The Spectator’s archives are full of surprises

The Spectator now has now reached a milestone unmatched in the global press, by becoming the first magazine to publish a 10,000th issue. To do justice to the history of the world’s oldest weekly magazine is a complex, perhaps even foolhardy task. Having spent the last three years piecing together its past, I can confirm that half a million multi-columned pages demand energetic trawling and patient sifting.

For most of its life, The Spectator has been more a newspaper than a magazine. Until the Second World War its first pages were occupied exclusively with summarising the previous week’s events. So the historian’s focus falls instead on the comment pieces that digest this news. But here a problem emerges: for The Spectator’s first century, these leading articles, along with the rest of the contents, were anonymous. This difficulty is compounded because early editors sedulously polished every page to produce a homogenous, Spectatorial house style.