ABSTRACT
Yates's claim, in his Recollections, that the 'Lounger at the Clubs' initiated a new style of 'personal journalism' in England has generally been accepted. Some aspects of it had been foreshadowed earlier, for
example in the use of miscellaneous snippets of news as 'fillers' or 'chips', and even in more regular features like Lewes's 'Literature' pages in the Leader, and the columns of Literary, Theatrical and Artistic News in the Athenceum. What was most novel about Yates's column is best suggested by Vizetelly's phrase 'flippant nonsense' (quoted by Yates in his Recollections}. It generally aimed neither to impart solid information nor to pontificate on the great issues of the day, but to amuse the reader with titbits of news or odd, preferably 'personal' angles on more substantial stories already in circulation. According to Yates it was looked down upon by journalists who contributed weightier articles to the paper - Sala, James Hannay, Frederick Greenwood, Augustus Mayhew and others - but Vizetelly believed that it did as much for the paper's sales as their 'deeper and drier wisdom'. By 1859 these had grown large enough to impel Herbert Ingram, the proprietor of the Illustrated London News, to 'clip its wings' by taking it over.
