The muckraker's mind
Sir: When the editor of the News of the World has finished preening himself on the opprobrium of Auberon Waugh, Paul Johnson and Simon Jenkins (Letters, 19 November), he can take satisfaction from this example of the progress we have made since Charles Dickens wrote Martin Chuz- zlewit 150 years ago.
Of an American tabloid editor Dickens writes:
. his thousands of readers could as ratio- nally charge their delight in filth upon him, as a glutton can shift upon his cook the respon- sibility of his beastly excess. Nothing would have delighted [him] more than to be told that no such man as he could walk in high success the streets of any other country in the world: for that would only have been a logical assurance to him . . . of his being strictly and peculiarly a national feature of America.
Anthony Gilbey
White Lion House, Wangford, Beccles, Suffolk
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