Stead, Newness and the Review of Reviews

12459776 — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 20:52:42 +0000

The Review of Reviews was started in January, 1890 by W.T. Stead and Tit-Bits proprietor, George Newnes. It was originally to be called the Six Penny Monthly and Review of Reviews, but this was changed at the last minute. According to Stead, it was “the maddest thing” he had yet done, on account that the venture had been decided on only a month before. The Review mirrored Stead’s own over-active imagination and was written almost exclusively by him. Along with the dozens of magazine and book reviews it contained, it also included a running commentary of world events entitled, “The Progress of the World”, and a character sketch of a current “celebrity”. The first issue was an instant success, and opened with numerous facsimiled welcome messages which Stead had courted from various dignitaries of the time. However, Stead’s relationship with Newnes came under strain when the latter strongly objected to Stead’s scathing character sketch of The Times newspaper (eventually published in March). Perhaps seeing this discord as a sign of things to come, Newnes severed ties, exclaiming that the whole venture was “turning his hair grey.” After buying out Newnes’ share, Stead shaped the Review after his own image. With article titles such as “Baby-killing as an Investment” and “Ought Mrs. Maybrick to be Tortured to Death?”, Stead showed he had lost none of the sledge hammer force of his journalistic days. He also involved the Review in social work, setting up the “Association of of Helpers” and even an adoption agency called “The Baby Exchange”. In 1891-92, Stead founded the equally successful American and Australian editions of the Review, and, in London, he added to his success with other literary triumphs, such as Stead’s Penny Poets and Books for the Bairns, all published under the Review’s auspices. However, in spite of such successes, without the business-like Newnes to guide him, Stead frequently drove the Review to death’s door, despite the best efforts of his business manager, Edwin H. Stout. This was particularly the case during the Boer War (1899-1902), when his pro-Boer stance caused sales to slump to critical levels. Stead’s attempt to recoup his losses, with the launch of the ill-fated Daily Paper, was a complete failure and, almost bankrupt, he suffered a nervous breakdown. The Review somehow limped on, buoyed up by a narrow but devoted subscription base. But, just like the Northern Echo and the Pall Mall Gazette, it lost much of its force with the loss of Stead (in the Titanic disaster) and, in c. 1917, it was sold for just £25000. It was eventually merged with World magazine and renamed the World Review in 1940.

The Saint Paul of Spiritualism

administrator — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:48:19 +0000

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Stead’s interest in spiritualism seems to have begun in his final year at the Northern Echo, probably through his association with Mark Fooks, his assistant editor, who “had some knowledge of the matter.” But it was not until he moved to London that he began to take a serious interest. In 1881, he attended his first seance where, he later claimed, he was hailed as the future “St. Paul of Spiritualism.” Though he continued to dabble in spiritualism during his time at the Pall Mall Gazette, political and editorial contraints prevented him from over-indulging, and it was not until he became his own boss as owner and editor of the Review of Reviews in 1890, that he was able to pursue his interest further. In 1891, he published Real Ghost Stories, as the Review of Reviews Christmas annual, and a year later, he followed this up with More Ghost Stories, again as a Christmas Annual. By this time, Stead was almost completely engrossed with matters supernatural, and in 1893, he founded the spiritualism quarterly, Borderland, with himself as editor. Sadly, massive work commitments forced him to abandon this venture four years later, but he continued publishing on the supernatural, becoming something of a spiritualist guru in the process. Stead’s most famous work on spiritualism is Letters from Julia (1897), a record of apparent “conversations” between himself and departed American journalist, Julia Amis, achieved by means of “automatic” writing. Stead later republished the work as After Death and even set up “Julia’s Bureau”, a seance circle that met each morning. Another notable “work” attributed to Stead is the implausible The Blue Island (1922), an alleged account of his after death experiences as “written” by him through the hand of a medium during several seances. Stead’s apparent clairvoyant powers seem to originate from his two fictional stories, “How the Mail Steamer went Down in Mid Atlantic” (1886) and “From the Old World to the New” (1892), both of which suggest the Titanic disaster in which, years later, he would ultimately perish. Inevitably, Stead’s absorption in spiritualism fatally eroded his political reputation, so much so that, by the time of his death, he was derided in many circles as a fanatic and a crank.

W.T. Stead and the Virgin Trade

administrator — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 09:49:44 +0000

In July, 1885, W.T. Stead ran a story in the Pall Mall Gazette that began: “all those who are squeamish, and all those who are prudish, and all those who would prefer to live in a fool’s paradise…will do well not to read the Pall Mall Gazette of Monday and the three following days..” The paper, he announced, was about to publish the report of a secret commission of inquiry that would open the eyes of the public to sexual criminality in the London underworld.

The subject of Stead’s story was child prostitution, or rather the entrapment, sale and sexual abuse of impoverished working class children at the hands of well-to-do paedophiles. Sensationally entitled “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon”, and based on its author’s own investigations, the story revealed a secret underworld trade wherein immoral or destitute parents sold their own children to the vices of the rich.

