If it has ever been your lot, most magnanimous sir, to be in the
neighbourhood of Westminster Hall about four any afternoon while
Parliament is sitting, you must have observed more than one individual,
with cheeks evidently "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,"
rushing into the door which leads to the Strangers' Gallery in the House
of Commons. If, however, you look well, you will see that the parties
referred to, instead of going the whole length of the passage, as you are
compelled to do when occasionally you get an order, turn sharply to the
left and climb a flight of narrow stairs. If you manage to follow them,
you will find at the top of the stairs a small lobby, where three or four
boys, in the livery of the Electric Telegraph Company, are waiting to
receive the parliamentary report, which almost immediately after is
flashing along the wires to our great hives of industry, of intelligence,
and life, or to the capitals of other lands--to Paris--to Vienna--to
Berlin. You turn to the left and enter a small room set apart for
refreshments--three or four individuals are seated at table, one drinking
Bass's far-famed ale, another feasting on juicy beef, another regaling
himself with brandy-and-water, and another sipping the less stimulating
and equally agreeable produce of the coffee plant. The happy fellows are
poking their fun at each other in a mild and pleasant way, or possibly
discussing the usual political topics of the day; others flit through the
room with a celerity, as Mr. Squeers said of nature, easier imagined than
described. Were they followed by gentlemen of Hebrew extraction, with
those mysterious little slips of paper which contain letters of such
magic power, they could not walk faster. As you listen, utterances of
doubtful and dire import fall from their lips. "Palmerston is up," says
one. You are alarmed; you think the bottle-holder is in a rage, and you
tremble for the consequences. Again you hear, "Lord John is down;" you
are distressed at the intelligence, the old champion of civil and
religious liberty you hoped would long have been preserved from such a
catastrophe. The gentlemen around you, however, listen to such
statements with the coolness of stoics, paying little or no regard to
such announcements. One says to another, "When are you on?" another
demands of his friend, whether he is off; another says he comes on at
nine. You are puzzled to know what manner of men you are amongst. They
are not strangers fresh from the country--they have too pale and
town-like a look for that; they are not members--because members feast in
another part of the house. You will soon see what they are! you leave
that room and enter another, in which are a few well-dressed personages
transcribing hurriedly, as if for life. The truth flashes upon you.
"These men are the reporters," you exclaim. For once, my good sir, you
are right; and if you go through that glass-door you will find yourself
in the REPORTERS' GALLERY.
We will suppose that for this time only the doorkeeper has relaxed his
usual vigilance, and you have managed to effect an entrance. There is as
much difficulty in getting a stranger into the Reporters' Gallery as in
getting Baron Rothschild into the House. As the gallery will not hold
more than thirty, it is quite right this should be the case. On the back
seats the reporters are sitting idle--some criticising the speakers in a
manner anything but complimentary--some sleeping--some reading a
quarterly; but on the front seat you see some dozen or thirteen, each in
a little box to himself, busily engaged. If the speaker be a great gun,
the reporter puts forward his utmost energies and takes down every
word--if he be one of the illustrious obscure the task is less difficult,
and a patient public is saved the painful duty of reading the _ipsissima
verba_ of Smith or Brown. Beside the reporter, in some cases, sits
another gentleman, who has, comparatively speaking, an easier office to
perform. He is the gentleman that does the parliamentary summary to
which you instinctively turn, instead of wading through the eight or nine
columns that give the debate itself. I believe the summary writer in the
gallery remains all night, while the reporters take their turns, which
last on an average half an hour. Thus, no sooner has a reporter been at
his post for that time, than he leaves the house and rushes up to the
office to copy out his notes; this may take him an hour. He then
returns, and is ready to go on again when he is due. It would be utterly
impossible for one man to report a debate and then to copy out his notes,
and be in time for the paper of the next morning; consequently each paper
is compelled to have a body of nine or ten parliamentary reporters, and
these reporters, in order that they may all have an equal chance, vary
their turns every week. Thus the man who goes on one week at four, goes
the next at a later hour--and the reporter who is one week in the
Commons, perhaps the next has the honour of sitting in the House of
Lords. Otherwise the hard work might fall to a few, and the rest might
take it very easy indeed.
