W. T. Stead
William Thomas Stead | |
---|---|
North Atlantic Ocean | |
Monuments |
|
Nationality | English |
Education | Silcoates School |
Occupation | Newspaper editor |
Notable work | The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon |
Style | Sensationalism |
William Thomas Stead (5 July 1849 – 15 April 1912) was an English
Stead's "new journalism" paved the way for the modern tabloid in Great Britain.[2] He has been described as "the most famous journalist in the British Empire".[3] He is considered to have influenced how the press could be used to influence public opinion and government policy, and advocated "Government by Journalism".[4] He was known for his reportage on child welfare, social legislation and reformation of England's criminal codes.
Stead died in the sinking of the RMS Titanic.[2]
Early life
Stead was born in
From 1862 to 1864, he attended Silcoates School in Wakefield until he was apprenticed to a merchant's office on the Quayside in Newcastle upon Tyne, where he became a clerk.[10]
The Northern Echo
Stead contributed articles to the fledgling liberal Darlington newspaper The Northern Echo from 1870 and despite his inexperience was appointed editor of the newspaper in 1871.[11] Aged just 22 Stead was the youngest newspaper editor in the country.[9] Stead used Darlington's excellent railway connections to his advantage, increasing the newspaper's distribution to national levels.[8] Stead was always guided by a moral mission, influenced by his faith, and wrote to a friend that the position would be "a glorious opportunity of attacking the devil".[11]
In 1873 he married his childhood sweetheart, Emma Lucy Wilson, the daughter of a local merchant and shipowner; they would eventually have six children.
He gained notoriety in 1876 for his coverage of the
The Pall Mall Gazette
Stead was appointed assistant editor of the Liberal
Over the next seven years Stead would develop what Matthew Arnold dubbed "The New Journalism".[12] His innovations as editor of the Gazette included incorporating maps and diagrams into a newspaper, breaking up longer articles with eye-catching subheadings and blending his own opinions with those of the people he interviewed.[9] He made a feature of the Pall Mall extras, and his enterprise and originality exercised a potent influence on contemporary journalism and politics.[16] Stead's first sensational campaign was based on a Nonconformist pamphlet, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London. His lurid stories of squalid life in the slums had a wholly beneficial effect on the capital. A Royal Commission recommended that the government should clear the slums and encourage low-cost housing in their place. It was Stead's first success. He also pioneered the use of the interview in British journalism—although other interviews had appeared in British papers before[17]—with his interview with General Gordon in 1884.[18]
In 1884 Stead pressured the government to send his friend General Gordon to the Sudan to protect British interests in Khartoum. The eccentric Gordon disobeyed orders, and the siege of Khartoum, Gordon's death and the failure of the hugely expensive
During the following year he managed to persuade the British government to supply an additional £51⁄2million to bolster weakening naval defences, after which he published a series of articles.[15] Stead was not a hawk, instead believing Britain's strong navy was necessary to maintain world peace.[20] He distinguished himself in his vigorous handling of public affairs and his brilliant modernity in the presentation of news.[16] However he is also credited with originating the modern journalistic technique of creating a news event rather than just reporting it, as his most famous ‘investigation’, the Eliza Armstrong case, was to demonstrate.[21]
In 1886 he began a campaign against
Eliza Armstrong case
In 1885, in the wake of
The first of his four articles was trailed with a warning guaranteed to make the Pall Mall Gazette sell out. Copies changed hands for 20 times their original value and the office was besieged by 10,000 members of the public.[24] The popularity of the articles was so great that the Gazette's supply of paper ran out and had to be replenished with supplies from the rival Globe.[9]
Though his action is thought to have furthered the passing of the
The ‘Maiden Tribute’ campaign was the high point in Stead's career in daily journalism.
Review of Reviews and other ventures
Stead resigned his editorship of the Pall Mall in 1889 in order to found the
Stead lived in Chicago for six months in 1893-4, campaigning against brothels and drinking dens, and published If Christ Came to Chicago.[13]
Beginning in 1895, Stead issued affordable reprints of classic literature under such titles as The Penny Poets[26] and Penny Popular Novels, in which he "boil[ed] down the great novels of the world so that they might fit into, say, sixty-four pages instead of six hundred".[27] His ethos behind the venture pre-dated Allen Lane's Penguin Books by nearly forty years, and he became "the foremost publisher of paperbacks in the Victorian Age".[15] In 1896, Stead launched the series Books for the Bairns, whose titles included fairy tales and works of classical literature.[28][15][29]
Stead became an enthusiastic supporter of the peace movement, and of many other movements, popular and unpopular, in which he impressed the public generally as an extreme visionary, though his practical energy was recognised by a considerable circle of admirers and pupils.
