A hundred years ago
The tom has been talking of libel cases this week. In the first, Mr Cornwallis West, Lord-Lieutenant of Denbighshire, prosecutes the publisher of Town Talk, one of the journals of debasing gossip which have recently sprung up, for asserting that Mrs West made a trade of being photographed and selling her photograph. The libel in this case is of the old kind, savage abuse worthy of Billingsgate, rather than definite slander. This kind of scene is the natural end of an outbreak of 'society papers.' The dose of gossip soon fails of its effect, and must be made stronger and stronger; these journals appear without even a pretence of literature; and then the police and the Courts are called in to end an unendurable nuisance. The evil has cropped up half-a-dozen times since 1800, and the end has always been the same.
Spectator, 18 October 1879
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