Adolphus (Asher) Rosenberg

Asher Rosenberg was born in Clift Street, which was off New North Road in Hoxton, to parents who had migrated from Germany.

Little is known about his early life, but as a young man he lived at 8 Ockendon Road, Canonbury, and went into journalism. He had a good start, with a commendation in the Jewish Chronicle in 1874 for a series in the London Sun on ‘Some Eminent Jews’. The JC noted that he had written ‘lively articles for various papers’. A year later he was sub-editor of The European Review, and the JC tells us that he had also been a sub-editor of the Jewish World (a well-regarded newspaper of the time) until 1877, when we learn that he had resigned.

This apparently respectable background was forgotten when he became editor-publisher of a gossip sheet called Town Talk. (It is not clear if this is the Town Talk that had been going some decades before, or a new publication trading on an old name.) The JC had by now turned against him as a ‘notorious defendant in libel trials’.

The talk of the town in 1879 was that the then Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, was rather closer than he should be to Lily, a society beauty who was married to Edward Langtry. But the talk was sottovoce, in the Victorian way, until Adolphus started printing articles suggesting a divorce was on the cards. Divorce would have been scandalous enough, but Adolphus defied all Victorian norms when he wrote that the Prince of Wales would be a co-respondent. The revelation – in the gutter press – resulted in Rosenberg’s arrest for libel.

His trial took place at the Old Bailey, and he was found guilty of this and two other libels. In each case, he admitted publication, but denied knowing his allegations to be untrue. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison, which he served at Wandsworth, and was bound over to keep the peace. After he was released, he continued to get into trouble with the courts over what was claimed to be further indecent matter. In 1898, when he was summoned to court yet again to answer a libel charge, his wife said he had left the country.

Whether he was a true friend of press freedom or just an unheroic muckraker is difficult now to judge. In 1900, we find him in New York, writing fulsomely to the New York Times to extol its sober virtues compared with the trivia and inaccuracies peddled by other American newspapers. What his motive was, we cannot tell. Perhaps we should take his praise at face value and judge him to have been, at heart, a serious journalist?