Section headers, such as “Confessions of a Brothel Keeper”, “The Violation of Virgins”, “Strapping Girls Down” and “Why the Screams are not Heard” were as shocking as anything in today’s tabloid newspapers. And as the story unfolded, respectable Victorians were led into a world of stinking brothels, underground chambers, drugs and padded rooms, where respectable upper-class men thrashed out their various sexual misdeeds on the children of the poor.

To such men, the story went, “the shriek of torture was the essence of their delight, and they would not silence by a single note the cry of agony over which they gloat”.

Stead’s story implicated a good many of London ’s respectable elite, who had either profited from or indulged in the procurement, sale and abuse of young, under-privileged girls. In the Pall Mall Gazette’s columns, he revealed how the trade was “winked at by many administrators of the law”, how it was “practiced by some legislators” and even how one “well-known member of Parliament [was] quite ready to supply…100 maids at £25 each”.

To read the full story, including complete facsimiles of the original articles, visit : http://www.attackingthedevil.co.uk/pmg/tribute/

Stead and Mice!

administrator — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:55:47 +0000

One of the most extraordinary accounts of Stead comes from Aaron Watson, a journalist who had worked under Stead for a time at the Pall Mall Gazette.

“He lived in Wimbledon,” declares Watson, “and got into town by a train arriving at 8.20. By that time he new everything that was in the papers, down to the inquests, though he had been out on Wimbledon Common with his children, in a dressing gown, giving each of the young ones a ride on a little donkey that he owned. One morning, very early, he received important news, and arrived in town much in advance of the train, wearing the dressing gown, and riding on the donkey. He was insensible to ridicule, except, perhaps, in the sense that it pleased him more to be laughed at than not noticed at all.”

“When he was at the Consulate at Newcastle,” continues Watson, “he caught the office mice, cooked them with nice care, and served them up to himself on toast, as a means of understanding what sort of experience the besieged residents of Paris were passing through at that time. His companions jeered at him, and he went on catching mice as before.”

See Aaron Watson, A Newspaperman’s Memories (Hutchinson & Co, London, 1925) pp. 66-67

Stead and the Smoking Room

administrator — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:42:18 +0000

As the “unsinkable” Titanic sank slowly into the frigid waters of the north Atlantic on the morning of April 15, 1912, a fire-stoker called George Kemish, who had scrambled his way up from Boiler Room no. 5, happened to notice a single elderly gentleman sitting quietly reading a book in the first class smoking room.

As the rest of the passengers, gripped by pandemonium and terror, struggled to save their lives, the old gentleman, said Kemish, “looked as if he planned to stay there whatever happened.”

This evocative account of Stead in his final hours, asserted years after the event, is, in all probability, just one more myth among the many that were generated by the disaster. Its only written source seems to be Walter Lord’s quintessential account of the tragedy, A Night to Remember, published in 1956 and made into a film of the same name in 1958. According to Lord, Kemish noticed Stead as he scurried past the first-class smoking room on his way to the lifeboats. Kemish escaped the stricken ship in lifeboat no. 9 and lived to correspond with Lord during the latter’s research for his now famous book.

There are, however, obvious problems with Kemish’s testimony that cast considerable doubt over its credibility: Firstly, despite Stead’s international notoriety, it is questionable whether a twenty-four-year-old fire-stoker would be sufficiently familiar with the world of literature and politics to be able to recognise the editor of the Review of Reviews. Secondly, Stead’s apparent indifference (according to Kemish) to the horrific scenes about him fly in the face of every contemporary account of his character. And thirdly, other far more credible sightings of Stead in his final hours place him on deck helping women and children into lifeboats or in the sea struggling for his life.

Survivor, Mrs. William Shelley, for example, said that her “last glimpse of the Titanic” showed Stead standing “alone at the edge of the deck” in a “prayerful attitude of profound meditation.” Another later sighting, by survivor Philip Mock, has Stead clinging to a raft with Col. John Jacob Astor. “Their feet became frozen,” recalled Mock, “and they were compelled to release their hold. Both were drowned.”

Yet, despite such perfectly plausible eyewitness accounts, it is Lord’s portrayal of Stead gallantly going down with the ship that endures to this day. Friends and colleagues who lived long enough to see A Night to Remember took comfort from Stead’s portrayal because it represented him as being fearless in death as he had been in life. Spiritualists likewise seized on the smoking room scene because it fulfilled their projected image of Stead as the gifted precognitive fatalist who had predicted the Titanic disaster (and his own death) in a number of “sinking stories” penned decades earlier.

Unfortunately, Stead’s own expectations of his final voyage, as recorded by him in the Review of Reviews, seem to be considerably less fatalistic and suggest that his supposed prior insight into the disaster has no basis in fact whatsoever: