Diplomacy, Satire and the Victorians energetic, innovative, and super-rich James Gordon Bennett Jr., who was Frencheducated and himself spent much time in Paris, where the Herald had its main European headquarters.69 Grenville-Murray had secured his lucrative appointment with this paper through the recommendation of Edmund Yates.70 Every week, he supplied it with ‘seven or eight closely printed columns, dealing with all kinds of subjects.’71 It was in his capacity as Herald correspondent that, on the centenary in 1876 of the American Declaration of Independence, he served with a number of other literary notables on the jury created to award a prize for the play most powerfully recalling this event; the other jurors included Victor Hugo, to whom he dedicated his third novel, The Boudoir Cabal.72 An interesting variation on Grenville-Murray’s American output occurred in 1877, when he gave the chattering classes of New York a droll tour through the English peerage in a signed article in their monthly, the Galaxy. This put the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos in his place by almost forgetting to mention him. The formal privileges accorded to peers in bygone ages were now only nominal, he concluded this address to his American readers, but the ‘nameless privileges of men of rank’ remained great indeed. Nevertheless, although in regard to political equality still well behind the United States (and France), England was at least headed in the same direction.73 As for the British periodicals to which Grenville-Murray supplied abundant copy, these continued to include Vanity Fair. On 7 February 1874, this included a cartoon of a rather dazed-looking Lord Carrington (‘Charlie’), inevitably enough slumped on the driving seat of a coach, caressing a horse-whip. The accompanying biographical note was, however, too flattering to have been written by the man he assaulted five years earlier. It was also in Vanity Fair that The Boudoir Cabal was first serialized.
69
Owing to a scandal at home, in 1877 Bennett joined G-M in exile in Paris. Later, he established a Paris edition of his newspaper that was the forerunner of the International Herald Tribune, International Herald Tribune, 3 October 2012. 70 At the end of 1872, Yates had been made the Herald’s roving correspondent for the whole of Europe on the handsome annual salary of £1200, but had really wanted only to be London correspondent and found the travel exhausting, Yates, His Recollections and Experiences, pp. 422-46. 71 Yates, His Recollections and Experiences, p. 451. 72 Huneker, ‘Villiers de l’Isle Adam’. 73 G-M, ‘The English Peerage’, Galaxy, vol. 23, March 1877. The Galaxy was launched in 1866 but absorbed by the Atlantic Monthly in 1878.
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