About The Examiner (1808 newspaper)

The Examiner (1808 newspaper)

The Examiner was a London weekly newspaper that was published from 1808 to 1886. It was founded by the brothers Leigh Hunt and John Hunt, and for its first fifty years it was a leading intellectual journal expounding radical principles, described by John Stuart Mill as the principal representative of radical opinion in the newspaper press. It published Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and William Hazlitt, survived the imprisonment of both its founders for libel, and was edited in succession by Leigh Hunt, Albany Fonblanque and John Forster before a long later decline set in.

From 1865 the paper repeatedly changed hands and political allegiance, lost readership and purpose, and finally ceased publication in 1886. Its history therefore fell into two distinct halves: half a century in which a sixteen-page weekly, priced at sixpence and designed to be kept and referred to, stood near the centre of British radical and literary life, and two decades in which repeated sales, a halved price and revived but unsustained editorships could not restore what had been lost.

Founding by Leigh and John Hunt in 1808

The Examiner was founded in 1808 by Leigh Hunt and his brother John Hunt. John had become a printer and publisher, and the brothers had previously worked together on a newspaper venture, The News, from 1805. In 1808 Leigh left a clerkship at the War Office to become editor of the new weekly, while John stood behind it as publisher. Their brother Robert Hunt also contributed to its columns, and his arts criticism made enemies, including William Blake, who had been given hostile reviews in the paper in 1808 and 1809.

The new paper's subtitle in the Hunts' hands described its intended range exactly: it was a Sunday paper on politics, domestic economy and theatricals. It devoted itself to providing independent reports on each of those areas. In the first edition the editor claimed that The Examiner would pursue truth as its sole object. Hunt later summarised the paper's main objects as assisting reform in Parliament, liberality of opinion in general, especially freedom from superstition, and a fusion of literary taste into all subjects whatsoever. The brothers initially aspired to refuse advertisements in an effort to increase the paper's impartiality, but that aspiration failed and advertising was accepted.

Radical principles and the tax on knowledge

The Examiner consistently supported radicals in Parliament such as Henry Brougham and Sir Francis Burdett, and the political ideas of figures including Robert Owen and Jeremy Bentham. As well as advocating social reform, including causes such as the abolition of slavery, freedom of the press and an end to imprisonment for debt, it campaigned against the fiscal burdens placed on newspapers themselves. The Hunt brothers pointed out on the front page of every edition that half the cost of the paper's price was the result of the government's tax on knowledge, turning the paper's own price into a standing editorial argument.

That combination of parliamentary reform, social reform and literary publishing made the paper unusual. It was not a party organ in the ordinary sense: it acquired a reputation for unusual political independence and would attack any target it considered worthy, from a principle of taste, as John Keats expressed it. Its radical reformist principles nevertheless brought it into repeated conflict with the authorities, and a series of high-profile prosecutions of its editors followed.

Prosecution and imprisonment of the Hunts

The most famous prosecution followed an article criticising the Prince Regent, the future King George IV. In 1812 John and Leigh Hunt were arrested and charged with libel after publishing the attack, which described the prince in terms that portrayed him as a violator of his word and a libertine sunk in debt and disgrace. The brothers were found guilty and were sentenced to two years' imprisonment and a fine of £500. Leigh Hunt served his term, from 1813 to 1815, at the Surrey County Gaol, and he continued to edit the magazine from prison.

Imprisonment did not silence the paper or ruin its editor's social position. Leigh Hunt's visitors at the gaol included Lord Byron, Thomas Moore, Lord Henry Brougham and Charles Lamb, and Jeremy Bentham also called on him. His cell was decorated in a manner Lamb compared to something from a fairy tale, and the stoicism with which Hunt bore his imprisonment attracted general attention and sympathy. The episode fixed The Examiner's public identity: a paper whose editors had gone to prison for what they printed about the Prince Regent, and had kept the paper going from inside.

Byron, Shelley, Keats and Hazlitt

The Examiner published the leading writers of its day. Its contributors and subjects included Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and William Hazlitt, and Hunt himself was among the first critics to praise the genius of Shelley and Keats, acting as a literary mentor to the young Keats after his release from prison. The paper's theatrical and literary criticism was as much a part of its identity as its politics, reflecting its founding subtitle's promise to cover theatricals alongside politics and domestic economy.

From 1814 to 1817 Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt wrote a series of essays in The Examiner under the title The Round Table. Fifty-two essays appeared in the series, twelve written by Hunt and the rest by Hazlitt, and they were collected in two volumes in 1817. The Round Table gave the paper a second life in book form and demonstrated its method: the weekly journal as a place where political argument and the familiar essay appeared side by side, week after week, for a readership that kept its copies.

