Times past
Sir: ‘Imagine,’ says Hugo Rifkind in his excellent piece on the power of Google (29 November), ‘that there was one newspaper that got all the scoops. Literally all of them.’ We don’t have to imagine: such a newspaper existed, a couple of centuries ago, and Hugo works for its descendent.
The Times of the early 19th century had a foreign intelligence service that regularly outperformed Whitehall’s, and a circulation several times that of all its rivals combined. It thundered as confidently on royal scandal as it did on the details of parliamentary reform. Its editor dictated the membership of at least one cabinet.
Regulation just entrenched this state of affairs. Stamp taxes gave the Times cheap distribution in the provinces; and once newspapers were issued with individual stamps, to reveal what the government assumed must be the Times’s fraudulent dominance, they also gave it authoritative figures showing how far ahead it was. Only after the end of the ‘taxes on knowledge’, in the 1850s, did it begin to wobble on its throne. There may be a lesson here for the politicians seeking to tame today’s technology giants.
Henry Dart
Bath
Ordered estates
Sir: Nicholas Berry makes a fine point concerning the correct punctuation of the controversial third verse of ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ (Letters, 29 November). However, there has been no ‘misrepresentation’ for the past 166 years, as Mr Berry claims.
Irrespective of the comma in the third line, once God had made people ‘high or lowly’, the fourth line goes on to assert quite unambiguously that He then ‘ordered their estate’. In other words, the hymn’s Victorian author clearly reflected the prevailing belief in the Anglican church at the time that one’s social class, rank and worldly wealth were all divinely ordained and should remain untampered with.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in