With Richard Holt Hutton, he was joint-editor of the Spectator until 1887, and he was largely instrumental in making it an established success, writing most of the political articles and the opening paragraphs every week.
His two chief publications were The Great Governing Families of England (1865), written in conjunction with Langton Sanford, and Asia and Europe (1901).
Townsend and Hutton remained co-proprietors and joint editors for 25 years, taking a strong stand on some of the most controversial issues of their day.
They supported the Federalists against the South in the American Civil War, an unpopular position which, at the time, did some damage to the paper’s circulation, though gained readers in the long run when the North won.
[1] They also launched an all-out assault on Benjamin Disraeli, accusing him in a series of leaders of jettisoning ethics for politics by ignoring the atrocities committed against Bulgarian civilians by Turkey in the 1870s.