W. T. Stead & the Virgin Trade: A "Special and Secret Commission of Inquiry"

Owen Mulpetre, in The Journal of the Whitechapel Society (June, 2005) pp. 8-10

"The ears and nose had been clean cut off. The breasts had also been cleanly cut off...The stomach and abdomen had been ripped open, while the face was slashed about, so that the features of the poor creature were beyond all recognition."

So reported T.P. O'Conner's The Star newspaper on November 10, 1888, following the discovery of Mary Jane Kelly's savagely mutilated body. Despite himself, O'Conner might have felt a pang of regret when this proved to be the last of the Whitechapel murders, since, throughout the autumn of 1888, the Ripper had been a veritable boon to the success of his radical paper and the unchaste sensationalism that ran through its pages.

The Star has gone down as being the first newspaper to appeal to a mass readership, and also has the distinction of being the template upon which Alfred (Lord Northcliffe) Harmsworth modelled his Evening News and The Daily Mail, beginning the age of so-called "Tabloid" journalism. Yet, neither editor was original in his approach to journalism, and, in fact, both owed a very large debt to Pall Mall Gazette editor W.T. Stead and what the writer and critic Matthew Arnold coined "New Journalism".

The "New Journalism" was a dynamic, innovative, fire-and-brimstone style of news reporting that the Northumberland-born Stead had developed during his highly successful editorship of The Northern Echo in Darlington . Throughout the 1870s, his sensational handling of issues such as war-time atrocities, prostitution and poverty had so scandalised Disraeli's Conservative government that, in 1880, allegedly at the recommendation of ex-Premier William E. Gladstone himself, newspaper owner Henry Yates Thompson decided to bring Stead down from the North in the hope that his rampaging writing style would help liven up John (later Viscount) Morley's ponderous editorship of the Liberal Pall Mall Gazette .

It was an inspired decision; Stead and Morley worked in tandem with each other for three successful years until Morley was elected to Parliament. Stead succeeded him in the editor's chair in 1883, and armed with his "New Journalism", immediately set about transforming the Pall Mall Gazette from a lacklustre gentleman's journal to a dynamic, outrageous political organ that soon became required reading for high society.

Ever a courtier of controversy, Stead involved the Pall Mall Gazette in one crusade after another. Such exposés, which drew their force from Stead's unerring ability to whip up public outrage, were often aimed at embarrassing reluctant governments into tackling social or political evils of the time. His attack on slum housing in 1883 resulted in new housing for the poor, and his "The Truth about the Navy" campaign in 1884 prompted a £3.5 million Government handout to repair and update Britain 's aging ships. His pièce de résistance , however, came in the summer of 1885 when, after investigating a particularly disturbing development the world of vice, he published a series that was to go down as one of the most controversial stories in the annals of journalism.

Sensationally entitled "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon", Stead's story began with "a frank warning": 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 Special and Secret Commission of Inquiry" that would open the eyes of the public to the ghastly realities of sexual criminality in the London underworld. Based on his personal account of four "terrible weeks" with "the meanest of mankind", what followed was a work of journalistic genius.

Stead's "revelations" went on sale on Monday 6 July, 1885 amid a storm of controversy and anticipation. The subject was child prostitution - the entrapment, sale and "ruin" of young under-privileged girls and their abduction to fashionable brothels for well-to-do paedophiles. An innovative writer, Stead constructed a matrix of Greco-Christian legend on which to weave his "infernal narrative". In the "Maiden Tribute", London was the iniquitous ancient Babylon mentioned in the Bible, while her streets were the Cretan labyrinth of Greek myth, into which, every nine years, the ancient Athenians were compelled to toss seven virgin maids as a sacrifice to the hideous Minotaur ("half man, half bull, the foul product of unnatural lust"). In the "Maiden Tribute", the brothel-using aristocrat had assumed the role of Minotaur, but his victims were "not seven maidens only, but many times seven...served up as dainty morsels to minister to the passions of the rich".

Published in successive instalments, the "Maiden Tribute" was a tour de force of Victorian journalism. Like some Gothic melodrama, Stead's gruesome narrative revealed to Victorian society a ghastly underworld trade that was "constantly and systematically practised in London without let or hindrance". With an unerring ability to tap into the middle-class psyche, Stead led his readers through a labyrinth of lurid, midnight streets, where destitute and dissolute parents offered their children to "the vices of the rich". Crossheads such as "The Violation of Virgins" and "Strapping Girls Down" were as shocking as they were sensational, and as the story unfolded, respectable Victorians gaped in horror at a world of stinking brothels, fiendish procuresses, underground chambers, drugs and padded rooms, where vicious upper-class rakes could "enjoy to the full the exclusive luxury of revelling in the cries of an immature child". To such men, fumed Stead, "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".

