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.
