Maiden Tribute: A Life of W.T. Stead

By Grace Eckley

Maiden Tribute: A Life of W. T. Stead

This journalist who communicated with his Senior Partner instantaneously, whose ecumenical advance beyond his epoch still startles his readers, throughout his life retained his Whitmanesque individualism and rugged speech. W. T. Stead frequently scoffed at the Anglican Sunday prayers that instructed God how to direct the affairs of the world. If God did not comply, it was not for want of pious instruction. Anglicans were wanting, and most of his late Victorian-Edwardian world was Anglican. W. T. Stead (1849-1912) was a Nonconforrmist with and without the capital n. Had he been born with a wooden spoon in his mouth, it meant only that God needed his help to make the world silver. He never ceased to believe the world could be made silver, for mankind in general was anonymously, even though sluggishly, contributing to the infinite ascending spiral traced by the finger of God between the universe and the ideal.
Clearly, the position of women in the 1870s was far from the ideal, remote from the privileges selfishly guarded by men. Taking a cue from his mother who campaigned against the Contagious Diseases Actswhich punished women but not men for transmitting syphilishe determined to bring women nearer the honors of Mary the Mother and Mary the Magdalen, for these two women stand out against the gloom of the past radiant as the angels of God, and yet the true ideals of the womanhood of the world. Such appeared implausible. Everywhere he saw in the streets wretched ruins of humanity, women stamped and crushed into devils by society . . . . And the children nursed in debauchery, suckled in crime, predestined to a life of misery and shame! Mrs. Josephine Butler already knew that Britains leadership would not assist: in the grandest house of the kind in Paris, are to be seen portraits of all the great men who had frequented themdiplomatists, generals, and English Lords . . . . The brothel-keeper put a cross underneath the portrait at each visit, to mark the number of visits made to the house by these great men! Before he visited London, the export of English girls for State-regulated prostitution in Brussels imposed upon Stead a sense that he was destined to write an Uncle Toms Cabin on The Slavery of Europe. The burden is greater than I can bear. But if it is ultimately to be laid on my back, God will strengthen me for it. If I have to write it I shall have to plunge into the depths of the social hell, and that is impossible outside a great city.
Even high-minded seekers of justice found the social hell a place they could not venture into. Initiating research for The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, Stead took counsel with civic powers Lord Carnarvon, John Morley, Arthur Balfour, Henry Labouchere among others, and Sir Charles Russell, who declined an invitation to see for himself because as leader of the English Bar he could not play the rle of a detective in a house of ill-fame. As the shocking series of four daily exposes neared its close, why others had not done Steads work was explained by Benjamin Scott, the City Chamberlain who had prompted Stead to take up the cause: We had not the ability or the opportunity that Stead possessed, and lacked the courage. Stead had begun the Maiden Tribute with a complaint against British society, that chivalry was dead and Christianity effete. Benjamin Waugh praised him after the fact: The spirit of both survives in you to-day. Stead accomplished his goal: passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, still in force today. Why the British sent him to jail for passing the first child protection law is graced with the word technicality.
Branded both a saint and a filthy ex-convict, Stead continued to use his journalistic strength to achieve justice for citizens; in the 1890s he turned to internationalism. Lobbying for arbitration for settling international disputes, he crafted a memorial calling for li

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 8, 2007
• ISBN: 9781462838110

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Copyright © 2007 by Grace Eckley.

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Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