With all his unpopularity, and all the suspicion and opposition engendered by his methods, his personality remained a forceful one, in both public and private life. He was an early imperial idealist, whose influence on Cecil Rhodes in South Africa remained of primary importance; many politicians and statesmen, who on most subjects were completely at variance with his ideas, nevertheless owed something to them. Rhodes made him his confidant, and was inspired in his will by his suggestions; and Stead was intended to be one of Rhodes's executors. However, at the time of the Second Boer War Stead threw himself into the Boer cause and attacked the government with characteristic violence,[16] and consequently his name was removed from the will's executors.[32]
The number of his publications gradually became very large, as he wrote with facility and sensationalist fervour on all sorts of subjects, from The Truth about Russia (1888) to If Christ Came to Chicago! (Laird & Lee, 1894), and from Mrs Booth (1900) to The Americanisation of the World[33] (1901).[16]
Stead was an
In 1904 he launched The Daily Paper, which folded after six weeks, and Stead lost £35,000 of his own money (almost £3 million in 2012 value) and suffered a nervous breakdown.[7][13]
Meeting with William Randolph Hearst
A year before the Spanish–American War W. T. Stead travelled to New York to meet William Randolph Hearst, to teach him government by journalism.[35][36][self-published source][37]
Travel to Russia
In 1905 Stead travelled to Russia to try to discourage violence during the
Spiritualism
In the 1890s, Stead became increasingly interested in spiritualism.[39] In 1893, he founded a spiritualist quarterly, Borderland, in which he gave full play to his interest in psychical research.[7][39] Stead was editor, and he employed Ada Goodrich Freer as assistant editor; she was also a substantial contributor under the pseudonym "Miss X".[40] Stead claimed that he was in the habit of communicating with Freer by telepathy and automatic writing.[41][42][43] The magazine ceased publication in 1897.[39]
Stead claimed to be in receipt of messages from the spirit world and, in 1892, to be able to produce automatic writing.[39][41] His spirit contact was alleged to be the departed Julia A. Ames, an American temperance reformer and journalist whom he met in 1890 shortly before her death. In 1909, he established Julia's Bureau, where inquirers could obtain information about the spirit world from a group of resident mediums.[39]
Grant Richards said that "The thing that operated most strongly in lessening Stead's hold on the general public was his absorption in spiritualism".[44]
The physiologist Ivor Lloyd Tuckett wrote that Stead had no scientific training and was credulous when it came to the subject of spiritualism. Tuckett examined a case of spirit photography that Stead had claimed was genuine. Stead visited a photographer who produced a photograph of him with an alleged deceased soldier known as "Piet Botha". Stead claimed the photographer could not have come across any information about Piet Botha; however, Tuckett discovered that an article in 1899 had been published on Pietrus Botha in a weekly magazine with a portrait and personal details.[45]
In the early 20th century, Arthur Conan Doyle and Stead were duped into believing that the stage magicians Julius and Agnes Zancig had genuine psychic powers. Both Doyle and Stead wrote the Zancigs performed telepathy. In 1924 Julius and Agnes Zancig confessed that their mind reading act was a trick and published the secret code and all the details of the trick method they had used under the title of Our Secrets!! in a London newspaper.[46]
Ten years after the Titanic went down, Stead's daughter Estelle published The Blue Island: Experiences of a New Arrival Beyond the Veil,[47] which purported to be a communication with Stead via a medium, Pardoe Woodman. In the book, Stead described his death at sea and discussed the nature of the afterlife. The manuscript was produced using automatic writing, and Ms. Stead cited as proof of its authenticity the writer's habit of going back to cross "t's" and dot "i's" while proof-reading, which she said was characteristic of her father's writing technique in life.
