Editing The Spectator (section)

===Meredith Townsend, Richard Holt Hutton, and John St Loe Strachey===
The need to promote the Buchanan position in Britain had been reduced as British papers such as ''[[The Times]]'' and ''[[Saturday Review (London)|The Saturday Review]]'' turned in his favour, fearing the potential effects of a split in the Union. As [[Abraham Lincoln]] was set to succeed the vacillating Buchanan after the [[1860 United States presidential election]], the owners decided to stop pumping money into a loss-making publication: as Moran confided to his diary, "it don't pay, never did since Hunt became its owner."<ref>Wallace, S. A. and F. E. Gillespie (eds.). ''The Journal of Benjamin Moran, 1857–1865'' (Chicago, 1948) Vol. 1, p. 763.</ref> On 19 January 1861, ''The Spectator'' was sold to a journalist, [[Meredith Townsend]], for the marked-down sum of £2,000. Though not yet thirty, Townsend had spent the previous decade as an editor in India, and was prepared to restore to the paper an independent voice in a fast-changing world. From the outset, Townsend took up an anti-Buchanan, anti-slavery position, arguing that his unwillingness to act decisively had been a weakness and a contributor to the problems apparent in the US.<ref name="Fulton" /> He soon went into partnership with [[Richard Holt Hutton]], the editor of ''[[The Economist]]'', whose primary interests were literature and theology. Hutton's close friend [[William Ewart Gladstone|William Gladstone]] later called him "the first critic of the nineteenth century".<ref name="Blake" /> Townsend's writing in ''The Spectator'' confirmed him as one of the finest journalists of his day, and he has since been called "the greatest leader writer ever to appear in the English Press."<ref name="Blake" />

The two men remained co-proprietors and joint editors for 25 years, taking a strong stand on some of the most controversial issues of their day. They supported the [[Union (American Civil War)|Union]] against the [[Confederate States of America|Confederacy]] in the [[American Civil War]], an unpopular position which, at the time, did serious damage to the paper's circulation, reduced to some 1,000 readers. The issue of 25 January 1862, published in the wake of the [[Trent Affair]], argued that "The Southern Bid" for active support in return for an Abolition promise, "demands careful examination".<ref>{{Cite web |title=25 Jan 1862 » The Spectator Archive |url=http://archive.spectator.co.uk/issue/25th-january-1862 |access-date=2023-04-01 |website=archive.spectator.co.uk}}</ref> In time, the paper regained readers when the victory of the North validated its principled stance.<ref name=Blake/> They also launched an all-out assault on [[Benjamin Disraeli]], accusing him in a series of leaders of jettisoning ethics for politics by ignoring the atrocities committed against Bulgarian civilians by the [[Ottoman Empire]] in the 1870s.<ref>See {{Cite book |last=O'Donnell |first=Frank Hugh |title=A Borrowed Plume of the "Daily News": The First Description of the Bulgarian Rising in 1876 |publisher=Arthur L. Humphreys |year=1912 |location=London |hdl=2027/wu.89013491543 |author-link=Frank Hugh O'Donnell}}</ref>

In 1886, ''The Spectator'' parted company with [[William Ewart Gladstone]] when he declared his support for [[Irish Home Rule movement|Irish Home Rule]]. Committed to defending the Union ahead of the [[Liberal Party (UK)|Liberal Party]] line, Townsend and Hutton aligned themselves with the [[Liberal Unionist Party|Liberal Unionist]] wing. As a result, [[H. H. Asquith]] (the future Prime Minister), who had served as a leader-writer for ten years, left his post. Townsend was succeeded by a young journalist named [[John Strachey (journalist)|John St Loe Strachey]], who would remain associated with the paper for the next 40 years. When Hutton died in 1897, Strachey became co-owner with Townsend; by the end of the year Strachey was made sole editor and proprietor. As chief leader-writer, general manager, literary critic and all things beside, Strachey embodied the spirit of ''The Spectator'' until the 1920s. Among his various schemes were the establishment of a Spectator Experimental Company, to show that new soldiers could be trained up to excellence in six months, the running of a Cheap Cottage Exhibition, which laid the foundations for Letchworth Garden City, and the impassioned defence of Free Trade against [[Joseph Chamberlain]]'s protectionist 'Tariff Reform' programme.{{citation needed|date=March 2024}}

Within two years he had doubled the paper's circulation, which peaked at 23,000. In the early decades of the twentieth century it was heralded as "the most influential of all the London weeklies".<ref name="Courtauld 1999">{{Cite book |last=Courtauld |first=Simon |title=To Convey Intelligence: The Spectator 1928–1998' |publisher=Profile Books Ltd |year=1999}}</ref> The First World War put the paper and its editor under great strain: after the conflict it seemed to be behind the times, and circulation began to fall away. Even the introduction of signed articles, overturning the paper's fixed policy of anonymity for its first century, did little to help. After years of illness, Strachey decided at the end of 1924 to sell his controlling interest in the paper to his recently appointed business manager, Sir [[Evelyn Wrench]]. Although he gained a second wind as a novelist, Strachey died two years later in 1928.{{citation needed|date=March 2024}}