Albany Fonblanque takes control

The tradition of accurate news and witty criticism of domestic and foreign politics was continued by Albany Fonblanque. Fonblanque had been the journal's political commentator since 1826, after earlier work on The Times and the Morning Chronicle and contributions to other reviews. In 1828 the paper was purchased by the Reverend Dr Fellowes and given over to Fonblanque's complete control. He took over The Examiner entirely in 1830 and served as editor until 1847, while retaining ownership of it until 1865.

For seventeen years Fonblanque sustained the high character for political independence and literary ability that the paper had gained under Leigh and John Hunt, and even political opponents acknowledged the boldness and brightness of his wit. At his height, an epigram in The Examiner was said to go off like a great gun, echoing all over the country. His best articles were republished in 1837 as England under Seven Administrations. When supporters proposed to facilitate a reduction in the paper's price by paying subscriptions ten years in advance, they were joined by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and by Benjamin Disraeli, who was then flirting with radicalism. Fonblanque remained at The Examiner despite many offers of other literary employment, resolving to make it a standard of literary excellence in journalism.

Dickens, Mill, Thackeray and Forster

Fonblanque brought in contributors who defined the next literary generation. They included John Stuart Mill, John Forster, William Makepeace Thackeray and, most notably, Charles Dickens. Fonblanque wrote the first notice of Dickens's Sketches by Boz, on 28 February 1836, and of The Pickwick Papers, on 4 September 1836, giving The Examiner a place in the earliest reception of Dickens's work. Forster became the magazine's literary editor in 1835.

In 1847, when the Liberals returned to office, Fonblanque relinquished the editorship and accepted an appointment in the statistical department of the Board of Trade, having declined the government of Nova Scotia because he could not tear himself away from London. He remained proprietor until 1865 and continued to contribute until about 1860, though with decreasing sympathy for the spirit of the new time. The editorship passed to John Forster, Leigh Hunt's friend, who edited The Examiner from 1847 to 1855. Forster was succeeded by Marmion Savage. Until Fonblanque sold the paper in the mid-1860s, it kept the form it had made standard: a sixteen-page journal priced at sixpence, designed to be kept and repeatedly referred to, with a circulation recorded at 6,000 in 1840.

Sale, price cut and decline after 1865

The turning point came in the mid-1860s. From 1865 The Examiner repeatedly changed hands and political allegiance, resulting in a rapid decline in readership and a loss of purpose. The paper's reputation was specifically undermined when its new owner, William McCullagh Torrens, halved its price in 1867. For a journal whose identity rested on being a considered, keepable sixpenny weekly, halving the price signalled a different and lesser kind of publication, and the change damaged rather than rescued it.

There was a revival of the paper's tradition of radical intellectual commentary in the 1870s under the editorship of William Minto. It did not last. The Examiner was repeatedly sold, and accounts of its end reflected the confusion of its final years: its final edition was reported as appearing in February 1881 in one summary, while the paper was also recorded as ceasing publication in 1886, the date carried in its standard listing. What was not in dispute was the direction of travel. A paper that had once set the terms of radical debate ended the century's ninth decade as a title passed from owner to owner without a settled allegiance or audience.

Closure in 1886

The Examiner ceased publication in 1886, seventy-eight years after its foundation. No merger preserved its name, and no successor continued it. Its close came a generation after Fonblanque's sale had broken the long proprietorial continuity that stretched, through the Hunts and then Fonblanque himself, from 1808 to 1865. Once that continuity was gone, neither a halved price nor Minto's revival of its radical commentary could give the paper a durable place in a newspaper market that had been transformed since its founding.

Legacy

The Examiner's legacy rested on the first five decades of its life. It had been founded to pursue truth, parliamentary reform and literary taste in a single weekly, and it had paid for its principles with the imprisonment and fining of both founding brothers. It had placed on its front page, week after week, the argument that half its price was a tax on knowledge. It had published Byron, both Shelleys, Keats and Hazlitt, collected its Round Table essays into volumes, given Dickens his first notices under Fonblanque, and numbered Mill, Thackeray and Forster among its contributors and editors.

Mill's judgement, that it was the principal representative of radical opinion in the newspaper press, summarised its standing at its height. Its decline after 1865, through repeated sales, shifting allegiance and the price cut of 1867, and its extinction in 1886, made its full history a study in how much a journal of opinion depended on the continuity of the hands that owned and edited it. As a standalone publication it ended in 1886, but the record of its Hunt and Fonblanque years kept it in the standard histories of both radical politics and nineteenth-century literature.