Death on the Titanic
Stead boarded the
A later sighting of Stead, by survivor Philip Mock, has him clinging to a raft with John Jacob Astor IV. "Their feet became frozen", reported Mock, "and they were compelled to release their hold. Both were drowned."[48] William Stead's body was not recovered.
Stead had often claimed that he would die from either lynching or drowning.
Reputation
Following his death, Stead was widely hailed as the greatest newspaperman of his age. His friend Viscount Milner eulogised Stead as "a ruthless fighter, who had always believed himself to be 'on the side of angels'".[51]
His sheer energy helped to revolutionise the often stuffy world of Victorian journalism, while his blend of sensationalism and indignation set the tone for British tabloids.[52] Like many journalists, he was a curious mixture of conviction, opportunism and sheer humbug. According to his biographer W. Sydney Robinson, "He twisted facts, invented stories, lied, betrayed confidences, but always with a genuine desire to reform the world – and himself." According to Dominic Sandbrook, "Stead's papers forced his readers to confront the seedy underbelly of their own civilisation, but the editor probably knew more about that dark world than he ever let on. He held up a mirror to Victorian society, yet deep down, like so many tabloid crusaders, he was raging at his own reflection."[19]
According to Roy Hattersley, Stead became "the most sensational figure in 19th-century journalism".[53]
A memorial bronze was erected in Central Park, New York City, in 1920. It reads, "W. T. Stead 1849–1912. This tribute to the memory of a journalist of worldwide renown is erected by American friends and admirers. He met death aboard the Titanic April 15, 1912, and is numbered amongst those who, dying nobly, enabled others to live." A duplicate bronze is located on the Thames Embankment not far from Temple, where Stead had an office.
A memorial plaque to Stead can also be seen at his final home, 5 Smith Square, where he lived from 1904 to 1912. It was unveiled on 28 June 2004 in the presence of his great-great-grandson, 13-year-old Miles Stead. The plaque was sponsored by the Stead Memorial Society.[54]
In his native Embleton, a road has been named "W T Stead Road".
In his adopted Darlington a pub is named in his honour in the town centre.
In the 2009 video game
Resources
Archives
Fourteen boxes of the papers of William Thomas Stead are held at the
Papers of William Thomas Stead are also held at
Charles Barker Howdill (1863–1941) took a colour photograph of Stead "finished in 12 minutes" on 17 January 1912, about three months before Stead's death. It is now in the collections of Leeds Museums and Galleries.[59]
See also
- The Story of Perseus and the Gorgon's Head, published in 1898
References
- ^ "The W.T. Stead Resource Site". Attackingthedevil.co.uk. 30 December 2010. Retrieved 21 September 2018.
- ^ a b c "Press Office Home – The British Library". British Library Press Office. 10 April 2012. Archived from the original on 9 May 2021. Retrieved 6 September 2019.
- JSTOR j.ctv12sdwnm.
- ^ a b c d e f g Joseph O. Baylen, "Stead, William Thomas (1849–1912)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed., September 2010. Retrieved 3 May 2011.
- ^ England Births and Christenings, 1538-1975", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:JMLD-L9F : 4 February 2023), Isabella Jobson, 1824
- ^ "Herbert & W T Stead", Derbyshire Advertiser and Journal, 6 March 1920, p. 19.
- ^ a b c "W.T. Stead Timeline". Attackingthedevil.co.uk. Archived from the original on 10 April 2021. Retrieved 7 May 2011.
- ^ a b c "The Great Educator: a Biography of W.T. Stead". Attackingthedevil.co.uk. 15 April 1912. Archived from the original on 16 April 2021. Retrieved 7 May 2011.
- ^ a b c d e f "Bookshelf: The Father of Tabloid Journalism". The Wall Street Journal.
- ^ a b "W.T. Stead by E.T. Raymond (1922)". Attackingthedevil.co.uk. Retrieved 7 May 2011.
- ^ a b "W.T. Stead to Rev. Henry Kendall (11 April 1871)". Attackingthedevil.co.uk. Retrieved 7 May 2011.
- ^ a b "Mr William Thomas Stead". Encyclopedia Titanica. 7 March 1997. Retrieved 7 May 2011.
- ^ a b c d e f g Luckhurst, Roger (10 April 2012). "WT Stead, a forgotten victim of Titanic". The Daily Telegraph. London. Archived from the original on 13 April 2012.
