Joseph Clinton Robertson

Joseph Clinton Robertson (c.1787–1852), pseudonym Sholto Percy, was a Scottish patent agent, writer and periodical editor.

He was a political radical prominent in the early days of the working-class press in London, and in the debates within the Mechanics Institute movement.

Robertson also devised a way of generating cheap content by an early crowdsourcing technique: letters to the editor were used without payment in continuing threads.

Knight & Lacey became bankrupt that year, and in a complex series of events the Mechanics Magazine was published dually for a period, two versions of the same title being produced weekly.

The Bankruptcy Court dealt with the matter by requiring Robertson to work on as editor, but upheld his claim to the title.

[6] The Mechanics' Magazine covered railway inventions increasingly as the 1820s wore on, and by the end of the decade had become a partisan of the railroad lobby who were arguing against the steam carriage, which ran on the road.

Herapath was brought into the company, did not fit in well, and in October 1835 quarrelled spectacularly with Robertson, who exacerbated the position with Lord Petre on what appeared to be a grudge.

Robertson was undermined as Secretary in 1839, as a group based in Liverpool gained control over the company, defeating his supporters the Cobbolds.

[13][14][15][16] The land deal with Lord Petre hit legal obstacles in 1839, and Robertson resigned from the company on 26 February of that year.

[17] Robertson ran the Mining, Railway, and Steam Navigation Gazette of the late 1830s, in parallel with his two other publications, as covert moonlighting.

But on 22 November 1823 he and Hodgskin made a matter of principle of the point that accepting outside subscriptions to support the Institute would diminish the autonomy of the mechanics for which it was intended.

Backed by Robert McWilliam, they lost the debate to Birkbeck and others including Francis Place, John Martineau and Richard Taylor.

[22] Robertson's reputation was damaged when subscription money was unaccounted for in November 1824, with the radical James Flather most deeply implicated.

In 1829 a parliamentary committee on patent reform was set up, after Thomas Barrett Lennard had pushed for an enquiry: Robertson lowered expectations in advance, and was partly justified by a lacklustre and scanty representation of manufacturing interests, with John Farey Jr. providing the bulk of detailed criticism where John Taylor and Marc Brunel showed little knowledge of the system.

When Labour Defended, Hodgskin's landmark pamphlet, was reviewed in the Newspaper in 1825, there was a note of dissent from Robertson on fixed capital.

Sir Richard Phillips later claimed that the original idea arose from his suggestion, made to John Mayne and Alexander Tilloch, to file the anecdotes which had appeared in The Star newspaper over the years.

Their success, which was a publishing phenomenon, was as a collection of "gobbets" suitable for social small-talk, or what in modern parlance would be a bluffer's guide to appearing well read.