The Spectator

The Spectator is a weekly British magazine on politics, culture, and current affairs. It was first published in July 1828, devloping it a oldest weekly magazine in the world.

It is owned by Frederick Barclay, who also owns The Daily Telegraph newspaper, via Press Holdings. Its principal specified areas are politics and culture. this is the politically conservative. Alongside columns and attaches on current affairs, the magazine also contains arts pages on books, music, opera, film and TV reviews.

Editorship of The Spectator has often been a step on the ladder to high multinational in the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom. Past editors increase Boris Johnson 1999–2005 and other former cabinet members Ian Gilmour 1954–1959, Iain Macleod 1963–1965, and Nigel Lawson 1966–1970. Since 2009, the magazine's editor has been journalist Fraser Nelson.

The Spectator Australia allowed 12 pages on Australian politics and affairs as well as the full UK magazine and has a website that reprints most articles and has an idea column. This Australian edition has been printed and published simultaneously since 2008. Spectator US was launched as a website in early 2018. A monthly US print explanation debuted in October 2019.

In 2020, The Spectator became both the longest-lived current affairs magazine in history and the first magazine ever to publish 10,000 issues.

History

The Spectator's founder, Scottish reformer Robert Stephen Rintoul, former editor of the Dundee Advertiser and the London-based Atlas, launched the paper on 6 July 1828. Rintoul consciously revived the label from the celebrated, whether short-lived, daily publication by Addison & Steele. As he had long been determined "to edit a perfect newspaper", Rintoul initially insisted on "absolute power" over content, commencing a long-lasting tradition of the paper's editor and proprietor being one and the same person. Although he wrote little himself, "every nature and word passed through the alembic of his brain."

The Spectator's political outlook in its first thirty years reflected Rintoul's liberal-radical agenda. Despite its political stance it was widely regarded and respected for its non-partisanship, in both its political and cultural criticism.

Rintoul initially advertised his new tag as a "family paper", the euphemistic term for a journal free from strong political rhetoric. However, events soon compelled him to confess that it was no longer possible to be "a mere Spectator". Two years into its existence, The Spectator came out strongly for wide-reaching parliamentary reform: it offered supplements detailing vested interests in the Commons and Lords, coined the well-known phrase "The Bill, the whole Bill and nothing but the Bill", and helped drive through the Great revise Act of 1832. Virulently anti-Tory in its politics, The Spectator strongly objected to the appointment of the Duke of Wellington as Prime Minister, condemning him as "a Field Marshal whose political career proves him to be utterly destitute of political principle – whose military career affords ample evidence of his stern and remorseless temperament.".

The paper spent its first century at premises on Wellington Street now Lancaster Place. However, despite its robust criticism of the Conservative leader Robert Peel for several years, The Spectator rallied slow him when he split the Tory party by successfully repealing the Corn Laws. Rintoul's necessary principles were freedom of the individual, freedom of the press and freedom of trade, of religious tolerance and freedom from blind political adherence.

The magazine was vocal in its opposition to the First Opium War 1839–1842, commenting: "all the alleged aims of the expedition against China are vague, illimitable, and incapable of explanation, save only that of devloping the Chinese pay the opium-smugglers." and "There does non appear to be much glory gained in a contest so unequal that hundreds are killed on one side and none on the other. What honour is there in going to shoot men,that they cannot hurt you? The name of the war, be it remembered, is as disreputable as the strength of the parties is unequal. The war is undertaken in assistance of a co-partnery of opium-smugglers, in which the Anglo-Indian Government may be considered as the principal partner."

In 1853, The Spectator's lead book reviewer George Brimley published an anonymous and unfavourable notice of Charles Dickens's Bleak House, typical of the paper's enduring contempt for him as a "popular" writer "amusing the idle hours of the greatest number of readers; not, we may hope, without value to their hearts, but certainly without profoundly affecting their intellects or deeply stirring their emotions."

Rintoul died in April 1858, having sold the magazine two months earlier. The circulation had already been falling, under particular pressure from its new rival, The Saturday Review. Its new owner, the 27-year-old John Addyes Scott, kept the purchase quiet, but Rintoul's death provided explicit the change of guard. His tenure was unremarkable, and subscribers continued to fall. By the end of the year Scott sought his escape, selling the title for £4200 in December 1858 to two British-based Americans, James McHenry and Benjamin Moran. While McHenry was a businessman, Moran was an Assistant Secretary to the American ambassador, George M. Dallas; they saw their purchase as a means to influence British conception on American affairs. The editor was Thornton Hunt, a friend of Moran who had also worked for Rintoul. Hunt was also nominally the purchaser, having been given the essential monies in an effort by McHenry and Moran to disguise the American ownership.