As we don't happen to be reporting, we will look about us a little. We
will report reporters as they are: on our left, just below us, is the
reporter for the _Star_; next comes the _Daily Telegraph_, then the
_Advertiser_, and then the _Daily News_. Three boxes are occupied by the
_Times_: one for the reporters, one for the summary writer, and one for
the manager of the _Times_ parliamentary staff. On the other side are
the _Chronicle_ reporter and summary writer, the _Herald_ ditto, and the
_Post_. Up to six o'clock in the evening the _Globe_, and the _Sun_, and
the _Express_ have each a parliamentary reporter present. The gallery is
under the care of Lord Charles Russell, Sergeant-at-Arms, who is sadly
put to it where to stow the gentlemen of the press, who have increased
far beyond the limits of the gallery. Behind the gallery are rooms in
which some reporters write out their notes; and so hot and inconvenient
are they, that his lordship has latterly acceded to the reporters a
committee room attached for such as need it. Behind the gallery also is
a refreshment room, and a policeman to keep out intruders. A few of the
weekly papers have reporters in on Thursday and Friday nights, and these
constitute the only habitues of the gallery. Of course the aspect of the
house is different to what it is when viewed from the Strangers' Gallery.
You miss the Speaker and his ornamental chair and majestic wig, but you
have a better view of the gangway and the bar--you see the
Sergeant-at-Arms, wearing a sword, seated on his easy chair--that chair
being made easy by the receipt of twelve hundred a year. You see the
gallery under the Strangers' Gallery in which peers, and members' sons,
and old M.P.'s occasionally sit; and now and then, through the glass door
by which members enter, you see a bonnet, a bit of muslin--the lustre of
some female eye--denoting that woman in her loveliness is taking note of
the Conscript Fathers. This reminds us that the Reporters' Gallery is
just under the little cage in which the British fair are confined during
a debate. The consequence is to some of the reporters who wear
moustaches, and cultivate the art of killing--who get themselves up in a
very different style to your fathers of families--a Barmecide feast of
the most cruel kind. They hear the murmur of female voices, not always
"gentle and low"--they know that, shining like stars above them, are
forms such as "might melt the saintship of an anchorite;" that above them
are eyes more eloquent than the tongues below, but they cannot realise
what they can imagine; and whilst music comes to them--
"Like ocean which upon the moonlight shores
Of lone Sigaeum steals with murmuring noise,"
they must take down the common sense of common men; such is their cruel
fate. And now one word about our companions. Most of them are young
men--some are in their prime. None of them are old; old reporters are
only met with where dead donkeys and departed postboys are common. At
any rate they are not engaged on the morning papers: the late hours, the
hard stretch of mind required in a reporter, don't exactly suit old men.
If you think reporting easy, my good sir, you are most egregiously
mistaken. It takes you two or three years to master shorthand
sufficiently to assume your place as a reporter in the gallery. When you
have done that, you will find that you don't get your money for nothing,
I can assure you. You must for half an hour take down all you can hear;
you must then copy that out into long-hand and plain English as best you
can. You must then come back into the house and take another turn, and
so on, till the house is up; and then, worn and weary, you must again
trudge to the office, and there indite the copy which, before the ink
with which it is written is dry, is in the composing-room and in type.
As this may detain you till four o'clock in the morning, you are then at
liberty to retire to your bed, if it suit you, or to the flowers and
early purl of Covent Garden, if it be summer time, and you are of a
sentimental turn. Now, occasionally, it is all very well to sit up till
three or four o'clock in the morning; London then is invested with a
grandeur and stillness very impressive: the air is fresh and pure,
bearing with it the odours of the country; the grand Cathedral of St.
Paul looms proudly before you; the streets seem broader, longer than
usual; and, far off, we catch glimpses of Hampstead or of the Surrey
hills; but when you have to see this, not once, but every morning, the
case is altered, the spell is broken, and the charm is gone; and such a
life must tell, sooner or later, upon the constitution. Reporters are
not rosy, jolly men; they don't look like Barry Cornwall's happy squires,
"With brains made clear
By the irresistible strength of beer."
Most of them live well, and are protected against the inclemencies of the
weather. The reporters of the _Daily News_ and _Times_ come down in
cabs, but they appear delicate hothouse plants; though, after all, they
do not look worse than a popular M.P., such as Lord Dudley Stuart or Mr.