1

Emerging Themes, 1849-1871

2

Attacking the Devil: Darlington, The Northern Echo, 1871-1880

3

Government by Journalism: London, the Pall Mall Gazette, 1880-1885

4

The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, 1885

5

The Majesty of the Law: Stead on Trial, 1885

6

Lighting the Streets of Babylon: London, the Pall Mall Gazette, 1886-1889

7

Telepathy: Psychics, Spirits, and Parapsychologists

8

Mediating for the World: London, the Review of Reviews, 1890-1893

9

If Christ Came to Chicago: America and London, 1893-1894

10

Penny Poets: London, 1894-1897

11

The United States of Europe: Peace Crusade, 1898-1899

12

Slaying My Brother: the Boer War and Its Aftermath, 1899-1903

13

A Tyro in the Theater and the Russian Revolution, 1904-1906

14

Peace Crusade in America and The Hague, 1907

15

Outsourcing Experience: London, 1908-1911

16

The Crossing, 1912

17

A Lifelong Tribute to Maidens

NOTES AND REFERENCES

For Wilton Eckley who made all things possible

Preface

Not to know W. T. Stead is to miss half of the late Victorian-Edwardian living and much of the twentieth century’s progress. In him was seen the Protestant reformation in its Puritan-Cromwellian foundations, the thrust of the New Democracy generated by the dynamo of the New Journalism, the rise of the new catholicism as he absorbed alternative faiths, the bible’s higher criticism, the impact of Darwinism, which in 1881 gave him a sense of the immanence of God, and the first international peace conferences. Imperialism must have shrunk under his compassion for natives, even as he conceived of the United States of Europe and in 1903 was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Peace. He watched the transition from sail to steam; exactly at the time coal-firing was threatened by oil, the Titanic ended his life in 1912.

In general, the public presumes that where there was a conviction there must have been guilt. Contrary history in the example of W. T. Stead will come as a surprise to many, for not all official records have been lost as scholarship maintains. True, Stead in 1885 exploded the myth of London’s sexual morality, for which in his investigations he plunged into the depths of human depravity. Thereafter the publicity he gave his jail sentence—for exposing the crime not for committing it—reminded government officials of their responsibility for injustice and kept the conviction prominent in the public’s memory. Historians unnerved by the convict status avoid crediting Stead for various philanthropic projects and events, particularly for his initiation of them. Living his motto Everything wrong in the world is a divine call to use your life in righting it, he rejoiced in having made himself a martyr for the cause of women and children. The inculpatory/exculpatory dual nature of his reputation, founded by The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, haunted him all his life. Today, it seems, the public is aware only of the inculpatory side; the exculpatory side is exposed herein.

His sacrifice earned passage of the groundbreaking child protection law, called the Criminal Law Amendment Act, still in force today in Britain, and precipitated the enactment of similar legal protections around the world. In the United States, its type of child protection is known as statutory rape laws. Despite his designation dirty ex-convict, how civilization today would survive without such laws is unimaginable. Compassion founded his being and explains his mistakes in 1904 and 1905 in South Africa and Russia. Inherent in him was what Bill Moyers has said that we need today: what the ancient Israelites called hochma—the science of the heart . . . the capacity to see, to feel and then to act as if the future depended on you.

His newspaper’s innovations of crossheads (section titles), interviews, illustrations, indexing and moralistic purpose, which was called government by journalism, put him at the forefront of the New Journalism. Ever scrutinizing his beloved profession, he held his colleagues to rigorous standards and scolded them for reckless imprudence: we have not yet sunk so low that the journalist must exchange the sceptre of power in an educated democracy for the bâton of chief conductor in that orchestra whose only music is ‘the rustic cackle of your bourg.’ Acknowledging that in journalism «The day before yesterday is as the date of the deluge,» Stead’s simultaneous interests and activities proliferated. Typically, in 1899 he was addressing The Hague Peace Conference, commencing with his notion of «Sex the Sinai of Religion,» when a listener informed him that Parliament had that very day voted funds for the Boer War. Four topics coexistent in a Stead biography is the usual fare.

This lavengro word sculptor, writing almost incessantly from the age of twenty-one onward, created new words as necessary, defined and popularized unusual words. Bluggy, holus bolus, jimjams, and sexophone may retain some air of distinction; others have passed into common usage. Erik Larson in The Devil in the White City reminds us that Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette (21Jan1885) brought psychopath into English; Larson’s is typical of the 28,000 books that presently quote W. T.

Stead or otherwise depend for their content upon his distinctive name, his biography, and publications. He was a dominant influence on Irish novelist James Joyce, whose History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake is universally recognized. Stead’s precedent in 1912 was The past has been like a nightmare with a sudden awakening. Three pages of notes from the Maiden Tribute appear in Joyce’s Buffalo Notebook VI.B.28.

Stead’s dedication to improving social structures led to the initiation of civic centers, circulating libraries, baby adoption, international correspondence and exchanges of homes for school children. He cared not for credit but for the Thing Done. Hence, so many of his pioneering reforms have since become commonplace that no one inquires, where did these thoughts [and institutions] come from? He is widely credited with institution of the Rhodes scholarships; he fought for the New Democracy, just barely finding its voice at the time of Bloody Sunday in 1887 in Trafalgar Square. How thoroughly he sought the equivalent of a bill of rights for the world made him unpopular among conservatives in South Africa, Russia, and India; yet protest and indignation were signs that he was hitting the mark. This book is a chronicle of his humanitarian achievements. Even as Stead pioneered against criminal vice, advanced journalism and promoted the world community, he converted to spiritualism and investigated as many phases of parapsychology as he could discover. Still a suppressed topic among many in the twenty-first century, receptive persons reading Stead’s After Death and the achievements of the Indian miracle-worker Sai Baba or Dr. Michael Newton’s discoveries through hypnotherapy of the soul’s journey can realize Stead’s advancement.