In the first instalment, a "Child of Thirteen Bought for £5" tells the story of the innocent and oblivious Lily, who is procured, subjected to chloroform, and left in a locked room of a fashionable London brothel: "And then there rose a wild and piteous cry...like the bleat of a frightened lamb... 'There's a man in the room! Take me home; oh, take me home!'". The man was Stead, and the child was Eliza Armstrong, whom he had procured from her own mother, just to show how easily it could be done.

The "Maiden Tribute" also exposed the corruption of several of London 's elite, who either profited from or indulged in the procurement, sale and eventual abuse of young, under-privileged girls. Though never going so far as to name people, Stead 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". Finally, the series implicated the medical profession, and the " unscrupulous medical men" who, for a price, certified the girls "virgo intacta", thus increasing their saleability in a trade where it was widely believed that sexual intercourse with a virgin could cure venereal disease.

Within days of its publication the "Maiden Tribute" had become an international sensation. Stead wrote proudly of "telegrams from the United States begging for telegraphic information as to the progress of the great exposure", while demand for his revelations in London was so great that, by the third instalment, crowds of newspaper vendors ("gaunt and hollow-faced men and women") lay siege to the Pall Mall Gazette offices and "fought with fists and feet, with tooth and nail...for the sheets wet from the press". By the end of the series, Stead had succeeded in throwing Victorian society into a state of moral panic over child prostitution. London would not see such hysteria again until the emergence of Jack the Ripper.

It was all too much for the Government, which now found itself pressured by reform groups, such as the Salvation Army and Josephine Butler's Ladies National Association (both of which were in on Stead's campaign) to enact the abandoned Criminal Law Amendment Bill, which would raise the age of consent from 13 to 16. This finally happened 14 August, 1885 , prompting a somewhat immodest Stead to declare that the victory was "one of the greatest achievements which any journalist single-handed had ever accomplished".

Yet, unbeknownst to Stead, he was about to pay a heavy price for his forcing of the hand of Government. He had made some very powerful enemies in the corridors of power, and in the weeks that followed his exposé, invisible forces saw to it that he was hauled before the court on charges of abduction and indecent assault. "The fact was", he later conceded, "that the first child [Eliza Armstrong]… was handed to me without the consent of the father, and without any written evidence as to the payment to the mother". This proved to be the editor's Achilles heal; after two lengthy court cases, Stead and two accomplices, Rebecca Jarrett and Sampson Jacques, were found guilty of abduction and indecent assault and were incarcerated accordingly. Bramwell Booth of the Salvation Army was acquitted.

Stead was jailed for three months. Unjustly, his "Secret Commission" was discredited as a fabrication and he himself was branded "a disgrace to journalism". While his outraged friends and supporters appealed for leniency (even to Queen Victoria herself), Stead took his conviction in typically defiant fashion. "I shall take my punishment," he declared to the jury, "and I shall not flinch". He was sent to Coldbath-in-the-Fields prison and later transferred to Holloway as a first class inmate.

Stead's conviction drew the curtain on the "Secret Commission", though, its cultural impact would be felt well into the next century. A masterstroke of investigative journalism, the "Maiden Tribute" represented a high watermark in the Victorian press and subsequently served as the template on which editors such as O'Conner and Harmsworth would later launch their own brand of the "New Journalism".

Stead himself continued at the helm of the Pall Mall Gazette for a further five years, but editorial constraints placed upon him by the paper's proprietor meant that he was never again the same journalistic force. He covered the Whitechapel murders with typical verve, and his frequent savage mauling of the Metropolitan Police over its failure to catch the culprit may well have contributed to Chief Commissioner Sir Charles Warren's decision to resign. But this last campaign proved something of a parting shot for the crusading Northumbrian, and in 1890, he left the Pall Mall Gazette and daily journalism for ever to found his own (highly successful) periodical, The Review of Reviews .

A campaigner for peace and social justice to the last, he continued to be outspoken, particularly about war, and was five times nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Tragically, in the year in which many thought he would be the actual recipient of the Prize, Stead lost his life, with fitting drama, aboard RMS Titanic on the morning of April 15, 1912 , leaving his friend A.G. Gardiner to lament:

"There has never been in English journalism a more versatile or bewildering figure, or one that challenged the judgment of his fellows in so many ways…With all his very obvious defects, there was in him a certain greatness of spirit, a spaciousness of atmosphere, a universal benevolence that make him a noble memory. He did not belong to our narrow ways and our timid routines. The wide waters of the Atlantic are a fitting grave for his bones…"

References

The Pall Mall  Gazette , 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, July 1885. 
Estelle W. Stead, My Father , (1913) 
Matthew Arnold, "Up to Easter", The Nineteenth Century (May, 1887)
Frederick Whyte, The Life of W.T. Stead (London: Johnathan Cape, 1925), 2 vols. 
Casebook: Jack the Ripper