This has been the story of a failed nineteenth-century newspaper that perhaps did not deserve to fail, and of the people more closely connected with it. The narrative centres on a single year, but the self-centredness that some of the principal actors brought with them into the enterprise influenced the shape and fate of the newspaper, while the consequences of its collapse lasted much longer. In fact, the experience of creating the Representative changed the lives of many people and broke up the way they related to each other.

Publisher John Murray II, the public ‘face’ of the periodical was a victim of his own success. For the previous few years everything he touched had turned to literary gold, therefore, when he started a newspaper, it was expected, by friends and foes alike, that the new publication would rise and dominate above all others, including the splendid The Times. For this same reason, when the first issues turned out to be simply average, they were judged with a particularly rigorous eye and found wanting. Benjamin Disraeli was also a victim of his own mistakes due to the fact that in his letters and fiction he painted himself as the protagonist of this story, when in reality, he was a mere supporting actor. Posterity took him at his word and lay the failure at his feet, possibly because the story of the Representative has come down the generations told mostly in his voice. The others said little, or kept few records of their journalistic experience. John Gibson Lockhart was perhaps the man who came out of the episode the best; although he did not contribute much to the success of the newspaper, he was rewarded with the editorship of the Quarterly Review, one of the most coveted editorial posts in the country.

There were a number of reasons why the Representative newspaper could not succeed. The first was that it did not have a good editor, and although there were many who performed as such but were not prepared for the task, such as young Disraeli and later William Maginn, the man chosen for the post, John Gibson Lockhart, was reluctant to carry out the job. Besides, the name of Lockhart awoke such animosity among London journalists (see Appendix I) that most of them were ready to find fault with any publication in which he had a hand.