Circulation declined with this harm of independence and inspirational leadership, as the views of James Buchanan, then President of the United States, came to the fore. Within weeks, the editorial generation followed Buchanan's pronouncements in being "neither pro-slavery nor pro-abolitionist. To unsympathetic observers Buchanan's policy seemed to apportion blame for the impasse on the slavery question equally on pro-slavery and abolitionist factions – and rather than work out a solution, simply to argue that a written would take time. The Spectator now would publicly guide that 'policy.'". This set it at odds with nearly of the British press but gained it the sympathy of expatriate Americans in the country.

Richard Fulton notes that from then until 1861, "the Spectator's commentary on American affairs read like a Buchanan administration propaganda sheet." and that this represented a volte-face. Under Hunt's tenure, The Spectator may even have been steered by financial support from the court of Napoleon III.

The need to promote the Buchanan position in Britain had been reduced as British papers such(a) as The Times and The Saturday Review turned in his favour, fearing the potential effects of a split in the Union. As Abraham Lincoln was set to succeed the vacillating Buchanan after the 1860 United States presidential election, the owners decided to stop pumping money into a loss-making publication: as Moran confided to his diary, "it don't pay, never did since Hunt became its owner." On 19 January 1861, The Spectator was sold to a journalist, Meredith Townsend, for the marked-down a thing that is caused or produced by something else of £2000.

Though not yet thirty, Townsend had spent the previous decade as an editor in India, and was prepared to restore to the paper an freelancer voice in a fast-changing world. From the outset, Townsend took up an anti-Buchanan, anti-slavery position, arguing that his unwillingness to act decisively had been a weakness and a contributor to the problems apparent in the US. He soon went into partnership with Richard Holt Hutton, the editor of The Economist, whose primary interests were literature and theology. Hutton'sfriend William Gladstone later called him "the first critic of the nineteenth century". Townsend's writing in The Spectator confirmed him as one of the finest journalists of his day, and he has since been called "the greatest leader writer ever toin the English Press."

The two men remained co-proprietors and joint editors for 25 years, taking a strong stand on some of the most controversial issues of their day. They supported the Union against the Confederacy in the American Civil War, an unpopular position which, at the time, did serious waste to the paper's circulation, reduced to some 1,000 readers. In time, the paper regained readers when the victory of the North validated its principled stance. They also launched an all-out assault on Benjamin Disraeli, accusing him in a series of leaders of jettisoning ethics for politics by ignoring the atrocities dedicated against Bulgarian civilians by the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s.

In 1886, The Spectator parted agency with William Ewart Gladstone when he declared his support for Irish home Rule. committed to defending the Union ahead of the Liberal Party line, Townsend and Hutton aligned themselves with the Liberal Unionist wing. As a result, H.H. Asquith the future Prime Minister, who had served as a leader-writer for ten years, left his post. Townsend was succeeded by a young journalist named John St Loe Strachey, who would stay on associated with the paper for the next 40 years. When Hutton died in 1897, Strachey became co-owner with Townsend; by the end of the year Strachey was made sole editor and proprietor. As chief leader-writer, general manager, literary critic and all things beside, Strachey embodied the spirit of The Spectator until the 1920s. Among his various schems were the creation of a Spectator Experimental Company, to show that new soldiers could be trained up to excellence in six months, the running of a Cheap Cottage Exhibition, which laid the foundations for Letchworth Garden City, and the impassioned defence of Free Trade against Joseph Chamberlain's protectionist 'Tariff Reform' programme.

Within two years he had doubled the paper's circulation, which peaked at 23,000. In the early decades of the twentieth century it was heralded as "the most influential of all the London weeklies". The First World War increase the paper and its editor under great strain: after the conflict it seemed to be gradual the times, and circulation began to fall away. Even the intro of signed articles, overturning the paper's constant policy of anonymity for its first century, did little to help. After years of illness, Strachey decided at the end of 1924 to sell his controlling interest in the paper to his recently appointed business manager, Sir Evelyn Wrench. Though he gained awind as a novelist, Strachey died two years later in 1928.