Friday 20 October 2017

A Challenge to the Editor: Conclusion and notes


With that the matter was closed, but the episode raises some fundamental questions. Why did Crossley take the situation to such an unnecessary and potentially dangerous extreme? Why did he not deny authorship in the first place, and force Taylor to apologise? Nowadays, the course of action would be to issue a denial and sue for libel, but Crossley belonged to a different age. For a solicitor practising in the first half of the nineteenth century, an era beset with pettyfoggers and mountebanks, a successful practice depended completely upon an unblemished reputation. A threat to his professional respectability might have been enough to persuade Crossley that extreme measures were justifiable. In a way this affair marked the transition between the old order and the new, because a month later the Manchester Law Association was formed, with Crossley as its president, and the profession took an important step to establish its status as a regional body, rather than an adjunct of a Metropolitan elite. Membership of the MLA was henceforth a guarantee of the professional integrity that was an essential requirement of an expanding and increasingly discerning middle-class clientele.

 

We should perhaps also consider the fact that, as I have already mentioned, the morale of the Manchester Tories was at a low ebb at the time of this dispute, so their sensitivity to any perceived injustices, especially those emanating from the Manchester Guardian, would have been acute. Another explanation for Crossley's actions may be more personal. The notion of a duel would appeal to someone whose mind was steeped in the customs and laws of antiquity, who found the age in which he lived 'arrogant and superficial'.12 It would also fit with the respect for tradition and 'gentlemanly' behaviour which characterised Crossley's well-publicised conservative viewpoint. It may have been to some extent a lawyer's reluctance to admit or deny involvement before the opponent's cards were on the table.

 

As a journalist and 'modern' thinker, his newspaper always in the vanguard of reforming ideas, it was unlikely that Taylor would have seriously considered taking up such a quixotic and anachronistic challenge as Crossley's. The challenger was therefore fairly safe from potential injury, and we could wonder exactly how serious the motivation for it actually was. Perhaps this was merely a joke that would have been enjoyed at John Shaw’s or any of the Tory clubs of which Crossley was a member. More likely, it was a calculated move to jolt Taylor into providing the information and apology that Crossley sought. This was more or less the outcome, as we have seen, but the decision to publish the whole series of letters indicates the strength of feeling on Crossley’s part when he feared his professional reputation was in danger of being impugned. On a purely practical level, the likelihood of Crossley taking the dispute to its violent and irrevocable conclusion was always remote. William Axon wryly noted that:

To those who remember the corpulent figure of Mr. Crossley in his placid and learned old age, there is something grotesque in thinking of him handling duelling pistols and offering to the adversary a target that even the inexperienced could hardly fail to hit.13

 

It is also possible that Crossley may have had in mind the duel in 1821 between John Scott, the editor of the London Magazine, and Jonathan Henry Christie, who was the London agent for John Gibson Lockhart of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Scott had attacked Lockhart following criticisms of the so-called ‘Cockney School’ of poets and particularly of Keats, which had appeared in Blackwood’s. Lockhart responded by calling the Londoner a ‘liar and a scoundrel’, and a challenge ensued. Christie and Scott ‘met by moonlight at Chalk Farm, near London’14 at about nine o’clock in the evening of 27 February. Scott was fatally wounded, and died later that evening at his lodgings. Christie and his second were tried at the Old Bailey for murder and were acquitted. Crossley was a regular contributor to Blackwood’s in 1820-21 and knew Lockhart quite well, so it is quite likely that he would have been acquainted with the facts of this dispute. Whether or not he was hoping for a similar outcome is less certain.

 

In a separate editorial, headed 'The Nuisance' (the usual description of matters relating to incorporation in this newspaper), the Manchester Courier pointed out that the editor of the Chronicle had confessed that he was in fact the author of the offending article, supporting Crossley's position and further embarrassing the hapless editor of the Guardian. The confession had appeared in the Chronicle editorial of the previous Saturday, in the following unequivocal terms:

Who is the "disreputable lawyer" whose ghost has so disturbed the worthy gentleman's bile:- what single article on any subject has any " disreputable lawyer" written for the Chronicle, and, lastly, what nameless iniquity can that be which justifies the Editor of the Guardian in calling the perpetrator of it "disreputable"?... Before these questions are answered, we will give the worthy ex-Commissioner [Taylor] a piece of information which may perhaps be serviceable to him hereafter. The articles which have produced such a wonderful effect upon him were written by the Editor of the Chronicle, without the intervention, direct or indirect, of any lawyer, reputable or disreputable, or of any other individual; and therefore he has most woefully deceived himself if he believed, as he professed to do, that he was contending with any other individual.15

Crossley was thus vindicated, and Taylor humiliated. But despite small victories like this, the cause Crossley so fervently espoused was doomed to failure. The new government of Manchester rapidly gained strength and acceptance in the borough and its opponents were left to fight an increasingly desperate rearguard action.