No doubt, the task proposed by Stead’s staff assistant Edith Harper in 1918 still lies before us. If all those who shared his aspirations, she said, would record their memories of him, then some day, perchance, some masterhand may fitly weave together the different threads, so that the beautiful pattern of his life shall stand out, bright and fair, for future eyes. Such cannot be accomplished in one volume, and certainly not by one person; I have tried to make a beginning.

Acknowledgments

A host of friends and fellow researchers have contributed to this volume by forwarding notices of anything by and about W. T. Stead. Particularly vigilant have been John D. Squires, Anthony R. Stead, Martha S. Vogeler, and the late Leslie Shepard. Abroad, Margaret and Victor Jones made us at home at Hayling Island. Neil Sharp anchored the Embleton and northern England research; Denise Rason and Stephen Butt headed the movement in 2004 to install a Green Plaque at W. T. Stead’s home in Westminster, funded generously by Susan Burmeister-Brown and others. Contributors to NewsStead have greatly expanded my awareness of wide-ranging interest in Stead and his activities. The National Endowment for the Humanities granted a Fellowship for College Teachers for the Stead research during the academic year 1984-1985.

Travels to access special collections render necessary my apologies to numerous librarians to whom I appeared a persistent pest and who labored on my behalf nonetheless. There should be a special award somewhere for these people, and special praise for the librarians of Drake University in Iowa, where this work originated, and the librarians of Jefferson County in Colorado, where it ended. The computer technology of Erika Eckley, and the wide tolerance of all the Eckley men—Wilton, Douglas, Stephen, Timothy—qualify them for without whom recognition.

Textual Citations

AD   Afler Death. London: Stead’s Publishing House, 1921

AmRev   American Review of Reviews, ed. Dr. Albert Shaw, 1891-1937

B   Borderland, ed. W. T. Stead, 1893-1897

Defence   The Armstrong Case: Mr. Stead’s Defence in Full. London: H. Vickers, 1885

EH   Edith Harper, Stead the Man. London: William Rider, 1918

ES   Estelle Stead, My Father. New York: George H. Doran, 1913

FW   Frederic Whyte, The Life of W. T. Stead,, 2 vols. New York:

Houghton Mifflin; London: Jonathan Cape, 1925

MP   The M. P. for Russia: Reminiscences and Correspondence of Madame

Olga Novikoff ed. W. T. Stead. 2 vols. London: Andrew Melrose, 1909; New York: G. P. Putnam‘s Sons, 1909

N. Echo   Northern Echo, ed. W. T. Stead, 1871-1880

PMG   Pall Mall Gazette, ed. W. T. Stead, 1880-1889

R   Review of Reviews, ed. W. T. Stead, 1890-1912

R. Scott   John W. Robertson Scott, The Life and Death of a Newspaper.

London: Methuen, 1952

TT   Trial Transcript: Central Criminal Court Sessions Paper; Minutes of Evidence Vol. CII, Part 612 (27 November 1885).

1

Emerging

T

hemes, 1849-1871

The world’s work was to be done by himself, with the assistance and the direction of the Senior Partner. Such was his interpretation of the duties enjoined upon him by his father’s Congregational Church, a little democracy in which women voted equally with men, which called its own minister, managed its own affairs, impressed on all its members their responsibility for others, and owed allegiance to no one but Jesus Christ.¹ So excessive was W. T. Stead’s zeal to reform the world that in later years the father inquired, Aren’t you going to leave a little for the Lord Himself to do, William? (EH 8). As a child, indignant at reputed injustice, Stead exclaimed I wish that God would give me a big whip that I could go round the world and whip the wicked out of it!² Bursting with energy, he could not walk but must run home full tilt after Chapel and in London startled his colleagues with running hard the length of Pall Mall. These humble origins catalyzed W. T. Stead’s lifelong mission of Peace, Woman, Spirit (EH 255 ) with which threefold idealizations he advanced to positions of international influence. In his father’s church was instituted the civic or secular church of his mature years and the society of helpers that would facilitate government by journalism. Few persons acquainted with Stead’s puritanic origins understand the scope of his secularism.

