertheless reluctantly recorded that ‘As its circulation is enormous and its influence abroad is very great a Government must take its support on the terms it chooses to put it.’ Abraham Lincoln’s tribute was still more fulsome but was not reciprocated, for The Times thought the Gettysburg Address made the dedication ceremony ‘ludicrous’.