[1] In 1858 Patterson moved to London as editor, and later proprietor, of The Press, owned by Benjamin Disraeli, after the death in 1857 of David Trevena Coulton.
The editors of this period, during the 1860s, of The Globe included: Charles Wescomb; Henry Barnett, minister of South Place Chapel; Patterson; and Marbrook Tucker.
[6] Patterson resigned from The Globe in 1869, to join a board appointed by parliament to investigate and report on the purification of coal-gas in London.
[1] As a financial journalist he belonged to the generation of Hyde Clarke, David Morier Evans and William Newmarch, who debated abstract finance; their successors were Walter Bagehot, Arthur Crump, Arthur Ellis and Robert Giffen, concerned rather with realistic reporting on the City of London.
[1] His essay on aesthetics "On Real and Ideal Beauty" first appeared in Blackwood's, and was praised by William Angus Knight; it promoted the theories of David Ramsay Hay.