Milner Gibson, at the end of a session. As a class, we have already
hinted, the reporters are intellectual men; among them are many who have
embraced literature as the noblest of all professions, and have as
sacredly devoted themselves to it as, in old times, priests did to the
service of their gods. You can tell these by their youthful flush and
lofty foreheads. A time may come when the world may seduce them from the
service, when all generous aspirations may fade away, when crushing
selfishness shall make them common as other men. Then there are others
to whom reporting is a mere mechanical calling, and nothing else; who do
their week's work and take their week's wages, and are satisfied; but
most of the parliamentary reporters are clever men, and all aspire to
that character. The mistake is one a little self-love will easily induce
a man to make. Men of infinite wit and spirit have been in the gallery;
therefore, the men in the gallery now are men of infinite wit and spirit.
A gorgeous superiority over other men is thus tacitly assumed. You will
hear of such a one, that he was a reporter on the _Times_, but he was not
clever enough for that, and so they made him an M.P. But, after all, no
man of great genius will report long if he can help it: reporting is a
terrible drudgery. A man who can write his thoughts well will not
willingly spend his time in copying out the thoughts of others. Dickens
was a reporter for the _Morning Chronicle_, but he, though his talent in
that way was great, though he could perform almost unparalleled feats as
a reporter, soon left the gallery. At one time Angus Reach was in the
gallery; there, till recently, might have been seen that accomplished
critic and delightful novelist Shirley Brooks. For a literary man
reporting is a capital crutch: he is well paid, and it often leads to
something else. The _Times_' reporters are divided into three classes,
none of whom get less than seven guineas a week. The other papers do not
pay quite so well; but a literary man, if he be in earnest, can live on
less than that till the day comes when the world owns him and he becomes
great; and if his dream of fancied greatness be but a dream--if hope
never realise the flattering tale she at one time told, still he has a
means of respectable livelihood, and may rise from a reporter into an
editor. Mr. James Grant, editor of the _Morning Advertiser_, was at one
time reporter for that paper. In some cases the ambition of the reporter
does not end quite so successfully. Only recently a reporter for one of
the morning papers contested an Irish borough. Unfortunately, instead of
being returned, the ambitious youth was thrown into gaol for an
insignificant tavern bill of merely 250 pounds for eleven days. What
cruelty! What talent, what hope, what failure, have there not been in
the Reporters' Gallery! And those who know it, if they wanted, could
find abundance of material there with which
"To point a moral or adorn a tale."
Perhaps, after all, in nothing is the astonishing improvement made in
these latter times so conspicuous as in our system of parliamentary
reporting. The House was in terror when reporters first found their way
into it. "Why, sir," said Mr. Winnington, addressing the Speaker, "you
will have every word that is spoken here misrepresented by fellows who
thrust themselves into our gallery. You will have the speeches of this
House printed every day during your session, and we shall be looked upon
as the most contemptible assembly on the face of the earth." In
consequence of such attacks as these, the reporters became frightened,
and gave the debates with the speakers disguised under Roman names,
though nothing could be more wearisome than the small type of the
political club, where Publicola talked against turnpike-gates and Tullus
Hostilius declaimed on the horrors of drinking gin. Nor is it to be
wondered at that the House grew angry when such reports as the following
professed to be a faithful account of its proceedings: "Colonel Barre
moved, that Jeremiah Weymouth, the d---n of this kingdom, is not a member
of this House." Even when the reporters triumphed, the public were
little benefited. Nothing can be more tantalising than such statements
as these, which we meet with in old parliamentary reports: "Mr. Sheridan
now rose, and, during the space of five hours and forty minutes,
commanded the admiration and attention of the House by an oration of
almost unexampled excellence, uniting the most convincing closeness and
accuracy of argument with the most luminous precision and perspicuity of
language; and alternately giving force and energy to truth by solid and
substantial reasoning, and enlightening the most extensive and involved
subjects with the purest clearness of logic, and the brightest splendour
of rhetoric." Sheridan's leader fared no better. "Mr. Fox," we are
told, "was wonderfully pleasant on Lord Clive's joining the
administration." Equal injustice is done to Mr. Burke. We read, "Mr.
