EASTHOPE, John (1784-1865), of Hillfield House, Hampstead, Mdx. and Salisbury St., Strand, Westminster, Mdx.

A former stockbroker, Easthope embodied the reforming impulses and social conscience of the Morning Chronicle, the newspaper he owned from 1834. The ‘architect of his own fortune’, he rose from being a bank clerk in his native county of Gloucestershire to a wealthy trader in the City, where he ‘made £150,000 in a few years’.1[J. Grant], Portraits of public characters (1841), i. 77-78 (at 77); F. Boase, Modern English Biography (1892), i. 953; HP Commons, 1820-1832. Generally siding with the Whigs in the unreformed Parliament, he retired as MP for Banbury at the 1832 election.2HP Commons, 1820-1832; VCH Oxon. x. 91. At the 1835 general election he struggled to secure a return, finishing third behind two Conservatives at Southampton, and was narrowly defeated in a by-election at Lewes, 21 Apr. 1837.3HP Commons, 1820-1832; McCalmont’s parliamentary poll book, ed. J. Vincent and M. Stenton (1972, 8th edn.), 268, 171; Morn. Chro., 6 Jan. 1835, 3, 21 Apr. 1837; Brighton Patriot, 4, 11, 18, 25 Apr. 1837. He was, however, returned jointly top of the poll with another Reformer for Leicester at the general election a few months later.4A. Temple Patterson, Radical Leicester: a history of Leicester, 1780-1850 (1854), 233-34.

Although he spoke rarely, Easthope, who had a ‘purposely plain, practical and business-like’ style, could make effective contributions on subjects about which he was knowledgeable, interested or passionate.5Grant, Portraits, i. 82. On financial policy, he complained of the high rate of interest charged on exchequer bills, arguing that it would increase the already high level of unfunded government debt.6Hansard, 18 May 1838, vol. 42, cc. 1419-20. He defended the Bank of England from the attacks of currency reformers such as Thomas Attwood, but admitted that its current roles were ‘incompatible’ for it could not ‘be at once a bank of issue and a bank of deposit’.7Hansard, 8 July 1839, vol. 49, cc. 65-68. He also argued that the Bank of Ireland’s charter should last two rather than four years: ibid., 19 Aug. 1839, vol. 50, cc. 394-95. The chairman of London and Southampton Railway, he confessed that his railway interests were ‘notorious’, but argued that therefore his views on the subject should merit greater attention.8Hansard, 31 July 1840, vol. 55, c. 1183. Initially, he was firmly resistant to higher levels of taxation and greater government intervention in the railways.9Hansard, 15 June 1838, vol. 43, cc. 743-44; ibid., 15 June 1838, vol. 43, cc. 743-44; ibid., 21 Feb. 1839, vol. 45 c. 734; ibid., 22 July 1839, vol. 49, cc. 655-56; PP 1837-38 (257), xvi. 342, 346, 348.

On other issues, Easthope was moved by a social conscience that was influenced by the experiences of his constituents and his sense of justice. Although he endorsed the general principle of the new poor law, he complained that ‘deep and general distress’ in manufacturing towns like Leicester rendered it ‘totally inapplicable’.10Hansard, 20 July 1839, vol. 49, cc. 551-53 (at 553). A critic of poor law administration, in 1841 he unsuccessfully moved for shorter terms for the commissioners, and often brought individual cases to the attention of the House, especially where it appeared that the authorities had acted arbitrarily.11Hansard, 22 Mar. 1841, vol. 57, cc. 482-83, 505-06; House of Commons Division Lists, 1841 session, 19, 26 Mar. 1841. Hansard, 14 Apr. 1840, vol. 53, cc. 1093-97, 1099-1100, 1100-03. This was the case of a poor Hertfordshire man imprisoned by JPs on little more than hearsay evidence for cutting down a local landowner’s tree. Easthope withdrew his motion for a debate after the government promised to investigate the issue. The government cleared the JPs and the legal process but admitted that the prison was ‘extremely improper’. Hansard, 1 June 1840, vol. 54, cc. 778-79. In 1839, he raised the case of a dissenter imprisoned by an ecclesiastical court for non-payment of church rates.12Hansard, 25, 30 Apr. 1839, vol. 47, cc. 546-48, 693-95; ibid., 30 July 1839, vol. 49, cc. 1005-06. The following year he introduced a bill whereby people who made ‘a solemn declaration’ that they were dissenters would be exempt from church rates.13Hansard, 7 July 1840, vol. 55, cc. 545-50. The bill fell on a technicality, but, motivated by the case of a Leicester dissenter whose imprisonment he believed was a ‘violation of religious freedom’, Easthope introduced a bill to abolish church rates in 1841, and replace the revenue with a levy on pews and seats to maintain churches.14In 1840, The speaker ruled that as leave was already been denied to another church rates abolition bill and ‘according to the rules, the same question cannot be twice entertained in the same Session’, the motion had to be withdrawn: ibid., c.553. For his second bill see PP 1841 session 1 (387), i. 247-52. For the case of the Leicester Dissenter, Baines, on whose behalf Easthope was very active, see Hansard, 16, 18 Mar. 1841, vol. 57, cc. 305-06, 306, 307-08, 309, 314-15, 360-67, 388-89, 389-90 (qu. at 367).It did not, however, make any further progress.15Hansard, 25 May 1841, vol. 58, cc. 764-82, 782, 783, 799; CJ, xcvi. 391, 414.

