Commissioned Letters to The Times
A Talk by Graham Law
The RSVP Digital Events committee is delighted to welcome Graham Law into our Speaker’s Forum for our next Digital Event on April 17. Research within the Times Editorial Diaries held in the News UK Archive in Essex reveals that from the late 1850s, the newspaper began to engage occasionally in the surreptitious practice of commissioning pseudo-letters to the editor from professional agents. In this talk, Dr. Law will present a pair of case studies of such “compensated” correspondence in The Times. The first is the extreme example of forty-four political letters over three years during the American Civil War intended to influence both British public opinion and Government policy. The second around a dozen from the autumn of 1869, much lighter in tone and apparently with the commercial motive of encouraging subscribers to patronize British seaside resorts.
Such commissions, he argues, demonstrate the paper’s efforts to maintain its quasi-monopolistic position in the face of a good deal of hostility from rival papers, within a media landscape transformed by the recent abolition of various fiscal constraints on newspaper publication. The most notorious incident relating to this hostility was the rancorous dispute throughout much of December 1863 between Richard Cobden, M.P. for Rochdale, the centre of Lancashire cotton manufacturing, and the chief editor of The Times, John T. Delane. It is of particular interest here as it concerns access to the “letters to the editor” columns.
The talk will thus be divided into four parts: “From the Editorial Diaries, 1857-1870”; “The Times in the Age of “New Journalism”; “A Powerful Platform for the Confederate Lobbyist from Liverpool (February 1862-January 1865)”; and “A Working Holiday by the Seaside for the War Correspondent (September-November 1869).”
About Our Speaker
Born on the outskirts of Manchester, Graham Law has spent most of his professional life in Japan. He is now Professor Emeritus at Waseda University, Tokyo, having worked there from 1990 until retiring in spring 2023. His books include Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press (2000), and Wilkie Collins: A Literary Life (with Andrew Maunder, 2008). Together with William Baker, Andrew Gasson and Paul Lewis, he is an editor of the correspondence of Wilkie Collins. More recently, he has produced a monograph analysing the nineteenth-century British media system under the title The Periodical Press Revolution and, with Jenny Bourne Taylor, two edited volumes on the journalism of E. S. Dallas. His latest publication is a critical biography of E.S. Dallas, “The Prince of Journalists” (2026).