Much that he accomplished in maturity, enhanced by his Father Christmas appearance from the late 1890s onward, veiled a gift for prophecy; skeptics would accredit his keen anticipation of newsmaking trends. Attending his birth 5 July 1849, his elder sister remembered the fate of unwanted kittens and speculated whether the unlovely infant should be put down the well (ES 3-4). As a public figure, W. T. Stead embellished the anecdote for the amusement of his audiences. Emerged from the depths of his being, death by water was convincingly linked with fog at sea threatening passenger-laden steamers. In 1886 he inscribed How the Mail Steamer Went Down in Mid Atlantic, by a Survivor, which first earned him credit for predicting the sinking of the Titanic.

Only a little space of lifetime was granted by the Senior Partner; to waste time was to commit death by installments, and multitasking an imperative. Cradled in his mother’s arms at the age of four months, he was transported from Embleton, the place of his birth (and where Bishop Mandell Creighton served as vicar 1875-1884) in northern England, to Howdon [also Howden], where his father William Stead (1814-1884) served until 1883 as pastor of the Howdon Independent Chapel.³ Church technically distinguished Anglican edifices. Like other northern industrial towns, Howdon was squalid and dirty, away from which the family trudged a mile before coming upon a tree.

Family tradition held that the Steads were of Swedish origin from the time of Queen Elizabeth, when they settled at Skipton in NorthYorkshire. From those hardy Norsemen, apparently, came W. T. Stead’s leonine head and the brilliant sea-blue eyes that blazed forth in un-English penetration (EH 2) as if mesmerizing. The word stead means place and occurs in innumerable place names. Allied in Swedish with stad, in German and Danish with stede and steed, the form sted denotes the family-preferred pronunciation and orally/aurally distinguishes Stead from Steed. Stead is practically synonymous with wick, etymologically allied with the Latin vicus, meaning a way; wick means a street, but also a castle, a village, a place of work, i.e. Stanswick and Stansted.

William Thomas Stead (1849-1912) and his sister Mary Isabella were instructed in spelling as they lay in bed awaiting the breakfast fire built by their father; home tutoring, swirled in community service and preparation of sermons, crammed any accessible hour. Their father’s dramatically-narrated history and Bible stories and social studies enlivened walks and waiting for trains. Mnemonics, a science beloved by the father, was inculcated in the children and bore fruit in Stead’s fabulous memory. The father encouraged the children to question, debate, and dispute in a manner that many parents would consider insolent; the only demerit was not to have an opinion at all. The children must remember the heads of his sermons and recite biblical passages at the dinner table. Reading in the Old Testament at the age of four, Stead and his sister, educated equally with him, displayed early doctrinal diversions while learning there are always two sides to turn to: she defended Arminianism and miracles; he favored Calvinism and rationalism. The father taught them French and Latin, which the brother Herbert knew better than English, and constructed their toys (R 37: 18-33).

The mother, Isabella Jobson Stead (1824-1875), while bearing a child every two years to a total of nine births, served as mediator and served as peacemaker in community disputes (ES 4-5). Outstanding in Stead’s memory was her canvassing the women of Howdon for repeal of the Contagious Diseases (CD) Acts, which degraded and punished women for syphilis but not men. As an editor, Stead would tolerate blasphemy in his newspaper but disallowed any support of the CD Acts, which made women chattel to men (FW 1:42).

He was perhaps eleven when an opportunity for defense of woman announced itself. An older boy jeered at a pretty neighborhood belle who was attempting to tie up her garter. Young Stead rushed upon the offender for a battle royal that diverted attention while the girl accomplished her immodest task in peace, and Stead was knocked to the ground. Mary Issie and the boy knight compacted solemnly to keep this secret from the parents, but all his public knew it when the Reverend Benjamin Waugh published it in 1885, after the Maiden Tribute had made Stead internationally famous as a defender of woman’s virtue. I often think that little scrimmage was prophetic of a good deal that has happened to me and will happen to me through life, Stead reflected. "I get the thing done that I want to get done, but I go under pro tem. Only pro tem., because I always keep bobbing up again!" (ES 16-18; FW 1: 21).

Mary Isabella (1847-1918), his chief playmate and confidante, in her teen years walked to a school in a nearby village and in her maturity served in several types of social work. The next younger brother, John Edward (1851-1923), battled physical delicacy in his youth and in maturity achieved fame as a metallurgist specializing in the production of iron and steel. Of the remaining two children who reached maturity, Sarah Annie (1855-1896) married George Richardson Strachan. Francis Herbert (1857-1928) as journalist and minister reared his family in London’s Browning Settlement where he improved the lot of Walworth slum dwellers.

