This month, The Spectator becomes the first magazine in history to print 10,000 issues,

and we'd like to celebrate with you.

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Hello and welcome to this episode of audio reads.

It's the Spectator's 10,000th edition,

and historian Tom Holland writes about the magazine's winning recipe in this week's

issue. Here he is. The spectator is a child of the 19th century, and damn proud of it. First

published in 1828, the link provided by its 10,000 issues to a long vanished age of regency

waistlines and romantic poets is one of the great wonders of journalism.

Its success was built upon Victorian foundations, yet it is a peculiarity of the current media

landscape that the spectator, the only current affairs magazine actually to have been published in the

19th century, should in many ways

seem the least Victorian of the lot. The new statesman, prospect, standpoint, all have a certain

quality of moral earnestness that one could imagine Gladstone admiring. The spectator, by contrast,

seems to breathe the coffee-perfumed air of an earlier age. Right from its first edition, it has been shaded by the spectre of a vanished

sensibility. In its morals, its values, its style, there is little of the wing collar about it. Dress the spectator up in period

costume, and it would have to sport a powdered wig. The magazine has always cast a certain

wistful gaze back at the 18th century. This is evident enough from its title. To launch a new publication back in 1828 was no less a leap of faith than it would be today.

But to call it The Spectator was a gesture of self-confidence so lavish that it might have seemed to verge on the conceited.

The original Spectator, founded in 1711, was a daily publication which, despite folding after a year, had come to be enshrined over the course of the 18th century as a supreme model of English prose.

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