Harcourt interpolation

[1] Harcourt made reference to a by-election campaign then being fought in the North Riding of Yorkshire (polling day was Thursday 26 January), in which the Liberal candidate, Samuel Rowlandson, was a tenant farmer.

The Times' compositors were in dispute with the newspaper management[2] and the report of Harcourt's speech printed in the first edition read (the '/' represent end-of-line in the original): I saw in a Tory journal the other day a note of alarm, in / which they said "Why, if a tenant-farmer is elected / for the North Riding of Yorkshire the farmers will / be a political power who will have to be reckoned with".

[5] Sir William Harcourt's son Lewis noted in his diary that the "disgraceful interpolation of an obscene line" had been "discovered before the second edition was published and so it only appears in the first".

[6] Talk about the misprint became widespread and many curious people sought to see it; this demand combined with the restricted supply (due to The Times efforts to recall all copies containing it) to raise the market price of editions containing it.

[4] Sir Edward Walter Hamilton noted in his diary on 26 January that copies were selling "at all sorts of fancy prices" and reported that Lord Wolverton had told him they were fetching 20s.

The Times maintained a dignified silence about it, but for many years after it was a rule on the paper that any compositor who was sacked left immediately with a payoff and did not work out a period of notice.