The Evening Star: Feargus O’Connor’s short-lived daily newspaper for London’s Chartists
Launched in July 1842, the Evening Star swiftly caught the attention of Feargus O’Connor, who saw in it an opportunity to have a Chartist daily newspaper in the capital. But the paper failed after just six months leaving its owner with debts of £3,500.
Feargus O’Connor always harboured ambitions to publish a London-based evening newspaper. As early as the spring of 1838, as the Northern Star hit heady circulation heights, he gave notice that he, along with James Bronterre O’Brien and Northern Star editor William Hill, planned to launch an Evening Star in the capital that November (‘To Readers and Correspondents’, NS, 17 March 1838, p4). He was even able to thank ‘brave Huddersfield’ for its offer of £500 towards the project, promising ‘to turn the Savings’ Banks’ money into a national press fund’.
But it would be another four years before the Evening Star appeared – and then it did so quite independently of any of those mentioned, and with no apparent connection to the Chartist movement at all. The very first issue, dated Monday 25 July 1842, declared itself to be ‘independent of parties – independent of classes – independent of men – independent of every living creature’, and promised not to be swayed by ‘the rash threats of blustering demagogues’.
Priced at 2d, and publishing four pages a day, six days a week, from Monday to Saturday, the paper had little to distinguish it from a host of rivals. It provided fairly lacklustre reporting on parliament, the courts and crime, and padded it out with snippets lifted from other papers (as was common practice at the time). It also promised that it would soon serialise a novel in twenty-six chapters, and managed to attract some advertising to help pay the bills.
But if O’Connor was not behind this new paper, who was? The following year, the Northern Star would carry a report, apparently written by O’Connor himself, claiming that the Evening Star had been launched by ‘a young American gentleman named Pray’ who had been associated with the democratic press in his home country (NS, 18 February 1843, p4). Though sincere, Pray lacked an understanding of politics in this country and was struggling to make a success of his paper.
This would be Isaac Clarke Pray. Born in Boston in 1813, Pray had worked as a newspaper reporter in his home city and then published a literary journal in Hartford before coming to England. In 1841, he was lodging with his wife Elizabeth at the home of a shoemaker named William Greenland in Bethnal Green. News of Pray’s London venture got back to America, where the Maine Cultivator reported with a sense of wonder that, ‘He is compelled to pay a stamp duty of one penny sterling on each sheet, and a duty of two shillings on each advertisement, which we think would make serious inroads upon the profits of a penny paper’ (Maine Cultivator and Hallowell Gazette, 17 September 1842).
Advised by the radical London publisher John Cleave, O’Connor approached Pray and made an offer: he would become editor ‘without pay or reward in any shape or form’, his only stipulation being that he should have control of its content. In O’Connor’s version of the story, Pray thought about the offer overnight and then accepted. He offered O’Connor part ownership, but O’Connor refused all financial connection with the paper – and so it became the Chartist evening paper for London that O’Connor had promised some years before. Even the title was as planned.
Isaac Pray may have been the proprietor, but much of the day-to-day work appears to have fallen on George Frederick Pardon1. He was nominally sub-editor, but his name also appeared in every issue as publisher, working out of an office at 1½ York-street, off Catherine Street on the north side of the Strand. Born in 1824, and just eighteen at the time he started at the Evening Star, Pardon had begun work in a printing office three years earlier and was soon contributing articles to magazines.
The paper was already struggling before O’Connor became involved. Within a matter of weeks of its launch, advertising was tailing off and it had raised its price to 3d. But as far as its readers were concerned there was no hint that anything was wrong. And then, in the issue of Tuesday 23 August Pray announced that henceforth the paper would continue ‘under the management and control of Feargus O’Connor’. Recanting his previous ‘jaundiced’ view of Chartism, Pray now assured readers that the paper would in future ‘be a mirror of the public mind reflecting the truth of Chartist principles’.
The Northern Star’s London correspondent, Thomas Martin Wheeler, meanwhile, was able to report: ‘The circumstance of the Evening Star having fallen into O’Connor’s hands has given our party in London great courage’ (NS, 27 August 1842, p8). Even as he wrote, he declared, the office was ‘literally burst’ with people waiting for that day’s early edition.
Pray’s lengthy explanation for his political change of heart appeared on the front page of the paper every day for the following week. That Saturday, the Evening Star underlined its new allegiance by reprinting the text of the People’s Charter in full (ES, 27 August 1842, p1). O’Connor also raised the price once again to 4d, explaining that of the previous 3d, 1d was for the newspaper stamp, 1d went to the vendor, and 1d for printing, ‘leaving not a fraction to pay any of the expenses of composing, reporting, sub-editing, publishing, keeping accounts, rent, gas, taxes, pens, paper, ink, casualties, spoiled stamps, and the thousand-and-one other contingencies’ (ES, 19 September, p2). He added that the paper had been losing £100 a week before he became involved, and that every increase in sales led to greater losses for its owners.
O’Connor kept Pardon on as sub-editor, and the paper continued to be published in his name. Pardon would go on to a long and successful career in publishing, so clearly had some ability. After later returning to America, Pray also made his life in publishing – as a poet, playwright and author. But it was O’Connor who took the principal writing role on the Evening Star. He claimed that for many months he wrote all the leaders – seldom less than two full columns of text every day and sometimes as much as three – sending his copy in from home.
It is difficult to imagine that O’Connor had the time for the hands-on work involved in producing an evening newspaper. He did, however, set the overall editorial policy, with increasing space given over to reports of Chartist meetings and rallies in Lancashire and West Yorkshire – typically lifted from the Northern Star. The Evening Star also began to run lengthy and frequent reports of Chartist meetings in the capital – which in turn would later appear in cut-down form in the Northern Star. This may have meant more work for Thomas Martin Wheeler, but it also enabled him to report London Chartism’s unique politics. Without the Evening Star as an outlet for his writing, far less would be known of the City of London Female Charter Association.
O’Connor clearly hoped that the two papers could pool their editorial resource, effectively becoming Northern and Southern editions of each other (but would later admit that the Northern Star’s publisher, Joshua Hobson, had warned him that by writing for one he was damaging sales of the other). Even with his contributions, however, the Evening Star failed to win the readership it needed. O’Connor might have written the leaders, much as he wrote his weekly letters for the Northern Star, but he lacked a William Hill or Joshua Hobson able to turn the rest of the paper into an essential read.
By the beginning of 1843, the Evening Star was still losing £72 a week and had clocked up losses of £3,500 (NS, 4 February 1843). Unable to carry on, and to O’Connor’s disappointment, Pray sold the paper that month. Under its new owners, the paper would espouse ‘High Tory principles’, O’Connor told his readers. He withdrew from any involvement with it.
Underlining the paper’s change of political direction, the new owners added a picture of a crown and sceptre resting on a bible to the masthead, and the words ‘Conservative Journal’ beneath it. The price went up again to 5d. There was, however, no saving it on any principles or at any price, and the paper appeared for the last time on Tuesday 28 February 1843.
Notes and sources
1. Pardon, George Frederick by Thompson Cooper, Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 43.
All newspapers referenced in the text are found in the British Newspaper Archive. Citations are given as ES for the Evening Star and NS for the Northern Star.
The 1841 census entry for Isaac Pray, at an address in Clare-street, Hackney Road, Bethnal Green, can be found on Ancestry.