Burke turned, twisted, metamorphosed, and represented everything which
the right honourable gentleman (Mr. Pitt) had advanced, with so many
ridiculous forms, that the House was kept in a continual roar of
laughter." Again: "Mr. Burke enforced these beautiful and affecting
statements by a variety of splendid and affecting passages from the Latin
classics." It is no wonder, then, that a prejudice should have existed
against the reporters. On a motion made by Lord Stanhope, that the
short-hand writers employed on the trial of Hastings be summoned to the
bar of the House to read their minutes, Lord Loughborough is reported, in
Lord Campbell's life of him, to have said, "God forbid that ever their
lordships should call on the short-hand writers to publish their notes;
for of all people, short-hand writers were ever the furthest from
correctness, and there were no man's words they ever had that they again
returned. They were in general ignorant, as acting mechanically and not
by considering the antecedents, and by catching the sound and not the
sense they perverted the sense of the speaker, and made him appear as
ignorant as themselves." At a later period, the audacity and impudence
of the reporters increased; loud and numerous were the complaints made
against them. Mr. Wilberforce, who really deserved better treatment at
their hands, read to the House, on one occasion, an extract from a
newspaper, in which he was reported as having said, "Potatoes make men
healthy, vigorous, and active; but what is still more in their favour,
they make men tall; more especially was he led to say so as being rather
under the common size, and he must lament that his guardians had not
fostered him upon that genial vegetable." Mr. Martin, of Galway, has
immortalised himself by his complaint made about the same time, though
based upon a less solid foundation than that of the great Abolitionist.
The reporter having dashed his pen under some startling passages which
had fallen from the Hibernian orator's lips, the printer was called to
the bar. In defence he put in the report, containing the very words.
"That may be," said Martin; "_but did I spake them in italics_?" Of
course the printer was nonplussed by such a question, and the House was
convulsed with laughter. Happily, this state of things no longer exists,
and, in the language of Mr. Macaulay, it is now universally felt "that
the gallery in which the reporters sit, has become a fourth estate of the
realm." The publication of the debates, which seemed to the most liberal
statesmen full of danger to the great safeguards of public liberty, is
now regarded by many persons as a safeguard tantamount, and more than
tantamount, to all the rest put together. "Give me," said Sheridan,
whilst fighting the battle of the reporters on the floor of the
House--"give me but the liberties of the press, and I will give to the
minister a venal House of Peers--I will give him a corrupt and servile
House of Commons--I will give him the whole host of ministerial
influence--I will give him all the power that place can confer upon him
to purchase up submission and overawe resistance--and yet, armed with the
liberties of the press, I will go forth to meet him undismayed; I will
attack the mighty fabric he has raised with that mightier engine. I will
shake down from its height corruption, and bury it beneath the ruins of
the abuses it was meant to shelter."
The reporters have now a comfortable gallery to themselves--they have
cushions as soft to sit upon as those of M.P.'s--they have plenty of room
to write in, and whilst they wait their turns they may indulge in
criticism on high art or Chinese literature--on the divine melodies of
Jenny Lind, or the merits of Mr. Cobden--a very favourite topic with
reporters--or go to sleep. Mr. Jerdan, in his Memoirs, tells how
different it was in his day; then the reporters had only access to the
Strangers' Gallery, and could only make sure of getting in there by being
the first in the crowd that generally was collected previous to its being
opened. But about the smart new gallery there are no associations on
which memory cares to dwell. It was different under the late one; old
Sam Johnson sat there with his shabby black and unwieldy bulk, taking
care to remember just enough of the debate to convince the public that
"the Whig dogs," to use his own expressive language, "had the worst of
it." We can fancy Cave, of the "Gentleman's Magazine," with a friend in
the gallery, stealthily, for fear they should be detected and turned out,
taking a few brief notes of the debate, and then, at the taproom of the
nearest public-house, amidst the fumes of tobacco and beer, writing out
as much as they could, which Guthrie then revised, and which afterwards
appeared in the magazine under the head of "Debates in Great Lilliput."
Woodfall we see--the Woodfall of Junius--his pocket stuffed with cold,
hard-boiled eggs--sitting out the livelong debate, and then writing out
so much of it as his powerful memory retained--a task which often
occupied him till noon the next day, but which gave the "Diary" a good
sale, till Perry, of the _Morning Chronicle_--Perry, the friend of
Coleridge and of Moore--introduced the principle of the division of
labour, and was thus enabled to get out the _Chronicle_ long before
Woodfall's report appeared.
