Victory for Rowlandson would clearly signal a major challenge to Conservative dominance in the countryside, and Harcourt mobilised his oratorical firepower to increase his opponents' sense of insecurity. The outcome of the by-election was likely to determine whether and when Gladstone's ministry might tackle the issue of the rural franchise. By contrast, in choosing their candidate, the Liberals had broken new ground, backing a tenant farmer, Samuel Rowlandson, whose election expenses were paid by public subscription. The son of a North Riding aristocrat, he had fought in the Zulu War and promised the farmers that he would support the attractive but utterly impracticable policy of imposing a tariff on imported foreign wheat. However, in the Honourable Guy Dawnay, the Tories had a young and glamorous candidate with good traditional credentials. The Liberals hoped to capture the seat being defended by their opponents. Because the two parties had agreed to split the representation in 18, the constituency had not gone to the polls since the 1872 Ballot Act had introduced secret voting. However, all that was perhaps about to change, in a hard-fought by-election in the North Riding of Yorkshire, due later that week.Īt general elections, North Yorkshire returned two MPs. Meanwhile, county constituencies remained strongholds of deference, generally returning Conservative MPs from the great landowning families, not least because they were the only representatives who could afford the expense of fighting the elections and of subsequently disgorging the required charitable subscriptions that were the implied price of sitting for a large constituency. The Reform Act of 1867 had extended the right to vote to working men in the towns, but the franchise remained restricted in rural areas, an anomaly that Gladstone's Liberal government was expected to tackle – as they did, successfully, in 1884-5. His orations read well, while his political seniority meant that his words would be scanned for clues about the cabinet's intentions in the upcoming session of parliament. A former President of the Cambridge Union, he was also a rip-roaring speaker who kept audiences howling with laughter at his savage assaults on the Conservative opposition. Harcourt's speech Sir William Harcourt was, in every sense of the term, a political heavyweight, and one of the principal ministers in Mr Gladstone's second ministry. Nonetheless, the Harcourt interpolation, as it is termed by Wikipedia, offers an opportunity to explore neglected practical aspects of nineteenth-century newspaper history in an attempt to understand how The Times was produced and distributed – and became vulnerable to such blatant sabotage. The reticence of Victorian propriety means that many aspects of the episode are likely to remain shrouded in obscurity. It is sufficient to say that it rhymes with "clucking", and to acknowledge that, in this thin disguise, it possesses a salacious quality that is largely absent from its pedestrian transliteration. It is rendered here by asterisks (*******), not out of prurience, but because some segments of the Internet may still block its use en clair. It is now widely, if informally, used around the English-speaking world, as a gerund (a noun formed by adding the suffix –ing to a verb) to refer to sexual intercourse, or – more loosely – as an adverb, meaning "very", or as an adjective that conveys generalised disapproval. The ban on the word's publication in England was not lifted until the case of R v Penguin Books Ltd in 1960 (known as the Lady Chatterley case), and only then for works of literary merit. Patrons of the early edition of The Times of Monday 24 January 1882 would have been surprised to read that, in the midst of a speech on current political issues, the Home Secretary, Sir William Harcourt, had suddenly announced his intention to engage in sexual intercourse.Įven more remarkably, he was reported to have employed a demotic term, an obscenity regarded by respectable people as too indecent to be printed – or, indeed, even to be mentioned in private diaries. a word too grossly indecent to be put into print": sabotage at The Times, 1882
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |