ABSTRACT
John Scott, later founding editor of Baldwin’s London Magazine, won his early success as a crusading editor of John Drakard’s weekly Stamford News (Stamford, Lincolnshire), which was founded in 1809. Drakard, the owner, was imprisoned for eighteen months on account of an article by Scott attacking excessive flogging of soldiers. Upon Drakard’s release, the owner and editor combined their efforts again to found DRAKARD’S PAPER in London, which ran weekly from January 10 through December 26, 1813. After that time Scott took sole control of the London paper, changing its name to the CHAMPION, but numbering issues consecutively from the fifty-one numbers of Drakard’s Paper. Scott edited the Champion into 1817, when it was purchased by John Thelwall (1764-1834), a radical friend of Godwin, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, who had been one of the defendents in the notorious Treason Trials of 1794. The Champion, though not a great financial success, struggled on until June 2, 1822. The reviews in the Champion, like that of other newspapers, reflect entirely the desires of its editor-owner, who — when the paper was not crowded with news or other feature articles — would review or insert reviews by friends or regular contributors of books that happened to interest them. Both Scott and John Thelwall had strong literary interests, and the Champion became, after the Examiner, the most important reviewing newspaper. Among the regular contributors to the Champion were Keats’s friend John Hamilton Reynolds and William Hazlitt, Reynolds contributing drama criticisms and literary reviews. The paper’s bias was politically liberal and generally sympathetic to the Romantic poets.
