Author: Meredith Townsend
Meredith White Townsend was born in London on April 1st, 1831. The Townsends were small landowners in Essex, of the type known in East Anglia as gentleman-farmers. His father died when he was a little boy, and his mother returned with him and his two sisters to live in Ipswich. He entered the grammar school there in 1841, and shot up rapidly to the top but the strain of genteel living upon a nominal income told upon him, and gave him a not very agreeable recollection of this portion of his life.
When he was seventeen John Clark Marshman, editor of The Friend of India asked him to come out to Calcutta to work on the paper. This had been started in 1835 and was produced at Serampore, about twelve miles above Calcutta, on the Hoogly. At Serampore Townsend lived with the Marshmans, and sent the whole of his first year's salary home to his mother.
He learned several native languages from an old Brahman pundit, who frequently harangued him on the irremovable barriers of East and West. At twenty-one he became editor of the now rapidly growing journal The Friend of India. He often wrote practically the whole of the paper himself.
He continued a friend and ally of the missionary and evangelical circle at Serampore, to which he owed his first introduction to Indian life, but in religious matters he came to stand a good way apart from them, rarely attending church and becoming more and more of a convert to ill-defined Unitarian or, as he would have preferred to call them, Arian opinions.
During the Mutiny he made of The Friend of India a power in the land, and he was more than once thanked by Dalhousie and Canning for the kind of influence which he exerted.
Dalhousie's thanks were well earned by the noble vindication of his methods undertaken by Townsend not only in his own paper, but also in the London Times, of which he was correspondent.
His predecessor on The Friend of India had drawn up A Guide to the Civil Law, which was the accepted authority on the subject before Macaulay's Civil Code came into existence. Townsend now at the end of 1856 began the issue of The Annals of Administration, which was published quarterly at Serampore, and was intended to do for India what Leone Levi did by combining the data obtained from the Blue Books of England.
While Meredith Townsend was at Serampore, Edwin Arnold was at Deccan College, and the two men both returned to Europe in 1860, one to lead The Daily Telegraph, the other to build up the fortunes of The Spectator. Having regard to the influence which these two organs were to exercise upon the future of English journalism, the coincidence is a rather remarkable one.
Since Rintoul's day the circulation of The Spectator had dwindled to a very few thousand, so that with the profits of his Indian journalism Townsend had no difficulty in purchasing it.
His leading contributor, R, H. Hutton, soon joined him in the venture, which was not at first profitable.
The turning-point was the recognition by readers that the paper had been a true and safe guide in the matter of the American Civil War, when the majority of Englishmen had gone astray in their judgments and sympathies.
From the outbreak of the war The Spectator had vehemently urged the justice of the Northern cause, and prophesied the certainty of its ultimate victory.
For a time the commercial effects had been disastrous, and subscribers and advertisers fell away.
Yet Townsend and Hutton held on their way, impervious to anything but the conviction that the North was triumphant both in principle and in fact. The episode was remembered long to the credit of English journalism. When the change of feeling came, it came handsomely. Townsend and Hutton's authority was established.
In the affairs of the Indian frontier their predictions were recognised as equally fortunate.
The basis of The Spectator's authorship was rapidly widened.
Townsend, above all, thoroughly understood how to interest his readers. He interested them because public affairs were his hobby and his passion. He was supremely interested in the changing scene upon which the publicist has to keep his gaze fixed. The result was that one read his articles with a sensation identical with that of listening to an able and well-read person talking at his best. His apt, pithy sayings, his historical illustrations, his flashes of political wisdom fell crisply, evenly, and unconventionally. He wrote in The Spectator chiefly on foreign topics, and his general knowledge of history was quite equal to the task. His reading was enormous and miscellaneous in the extreme. He hated qualification, and was a generous adapter of Jowett's maxim: " Never qualify, never retract and let them howl."
He never wrote about religion in The Spectator, and this was, perhaps, just as well, for he had very little sympathy with the growing churchmanship and eucharistic ecstasies of Hutton. Hutton, he more than once said, was " as blind as a bat, but had the courage of forty bloodhounds."
For once, easy writing made easy reading, for Townsend seldom exceeded two hours in finishing an article. His work fell readily and almost inalterably into article shape, two articles made a chapter, and so many chapters a book. Yet he never permitted such ready-made literature to materialise into books. Virtually the only book he completed was that of which this study is an excerpt.
After his compilations in India Townsend accomplished comparatively little outside journalism. With John Langton Sanford (1824-1877) he produced a valuable series of chapters on The Great Governing Families of England, and in 1879 he rounded off his friend James Macdonell's able and incisive book on France Since the First Empire by a short epilogue. His great work as a contribution to the thought of his time was the splendid historical analysis and judgment, a recapitulation of convictions long ago formed in India, which was issued in book form in 1901, and rapidly passed through several editions under the title of Asia and Europe. The masterly insight shown by Townsend in the perennial question of ebb and flow between the great qualities and the periodical decadences of the two climates, atmospheres, and zones of history was corroborated by the happenings of the Russo-Japanese War, of which he wrote an application in his Preface to the third edition in 1905. He looked upon the relationship of East and West as the binding thread of History. The three races, white, black, and yellow, he was inclined to regard as fixed immutably in their respective spheres. His book is a series of apt and revealing illustrations of this general thesis. It was stimulated throughout by the cordial encouragement and approval of his friend Hutton.
Townsend's later life was uneventful. In 1898 he sold his share in The Spectator to Mr. St. Loe Strachey, gave up his house in which he entertained a circle of friends every Monday in Harley Street, and settled at the Manor House, Little Bookham, Surrey, where he died on Saturday, October 21st, 1911. He continued almost to the end to send in occasional and much valued contributions to The Spectator. He exemplified to the end his ideal for the journalist of a suppressed and unobtrusive influence. His first wife had died during his first spell of work in India. The great success of The Friend of India was clouded by the death of his second wife in 1859, and he married, for the third time, in 1861, Ellen Frances, daughter of John Snell, of Hendon, Middlesex, by whom he left one son and two daughters.
No other man since Macaulay managed to make Indian life so vital and interesting until the advent of Mr. Rudyard Kipling.
