In late 1825, in a lavish drawing room on Albermarle Street, London, the Scots-born publisher John Murray II sat and listened avidly as a twenty-year-old family contact pitched an idea for a new Conservative daily newspaper. Murray had built up his family firm through astute management of literary property: he had been responsible for turning Lord Byron into a household commodity, selling his volumes of poetry as fast as they could be printed; he had championed Jane Austen, who brought her greatest works to him for publication; and he had instituted the Quarterly Review in 1809, which had become a leading Conservative voice in the periodical press world. Now he was being asked to invest in a new venture, a daily newspaper to be called the Representative, set to stand as a Conservative counterpoint to the more Whiggish London Times. The man pitching the idea was young firebrand Benjamin Disraeli, who promised to find half the start-up capital needed if Murray would front the other half. Disraeli sought but failed to get Walter Scott's Scottish born-and-bred son-in-law, editor and writer John Gibson Lockhart, to take on the editorship role, though Lockhart did accede to playing a consultancy role while taking up editorship of Murray's Quarterly Review instead. A number of less qualified individuals were called on to fill the gap, with the polymath Irishman William Maginn providing crucial interventions as an overseas correspondent, provider of copy, and then manager of the newspaper's production. Money was lavishly poured into launching the new press entrant on 26 January 1826, but it soon became apparent that this Conservative voice was not of interest to the paying public, and that Disraeli was signally unable to manage the running of the paper. It did not help that it was launched in the face of opposition by two key players of the Conservative government then in power, the Foreign Secretary George Canning, and the First Secretary to the Admiralty John Wilson Croker. It also fought headwinds occasioned by the financial crash of 1825–6, where overburdened debt structures and risky investments in overseas shares, bonds and government loan schemes collapsed and brought down a great number of financiers, investors, printers, publishers and press outlets.