Only W. T. Stead at age twelve in 1861 entrained to Silcoates boarding school at Wrenthorpe, near Wakefield, where ministers’ sons and some laymen were educated, for two years. The neophyte was pulled across the playground on his back by his hair until his fortitude gained him respect; the initiation determined him to educate his own children at home. He developed a passion for cricket. Into the game he introduced overarm bowling, and contributed a narration of a game to the school paper. At thirteen he experienced an evangelical religious conversion that committed him to lifelong membership in the Congregational service. The Reverend James Bewglass, A.M., LL.D (headmaster 18541876) was a fiery pedagogue who enflamed the children with narrations of Sherman’s march to the sea and the injustices rendered the Irish under British rule; he taught democracy by allowing the scholars to decide part of the curriculum. Stead left the school in 1863 with a comprehension that the best of all governments is government by all. He found invaluable the intensification of three principles not in the curriculum: Christianity, cricket, and democracy (ES 18-25).

Since the father’s salary in all his life never surpassed £150 per annum, financial necessity pressed upon Stead at barely age fourteen to contribute to the family income. Keeping accounts for Charles Septimus Smith, a wine merchant who doubled as the Russian consul, Stead sat perched on a stool in seaside Newcastle, a city of 150,000 on the north bank estuary of the tidal Tyne. Formal education was not an option, for until passage of Forster’s Education Act in 1870, Nonconformists (Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists) were not admitted to the universities, and even then the prizes were withheld.

During these teen years, attracted to Locke and Macaulay, Stead extended his reading in history and religions. While commuting daily twenty minutes by train, he read and studied French. He devoured Coleridge, Hazlitt, Schlegel, Goethe, Milton and additional Puritans, and Carlyle’s Life of Cromwell. He read his employer’s copy of the daily newspaper and recited the contents to his father.

At home in Howdon on weekends, his sister’s authorship of biblical plays turned him into a production manager for performances at his father’s church; despite the puritan embargo of the theater, Stead developed an attraction to a beautiful actress in Newcastle whose picture he carried and haunted the square where she lived (R 30: 30). Reading all of Shakespeare’s plays with astonishment, he knew ever after exactly how each scene should be acted. As a leader of Howdon’s youth, he exercised his father’s educational methods upon the boys of the Sunday School by requiring them to note the heads of sermons, to stand and speak for two minutes, and by entertaining them with his own creations of biblical tales. Appalled at such license concerning holy scripture, the superintendent ordered him out, whereupon Stead and his boys marched proudly to the nearby Club Room, where they continued as before (ES 34).

Entering The Boy’s Own Magazine essay competitions proved valuable for demanding study and inculcating the methods of composition. He submitted several essays under the name W. T. Silcoates, saw some of his contributions published locally, and took third prize on Shakespeare and first prize on Cromwell. Among the award of books totaling a guinea’s worth, he chose a paper-covered edition of the works of James Russell Lowell, which accomplished his second conversion. The poems A Parable and Extreme Unction formulated his service to humanity. Beside the second he inscribed, This poem changed my life (ES 26-30). A dying wealthy man surveys his life wasted of Youth and Ideal and bids the priest begone. The last half of the fifth stanza rang in the reader’s consciousness night and day: What bands of love and service bind/ This being to the world’s sad heart? Further, at a country house the teenager found a copy of Lowell’s Biglow Papers, of which the preface to the essay the Pius Editor’s Creed formed his editorial policy: That great ideal of the editor as ‘the Captain of our Exodus into the Canaan of a truer social order’ still glows like a pillar of fire amid the midnight gloom before the journalists of the world. All that is real and true in what Matthew Arnold called the ‘New Journalism,’ which he said I had invented, is there in germ (R 4: 235-36).

The volume of poetry reached the eighteen-year-old at a crucial time when his health was impaired by over study and he feared blindness. Having aspired to writing the history of the Puritan movement from where Froude left off and Macaulay began (ES 32), he was forced to relinquish his cherished reading on trains and in its place memorized long screeds of verse and compiled a date book. Poor health brought on by nervous exhaustion exaggerated his morbid self-pity and sense of guilt for ambitious daydreams, in which gradually Lowell’s promise of a community purpose gained a foothold:

God bends from out the deep, and says, "I gave thee the great gift of life;

Wast thou not called in many ways?

