Palmerston and The Times: Foreign Policy, the Press and Public Opinion in Mid-Victorian Britain, by Laurence Fenton

Abstract

Two of the major historical developments in British politics from the 1830s were the construction and manipulation of ‘public opinion’ by prominent politicians and the expansion and growing influence of the metropolitan and provincial press. As foreign secretary after 1822, George Canning defined a patriotic, Protestant and liberty-loving ‘public opinion’—bolstering his diplomatic aims of championing liberal progress against repression and promoting British commercial interests around the world. From the 1830s, Palmerston self-consciously took up Canning’s mantle, serving as foreign secretary (1830–4, 1835–41 and 1846–51) and prime minister (1855–8 and 1859–65). A genial affability, diplomatic expertise, and the celebration of the nation’s liberal political values giving Britain a moral sway in the world, were combined with a subtle cultivation of the press. The expansion of the press, meanwhile, gave further force to ‘public opinion’. Debate ensued about the extent to which the press (the ‘fourth estate’, as Macaulay described it in 1828) educated, expressed or directed ‘public opinion’. But there existed a consensus that the comparative freedom of the British press, in contrast to parts of Continental Europe, was evidence of a constitutional liberty by which the political public were moralised and improved.