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A Biography of James Augustus St.John
Greville Brooke, The Corn Laws - Introduction
‘...In general Brooke’s writing is of an order not to be matched anywhere in the paper..
James Augustus St.John’s description of a plague ship titled ‘The Yellow Flag’ had originally been published in a periodical called’ Chapman’s Weekly Magazine.’
‘John Chapman’ is a name common to Victorian journalism and a few publishers existed with the name, but it is likely this periodical had been edited by John Kemble Chapman.
John Kemble Chapman had been associated with the Victorian theatre but in the 1840’s he edited the ‘Sunday Times’ at a time when the leading articles had been written by ‘Greville Brooke’ - a pseudonym of James Augustus St John.
In an ‘Intimate Memoir of the Sunday times 1822 -1972’ called ‘The Pearl Of Days’ written by Harold Hobson, Phillip Kightly and Leonard Russsell, Greville Brooke is recalled.
The writers describe a leading article concerned with an argument for the repeal of the ‘Corn Laws’. The article takes the form of a letter addressed to The Duke of Buckingham who supported the farmers and land owners’ interests in the House of Lords and they, naturally, wished the ‘Corn Laws’ to be retained.
,,,,Stylistically, however, the political writers of The Sunday Times could already do better than such hysterical abuse of Socialists and Tories. One of them, Greville Brooke, who has left no memorial in the Dictionary of National Biography, which commemorates many men of lesser literary and political ability, wrote during the 1840s a weekly signed column called 'The Political Inquirer'. It is in striking contrast with the tone of the other political articles in the paper and with the bombastic, thundering style set up as a model of political controversy by The Times. It is cool, restrained, ironic, and because it is strictly controlled it is able to build up to a climax which most of the other leader writers of the period would have wasted in the vain fulminations of their opening paragraph. A typical example of Brooke's style is seen in his letter on the Corn Laws to His Grace the Duke of Buckingham on April 12, 1840
Greville Brooke, The Corn Laws
My Lord Duke, though you state it to be your conviction that the agricultural labourer, with a large family, whose wages amount to nine shillings per week, is sufficiently well paid, there appears to be strong reason for supposing you to be in error. In the first place, the labourers themselves think very differently from Your Grace. They consider themselves to be very ill-paid, and the reasons which they give for so thinking are not unworthy of your Grace's attention.
[Soberly and quietly Brooke exposes the poverty of the agricultural poor. He then, but still always distancing himself from his anger, proceeds to discuss the possible consequences of this poverty.]
No doubt, as a member of an oligarchy accustomed to look down with contempt upon the humble and industrious classes, and to treat with extreme disdain all their endeavours to think and reason for themselves, your Grace supposes it to signify but little what notions the multitude get into their head, or whether their
feelings towards the privileged orders be those of affectionate veneration, or of deep and rankling hatred.
[In the same measured tones Brooke points to the unemployment and misery that the retention of the Corn Laws will produce in the manufacturing centres of the midlands. It is only then that he begins to reveal the dramatic threat which is to be the culmination of his article]
These miserable men, with bodies and minds disordered by hunger, will be prepared to kindle and blaze forth at the throwing in of the first revolutionary brand among them. Hunger. let me inform your Grace. is as bad a reasoner, and oft-times as bad a patriot, as a member of the oligarchy itself. . . Your Grace has read the history of France for the last sixty years, and need not be told that the worst horrors of the revolution were but the natural and necessary reaction of tyrannical principles pushed to extremes.
Greville Brooke, The Corn Laws - Prologue
Brooke makes one realize the extent of the agitation for free trade in corn. The trouble went back to a law of 1815 designed to keep out cheap grain. However much the squires may have benefited from this protection, it was bitterly opposed equally by the middle class employers and the poor themselves, neither of whom wished to see slender wages expended on impossibly dear bread. In general Brooke's writing is of an order not to be matched anywhere else in the paper in its early days.
Nevertheless, the position of political oracle had been pre-empted in these years by The Times; and the reputation of The Sunday Times, which by the 1860s was very considerable, had to be made in other fields of journalism.
But before this, there were other changes of ownership. After John Kemble Chapman came Samuel Benaiah Frederick. Then the real founder of the highly-successful Daily Telegraph, a printer named Joseph Moses Levy, became its chief proprietor in 1855, but finding that he had his hands full with The Telegraph, which made history in Fleet Street when he reduced its price to one penny in September, 1855, he sold his interest to E. T. Smith, the impresario and lessee of Drury Lane Theatre. Under Smith and his editor, William Carpenter, the paper gave more space to the theatre and other entertainments, to book reviews and to sporting news, with special attention to racing and boxing. Thus at a time when the removal of the 'taxes on knowledge', the appearance of The Daily Telegraph, with its emphasis on news, and the successes of William Howard Russell in the Crimean War for The Times had all resulted in a new and more enterprising spirit in Fleet Street, The Sunday Times gave up the vulgar struggle and retreated into semi-literary journalism, to become a highly respectable quality publication which disdained the old ruffian appeal of its earliest days.
- ↑ James Augustus St John also ran the political department of the ‘Daily Telegraph’ with his son, Horace St John