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Typo: A Monthly Newspaper and Literary Review, Volume 3
[trade dispatches]
The collapse of the « land boom » in Melbourne has been fraught with disaster to printers as well as others. Among the victims are Messrs Ellingworth & Hanstein, printers of several suburban newspapers, who have had to seek the protection of the bankruptcy court.
James Gordon Bennett has brought out a London edition of his paper. This will be a heavy blow to the Star, which is but an imitation of Yankee journalism. The new Herald is published seven days a week—an innovation which has aroused the indignation of John Bull, and has evoked a solemn protest from the Bench of Bishops and the almost unanimous condemnation of the English press. All of which the irreverent J.G.B. will regard as a good advertisement.
There is a good deal of human nature about most people, after all, as a Yankee philosopher remarked. There is a small paper of very limited circulation, in Dunedin, entitled (lucus a non lucendo) the Otago Workman. It is an out-and-out radical organ, with the utmost contempt for dignities. Yet a contributor who has the taste to write an article in which « Vagrants and Bible-readers » are classed together, tells with conscious pride how « I had occasion to visit—with a member of the New Zealand Ministry….. We walked to a roadside hotel, and went in and had something to eat there. » Apparently the fact of once dining in company with a N.Z. Minister at a public table, has shed a lustre over the Workman which will brighten the rest of his days, and gild his passage to the tomb.
« A certain well-known and wealthy Scotsman » is reported to have declared his readiness to subscribe £10,000 to a fund to indemnify The Times. It is not likely that any such offer will be accepted. In 1840-41, The Times, single-handed, exposed and defeated the greatest swindling conspiracy on record, involving some millons. The informant narrowly escaped with his life, and the newspaper had to defend a libel action, which it did with success, but at a cost of £32,000. A subscription was set afoot, and £2,700 at once raised, but The Times refused to accept a penny. The sum of 150 guineas was therefore spent in erecting two tablets suitably inscribed, one of which is still to be seen in Lloyd's Underwriters' Room, in the Royal Exchange. The remainder of the money was devoted to the establishment of two scholarships in Christ's Hospital.
Can any one explain how it is that the papers which publish « Sunday Reading » on Saturdays so often have a realistic report of a prize-fight in the column adjoining the sermon?