The first municipal election took place in December 1838, and, in the absence of any Tory candidates, resulted in a borough council composed mainly of Whigs, with a sprinkling of Radicals. Prominent among the new aldermen were Richard Cobden and William Neild, and the first day's business saw the election of the Mayor, Thomas Potter.

The next meeting of the Police Commissioners, on 10 January 1839, was a stormy affair, resulting in a decision, by a narrow majority, not to allow the Town Hall to be used for meetings of the new Borough Council. Both Crossley and Oswald Milne, legal clerk to the Police Commissioners, spoke at the meeting (as did Thomas Flintoff, Crossley's messenger in the dispute with John Taylor), which was reported very differently by two major local newspapers representing the opposing sides. The Courier, under the heading DEFEAT OF THE CORPORATORS, referred to Crossley in its editorial, saying:

The truth is, as MR. CROSSLEY remarked at the meeting, they find themselves not only legally, but morally weak; every hour sinking lower, and something like a desperate effort was necessary, to give sanction and authority to that which every body (sic.) had begun to find was not based on legal authority.16

 

 

As might be expected, the Guardian editorial took a very different view of the proceedings, suspecting that a dialogue had been set up, and executed by Crossley and Milne, in order to disrupt the meeting and focus attention on their speeches:

The interruptions to the speakers in support of the application were violent and incessant ... Any man who knew the prominent part taken by MR. CROSSLEY in getting up the opposition to the charter, and who witnessed the scene between him and MR. MILNE, which, apparently, had been previously rehearsed, was pretty sure to draw this inference.17

 

Despite these skirmishes, it was apparent that the battle had been lost, and the ‘anti-corporators’ gradually withdrew. Crossley gave up politics shortly afterwards, and his influence on the city of Manchester was henceforth evident in cultural rather than political matters. John Edward Taylor continued to edit the Manchester Guardian until his death in 1844.

 

Postscript

The last fatal duel in England took place in 1852 between two French political exiles. The last between Englishmen was in 1845, between two young army officers.

 

 

This paper was given at a conference at the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, on 6 April 2017: ‘Comment is free but facts are sacred’ The Guardian in Local, Regional and Global History.

 

 

Notes

1  Geoffrey Taylor, ODNB (Oxford: OUP, 2004).

2  Manchester Guardian, 14 Nov 1838.

 

3  Manchester Guardian and Manchester Courier, 24 Nov, 1838. Letter from Crossley to Taylor, 14 Nov 1838.

 

4  Ibid., letter, Taylor to Crossley, 15 Nov 1838.

 

5  Ibid., letter, Crossley to Taylor, 16 Nov 1838.

 

6  Ibid., letter, Taylor to Crossley, 16 Nov 1838.

 

7  Ibid., Taylor's description of events.

 

8  Ibid., letter, Crossley to Taylor, 17 Nov 1838.

 

9  Ibid., letter, Taylor to Crossley, 17 Nov 1838.

 

10  Manchester Courier, 24 Nov 1838.

 

11  Manchester Guardian and Manchester Courier, 24 Nov 1838.

 

12  James Crossley, 'The Retrospective Review', Blackwood's Magazine, x (Dec, 1821), 701-712, at p. 708. Crossley may have had in mind the notorious duel between The Duke of Wellington and the Earl of Winchelsea in 1829, when both protagonists declined to hit their targets.

 

13  Axon, Cobden as a Citizen, p. 113n.

 

14  R. M. Healey, ‘John Scott (1784-1821)’ in ODNB.

 

15  Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle, 17 Nov 1838.

 

16  Manchester Courier, Saturday 12 Jan 1839.

 

17  Manchester Guardian, Saturday 12 Jan 1839.

 

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