Welcome to the W.T. Stead Resource Site

William Thomas Stead was one of the most controversial figures of his age. Journalist, editor, pacifist and spiritualist, he was an important contributor to the evolution of today's popular journalism and his death on the ill-fated Titanic continues to generate fascination and debate.. Delve deeper into this website and discover more about this extraordinary man, whose many social and political campaigns had far reaching effects that remain with us today. On this website, you will find a wealth of textual material, including Stead's tour de force of Victorian prostitution, The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon and the subsequent Eliza Armstrong Case, which landed Stead in prison. Covering almost every aspect of his life and career, the WTSRS is today the largest online repository of material on W.T. Stead.

Publications

Muckraker: The Scandalous Life and Times of W.T. Stead

W. Sydney Robinson

This book traces the rise and fall of W. T. Stead, from his childhood as the son of a strict Nonconformist minister in Newcastle, to his rapid and Machiavellian career as an influential investigative journalist, and his last years when he was ridiculed as a madman for his devotion to the occult. Stead's campaigns - all conducted with his trademark invincible zeal - are vividly described, ranging from the reform of London slums to denouncing an ex-slave trader who claimed to be the Messiah. A hundred years after his death, author Will Robinson presents new material about Stead's life taken from his personal papers, previously suppressed by his wife, giving us a fuller portrait than ever before of the sensational father of journalistic campaigning.

Secrets of a Titanic Victim: the Story of the Real My Fair Lady

Gavin Weightman

1912 was the year W. T. Stead drowned in the Titanic disaster and the year George Bernard Shaw wrote Pygmalion (aka, the Hollywood musical, My Fair Lady), the main character being young Eliza Doolittle from Lisson Grove. Shaw had worked under editor Stead at the Pall Mall Gazette in the era of its most scandalous headline, "The £5 virgin", in which Stead claimed he had personally witnessed the purchase of a 13 year-old girl and her sale to a brothel for the sum of £5. The scandal was to pass into journalistic legend and ultimately placed the crusading editor in prison. But the story also got the age of consent raised from thirteen to sixteen and, in 1912, served as inspiration for Shaw's play Pygmalion. The true story of the "£5 virgin" is what this book is about. It is the disturbing story of the real "My Fair Lady", a young, impoverished girl called Eliza Armstrong from Lisson Grove in Marylebone..

W.T. Stead and the New Journalism

Owen Mulpetre

Written by Owen Mulpetre, editor of the W.T. Stead Resource Site, this post-graduate thesis and study-aid sheds new light on the journalism of W.T. Stead, both at the Pall Mall Gazette and the Northern Echo. Using fresh evidence from the news media of the time, it shows how Stead used the power of the so-called "New Journalism" to sway public opinion. By examining highly controversial campaigns such as The Langworthy Marriage, The Tragic case of Miss Cass, The Trial of Isreal Lipski, The West Auckland Poisonings, The Contagious Diseases Acts and The Bulgarian Atrocities, it challenges a number of ideas about the New Journalism at this juncture and shows how Stead succeeded in establishing the genre as a powerful and popular concept..

Latest added (3/5/12)