When the first Observer journalists waited, three weeks before Christmas 1791, for issue number one of this newspaper to be printed, did they imagine that we would still be doing the same thing 220 years later? You'd guess that they didn't. In newsrooms, the future has never extended much beyond the drama of next week's pages.

That first Observer editorial team might have recognised one or two concerns of the current paper, though. In 1791, there was certainly an "unprecedented crisis" in Europe: across the Channel, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were under house arrest and contemplating the ultimate democratic deficit. At home, Pitt the Younger was insisting on paying down the crippling debt incurred during the American War of Independence and raising punitive taxes accordingly. Celebrity was much in the news: Mozart, whose Magic Flute had had its premiere only a couple of months earlier, lay on his deathbed in Vienna.

A couple of books published that first Observer year also seemed to find their way into the paper's DNA. One was Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, which set out the basic human freedoms that the paper has sought to defend and extend over the past couple of centuries – from supporting anti-slavery in the American Civil War, to generating the campaign that led to Amnesty International, to implacable opposition to apartheid.

The other book of 1791 that the Observer has, we like to think, tried to live up to is Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson: always the best argument for vivid, fully engaged journalism, the original inside story.

Words in a newspaper, though, only ever come properly alive in the eyes and minds of its readers. The first Observer looked forward to an audience "not less eminent for their liberal rewards of merit than for their ample powers of discrimination". Two hundred and twenty years of Sundays later, we celebrate the fact that we couldn't put it better ourselves.