ABSTRACT
By all the rules of intellectual warfare the aristocratic ideal should have won the battle for the mind. The aristocracy was the army in possession, defending a prepared position, and in control of the most powerful organs of opinion and most of the institutions of education. It also had the enormous moral advantage of long and successful experience of preaching its ideal. At the outset it controlled nearly all the most widely read ‘quality’ journals and newspapers. The largest quarterly, monthly and daily circulations belonged to the Tory Quarterly Review, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, and The Times.1 The Whig publications were more open to Radical influence, but their editors, taunted their enemies, walked in fear of being ‘cut by the great aristocractical Whigs’.2 Of the leading national journals only the Westminster Review, founded by Bentham and James Mill in 1824, and the Morning Chronicle, edited by Mill and Place’s protégé John Black were unequivocally anti-aristocratic, and their circulations were comparatively small.1