- ^ Stead, W.T. (August 1912). "The Great Pacifist: an Autobiographical Character Sketch". The Review of Reviews for Australasia. p. 609. Retrieved 8 November 2017 – via Internet Archive.
- ^ a b c d "Sally Wood-Lamont, W.T. Stead's Books for the Bairns". attackingthedevil.co.uk. 7 August 1923. Retrieved 7 May 2011.
- ^ a b c d e f public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Stead, William Thomas". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 25 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 817. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the
- ^ "An Interview with Oscar Wilde". Liverpool Daily Post. Liverpool. 8 January 1883. Retrieved 29 October 2020.
- ^ Roland Pearsell (1969) The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality: 369
- ^ a b The Sunday Times (London), 13 May 2012 Sunday Edition 1; "National Edition Fleet Street's crusading villain; The Victorian editor whose love of sensationalism set the tone for the tabloids for a century Scandalmonger", 40–42.
- ^ Stead, Estelle (1913). My Father. (London) p. 112.
- ^ Roland Pearsell (1969) The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality: 367–78.
- ^ "Mary Jean Corbett, "On Crawford v. Crawford and Dilke, 1886″ | BRANCH". Retrieved 8 March 2020.
- ^ Stead, William Thomas (1885). "The Armstrong Case". William Thomas Stead. Retrieved 17 December 2022.
- ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved 18 August 2023.
- ^ "Book review: Muckraker, W Sydney Robinson". The Scotsman. 6 May 2012.
- ^ The Penny Poets (The Masterpiece Library: Series I) ("Review of Reviews" Office; Stead's Publishing House) - Book Series List, publishinghistory.com. Retrieved 6 October 2019.
- ^ "Grant Richards on Stead as Employer &c". Attackingthedevil.co.uk. Retrieved 7 May 2011.
- ^ Stead's Publishing House Series Books, kent.edu. Retrieved 25 August 2019.
- ^ Books for the Bairns ("Review of Reviews" Office), publishinghistory.com. Retrieved 6 October 2019.
- ISBN 0-9512533-0-1.
- ^ "W.T. Stead, "The Great Pacifist: an Autobiographical Character Sketch" (The Review of Reviews for Australasia, August, 1912)". Retrieved 24 March 2024.
- ^ The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes, ed. W. T. Stead (Review of Reviews Office: London), 1902.
- ^ Stead, William T[homas] 1849-1912 [from old catalog (24 March 1902). "The Americanization of the world;". New York, London, H. Markley. Retrieved 24 March 2024 – via Internet Archive.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ^ Enciklopedio de Esperanto, 1933. "Software & Services". Archived from the original on 8 July 2007. Retrieved 14 September 2007.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) - ^ "W. Randolf Hearst". Attackingthedevil.co.uk. 30 December 2010. Retrieved 5 October 2014.
Mr. Hearst, I am very glad to see you. I have been very curious to see you for some time, ever since I saw how you were handling the Journal. But do you know why I want to see you? [...] I have been long on the look out for a man to appear who will carry out my ideal of government by journalism. I am certain that such a man will come to the front some day, and I wonder if you are to be that man.
- ISBN 978-1425727086.
- ^ Stead, William (December 1908). "A Character Sketch of William Randolph Hearst, by William Thomas Stead". London: Review of Reviews. Retrieved 5 October 2014.
- ^ "The beauty, the journalist, and the Titanic". BBC News. 28 December 2014.
- ^ ISBN 0-521-34767-X.
- ISBN 0-7156-1427-4.
- ^ ISBN 978-90-382-1340-8.
- ISBN 978-1-4411-6401-8.
- ^ Borderland, volume I, 1893, p 6. Quoted in Hall (1980) p. 50.
- ^ Grant Richards (1933). Memories of a misspent youth, 1872–1896. Harper & Brothers. p. 306.
- ^ Ivor Lloyd Tuckett. (1911). The Evidence for the Supernatural: A Critical Study Made with "Uncommon Sense". Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Company. pp. 52–53.
- ISBN 978-0-87975-358-0
- ^ Pardoe Woodman and Estelle Stead (1922). The Blue Island: Experiences of a New Arrival Beyond the Veil. Hutchinson & Co., London.