16Hansard, 4 Feb. 1842, vol. 60, cc. 70-71; ibid., 16 June 1842, vol. 63, cc. 1613-23, 1637-39; CJ, xcvii. 385. He did not return to the issue, but his continued belief in religious liberty was reflected in his support for non-denominational education and Catholic relief.17Hansard, 14 Apr. 1847, vol. 91, cc. 790-91; ibid., 22 Apr. 1847, vol. 91, cc. 1178-81. Much affected by the distress of his constituents, who were ‘suffering in a manner which he had no words to describe’, Easthope warned the government in 1842 that if the people began to feel that petitioning was pointless they would turn to alternative, and less constitutional, methods to achieve redress.18Hansard, 22 July 1842, vol. cc. 536-40 (at 536). He welcomed the repeal of the corn laws in 1846, having been a long-standing supporter of free trade.19Hansard, 11 May 1846, vol. 86, cc. 355-56; House of Commons Division Lists, 1837-38 session, 15 Mar. 1838; ibid., 1839 session, 19 Feb. 1839, 15 Mar. 1839; ibid., 1840 session, 26 May 1840; ibid., 1842 session, 16, 24 Feb. 1842, 7, 11 July 1842; ibid., 1843 session, 13 June 1843; ibid., 1844 session, 26 June 1844; ibid., 1845 session, 10 June 1845; ibid., 1846 session, 27 Mar. 1846, 15 May 1846.

Although he opposed the 1844 railway bill, his attitude towards government intervention in the industry appears to have been moderated by his service on the 1844 and 1846 inquiries.20House of Commons Division Lists, 1844 session, 11 July 1844; PP 1844 (318), xi. 18, 22-31; 1846 (687), xiv. 6, 8-27. He supported the reform of procedure excluding local interests from consideration when local railway bills were under discussion, noting that he had ‘had the misfortune to sit on [one] … Railway Committee for sixty-two or sixty-three days’.21; Hansard, 4 Mar. 1845, vol. 78, c. 279; Hansard, 4 Mar. 1845, vol. 78, c. 279. Favourable to factory legislation, he was initially sceptical that attempts to regulate the hosiery industry would benefit workers, but remained a good deal more sympathetic to the plight of the framework knitters than other Leicester MPs, who matched many of the town’s hosiers in their hostility to the measure.22Hansard, 21 Apr. 1847, vol. 91, cc. 1121-22. Richard Gardner, MP 1847-48, 1852-56 and Wynn Ellis, 1832-35, 1839-47 were particularly dogmatic in their opposition to Sir Henry Halford’s bills of late 1840s and early 1850s. He soon became a supporter, however, dismissing laissez-faire arguments, saying that ‘in the artificial state of the social relations in this great manufacturing country it was absurd to maintain that no … interferences were necessary, or had been called for’.23Hansard, 9 June 1847, vol. 93, cc. 268-71 (at 269). He spoke freely as he did not intend to stand again for Leicester, instead contesting Bridgnorth at the 1847 general election, when he finished third behind a Peelite and a Protectionist.24Ibid., c.270; McCalmont’s parliamentary poll book, 31.

He sold the Chronicle to a syndicate of Peelites the following year, and it has been argued that he was a poor proprietor, who compromised the newspaper’s independence and commercial viability by slavishly following a succession of Whig leaders.25D. Bostick, ‘Sir John Easthope and the Morning Chronicle’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 12 (1979), 51-60. A more generous interpretation would be that Easthope helped to foster a climate of social inquiry and reform which culminated in the series of letters on the labouring poor later published by the Chronicle, 1849-51.26Collected and published in J. Ginswick (ed.), Labour and the poor in England and Wales, 1849-1851, 3 vols., (1983); H. Mayhew, London labour and the London poor, 4 vols., (1967; first published as a book 1861-62); idem, The unknown Mayhew, ed. E.P. Thompson and E. Yeo (1971); P. Razzell and R. Wainwright (ed.), The Victorian working class (1973). Although the newspaper’s circulation declined during Easthope’s proprietorship, rapidly so from the mid-1840s, and it was always inferior to The Times, it held up well in the 1830s and early 1840s and was generally larger than other rival metropolitan dailies such as the Morning Herald, Morning Post and the Standard.27Based on the newspaper stamp returns: PP 1852 (42), xxviii. 508-09, 512-13. Described as ‘slightly under the middle height’ but possessing ‘more than the average circumference’, Easthope died in 1865 at his Surrey house, Fir Grove.28Grant, Portraits, i. 85-86; G. Boase, rev. A. McConnell, ‘Easthope, Sir John (1784-1865)’, www.oxforddnb.com. The baronetcy, given to him by the Whigs in 1841, became extinct as his only son and namesake, who had unsuccessfully contested Tewkesbury in 1841, died in 1849.29HP Commons, 1820-1832; Morn. Chro., 26 June 1841.