We see rollicking roysterous reporters, full of wine and fun, committing
all kinds of absurdity. For instance, one night the debate has been very
heavy--at length a dead silence prevails, suddenly a voice is heard
demanding a song from Mr. Speaker. If an angel had fallen from heaven,
it is questionable whether a greater sensation could have been created.
The House is in a roar. Poor Addington, the Speaker, is overwhelmed with
indignation and amazement. Pitt can hardly keep his seat for laughing.
Up into the gallery rushes the Sergeant-at-Arms to take the delinquent
into custody. No one knows who he is--at any rate no one will tell. At
length, as the officer gets impatient and angry, a hand is pointed to a
fat placid Quaker without guile, seated in the middle of the crowd. Much
to his amazement, on his devoted yet innocent person straightway rushes
the Sergeant-at-Arms; and protesting, but in vain, the wearer of
square-collar and broad-brim is borne off to gaol. The real delinquent
is Mark Supple, a big-boned, loud-voiced, rollicking Irish blade--just
such a man as we fancy M., of the _Daily News_, to be. Mark has been
dining. He is a devoted follower of Bacchus; and, at this time, happens
to be extraordinarily well primed. Hence his remarkable contribution, if
not to the business, at any rate to the amusement, of the evening.
People call the present times fast; but men lived faster then. Sheridan
drank brandy when he spoke. Pitt made one of his most brilliant speeches
just after he had been vomiting from the quantity of port he had
previously been drinking. Members, when they came into the House, not
unfrequently saw two speakers where, in reality, there was but one; and
the reporters were often in a state of similar bewilderment themselves:
but they are gone, and the oratory they recorded has vanished from the
senate. In the new gallery they can never hear what was heard in the
old--the philosophy of Burke--the wit of Sheridan--the passionate attacks
of Fox--or the cool replies of Pitt. The House has become less
oratorical--less an imperial senate, more of a national "vestry." It
discusses fewer principles, and more railway bills. The age of Pitt and
Fox went with Pitt and Fox. You cannot recall it--the age has altered.
You find Pitt and Fox now in the newspaper office, not in the senate.
The old gallery has looked down on great men. It could tell of an heroic
race and of heroic deeds. It had seen the angry Charles. It had heard
Cromwell bid the mace be gone. It had re-echoed the first indignant
accents of the elder Pitt. It had outlived a successful revolution. It
had witnessed the triumph of reform. Can the new one witness more?
So much for the Reporters' Gallery. We cannot take leave of the subject
without remarking what obligations members are under to it. No man can
long attend parliamentary debates without being very strongly impressed
with that one great fact. The orators who are addressing empty benches
and inattentive audiences are, in reality, speaking to the dozen
reporters just before them. Colonel Sibthorpe, when he spoke, turned his
face to them, in order that they might not miss a single word. You did
not, the last time you were in the house, hear a single atom of Jones's
speech; you could merely see Jones, with an unhappy expression of face,
and to the infinite annoyance of the House, waving his arms in an
inelegant manner; yet how well Jones's speech read in the _Times_ the
next day. Once upon a time a paper attempted to report literally what
the members said--not what they should have said. They were threatened
with so many actions for libel that they were all obliged to abandon the
attempt; and now the reporters take care that the speeches contain good
grammar, if they do not contain good sense. Nor, most good-natured sir,
are you under fewer obligations. It is owing to them that you read the
debate over your muffins and coffee at your ease, in your morning gown
and slippers, whilst otherwise you would have to remain in profound
ignorance of it altogether, or would have to fight your way into the
gallery as best you could, besides running a risk of catching cold or
having your favourite corn trod on. Think, then, of the Reporters'
Gallery leniently. The brave fellows in it suffer much for you. Cowper
makes the slave in the "Negro's Complaint" exclaim--
"Think ye, masters, iron-hearted,
Lolling at your jovial boards,
Think how many backs have smarted
For the sweets your cane affords."
A thinking public, at times, should reason in a similar manner. The
reporters don't find it all play. People should remember--if a debate be
dull to read--how terrible it must be to hear!