- ^ "Stead and Astor cling to Raft" (Worcester Telegram, 20 April 1912) at www.attackingthedevil.co.uk
- ^ W.T. Stead, "How the Mail Steamer went down in Mid Atlantic" (1886) at www.attackingthedevil.co.uk
- ^ W.T. Stead, "From the Old World to the New" (The Review of Reviews Christmas Number, 1892) at www.attackingthedevil.co.uk
- doi:10.16995/ntn.654.
- ^ F. Regard, 'The sexual exploitation of the poor in W.T. Stead's The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon (1885) : Humanity, democracy and the origins of the tabloid press', in Narrating Poverty and Precarity in Britain (ed. B. Korte et F. Regard), Berlin, De Gruyter, 2014, pp. 75–91.
- ^ Roy Hattersley (2003). "Victorians Uncovered – William Stead: unscrupulous journalist or moral crusader?". www.channel4.com. Archived from the original on 12 February 2003. Retrieved 19 June 2020.
- ^ "City of Westminster green plaques". Archived from the original on 16 July 2012.
- ^ "Homepage". Churchill Archives Centre. Retrieved 24 March 2024.
- ^ "Redirecting to ArchiveSearch". janus.lib.cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 24 March 2024.
- ^ Science, London School of Economics and Political. "Library".
- ^ "9/11". Archived from the original on 17 July 2013.
- ^ "W. T. Stead : Charles Barker Howdill's Blazing Balkans". blazingbalkans.leeds.ac.uk. Retrieved 24 July 2019.
Further reading
- Brake, Laurel et al. W.T. Stead: Newspaper Revolutionary (British Library, distributed by University of Chicago Press; 232 pages; 2013), essays by scholars
- Brake, Laurel. Stead alone: Journalist, Proprietor and Publisher, 1890–1903 (British Library Press, 2013).
- Eckley, Grace. Maiden Tribute: A Life of W. T. Stead (2007).
- Gill, Clare. " 'I'm really going to kill him this time': Olive Schreiner, WT Stead, and the Politics of Publicity in the Review of Reviews". Victorian Periodicals Review 46#2 (2013): 184–210.
- Goldsworthy, Simon. "English nonconformity and the pioneering of the modern newspaper campaign: including the strange case of WT Stead and the Bulgarian horrors". Journalism Studies 7#3 (2006): 387–402.
- Luckhurst, Roger, et al. eds. WT Stead: Newspaper Revolutionary (The British Library Publishing Division, 2013).
- Prévost, Stéphanie. "WT Stead and the Eastern Question (1875–1911); or, How to Rouse England and Why?" Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 19 (2013). online Archived 8 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine
- Schults, RL (1972). Crusader in Babylon: W.T. Stead and the Pall Mall Gazette. University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0-8032-0760-8.
- Regard, Frederic. "The Sexual Exploitation of the Poor in W.T. Stead's 'New Journalism': Humanity, Democracy and the Tabloid Press". Narrating Poverty and Precarity in England (B. Korte and F. Regard eds). Berlin, De Gruyter, 2014 : 75–91.
- Robinson, W. Sydney. Muckraker: The Scandalous Life and Times of W.T. Stead, Britain's First Investigative Journalist (Biteback Publishing, 2012).
- Whyte, Frederic. A Life of W.T. Stead (2 vol. 1925).
External links
- Catalogue of the W.T. Stead papers at the Churchill Archives Centre
- Encyclopedia Titanica Biography of W. T. Stead
- William Stead: unscrupulous journalist or moral crusader? article by Roy Hattersley
- NewsStead: A Journal of History and Literature
- Website of Stead's most recent biographer, W. Sydney Robinson
- The Last Will and Testament of Cecil J. Rhodes, Edited by Stead
- Photograph of William T. Stead, signed From scrapbook in the Carrie Chapman Catt Collection in the Rare Book and Special Collection Division at the Library of Congress
- A New Portrait of Mr. William T. Stead, Taken in New York From scrapbook in the Carrie Chapman Catt Collection in the Rare Book and Special Collection Division at the Library of Congress
- Works by W. T. Stead at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about W. T. Stead at Internet Archive
- Works by W. T. Stead at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- Works by Estelle Wilson Stead at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Estelle Wilson Stead at Internet Archive
- W. T. Stead at Library of Congress, with 80 library catalogue records