Are not my heaven and earth at strife?"

Hence, The idea that everything wrong in the world was a divine call to use your life in righting it, sank deep into my soul. He put aside his dreams of fame and his literary ambitions and determined to do what little he could in his present environment to fulfil the trust for such high uses given. Since then, he could honestly say, I have never regarded literary or journalistic success as worth a straw except to strike a heavier blow in the cause of those for whom I was called to fight (ES 29-30).

Alleviating the endless extensions of poverty, he found, could be accomplished only with publicity and organization. Behind his father’s church was an eyesore called clarty gutter. Stead’s red-hot stinging letter in a local paper galvanized the Board to take action to render it respectable.⁴ As a lay cleric assistant to his father, he escorted the town drunks home by circumnavigating the pubs. For the young people he organized clubs for cricket, swimming, and gardening and in winter held readings and discussion groups. Canvassing his people, he booked wholesale orders for periodicals in Newcastle and contributed the profits to the Sunday school (R 34: 418-19). He produced at home The Magazinctum, a journal of his family in which he served as editor and chief contributor under several clever pseudonyms over five years. A special award of a silver watch and sum of money from his employer enabled him to treat his sister and two friends, Annie and Emma Wilson, to a visit to Edinburgh (ES 36-38).

A new daily morning paper, the Darlington Northern Echo, was founded on 1 January 1870 under ownership of the Pease family of Quakers. The proprietor John Hyslop Bell placed Jonathan Copleston in the position of editor. Grooming a replacement immediately, Copleston responded to Stead’s letters and articles by tutoring Stead, whose zeal for social reform motivated him to strive mightily to grasp the principles and practices of accepted journalism. In the merchant’s office were a Chaldean grammar and a Russian, but he had never heard of a Printer’s Grammar (FW 1: 27). The first assessment of pestiferous Indiscriminate Charity on 7 February 1870 appeared as a leader and was followed by The Begging Profession containing a telltale Steadmark, the analogy of Sambo’s pigs for uncountable migrants, leading to a proposal for a Charity Organization Society. Some of the essays flowing from Stead’s eager pen were published, some blue-penciled and excerpted, and others totally ignored. Querying these decisions, Stead received a flattering reply from the editor: "If you . . . will allow me to use your mind, I shall be gratified. By August he conceived of uniting the English-speaking race and advocated better American coverage. When Napoleon III declared war against Prussia, Stead initiated a lifelong fervid pursuit under title Disarmament the Manifest Duty of the Future." His first reporting assignment was the several sessions of the Social Science Congress meeting in Newcastle. During the Siege of Paris (131 days beginning 19 September 1870), he read that Parisians were forced to eat mice and strived to learn how they tasted.⁵ He brought specimens from an adjacent warehouse and found, as Farley Mowat did for Never Cry Wolf, that this gourmand’s delight could be tasty with toast. Tom Stoppard wrote this part of Stead’s history into his play The Invention of Love (1997).

Eventually, scheming a birthday present to his father, Stead learned that the newspaper being in low water financially could not reimburse him and continued nevertheless, pouring out his soul’s needs for a better world. Copleston anticipated a brilliant future for the young man and wished that he could change talents with him. Stead confessed himself ignorant of matters of remuneration, without thought of wealth as an ultimate object: "If my life may be the means of doing much good in my day (and perhaps afterwards) I dedicate it to that purpose. And any prospect of wealth and comfort which may have to be sacrificed—what is it? Dust in the balance. To choose wealth instead of influence would be to sell Christ as did Judas. Walking the streets he saw wretched ruins of humanity, women stamped and crushed into devils by society. . . . And the children nursed in debauchery, suckled in crime, predestined to a life of misery and shame! He longed for a way to remedy those evils (FW 1: 29). The leader 17 January 1871, titled The Viking in Englishmen, deplored the English militants crying out for participation in the French-German death-struggle, for eight centuries of civilization had not extinguished the old lust of plunder."

He argued the triumph of democratic principles through the spread of Christianity in an essay that reached the proprietor J. H. Bell when abroad. Impressed, Bell inquired about the author and began a brisk interchange of letters with Stead, who still harbored no intention of becoming a journalist. Like magic, one day in late April, 1871, there appeared in the Wine Merchant’s office in Newcastle a portent of the future, the kind of event that would compel Stead in later years to confess, I have ever been a child of fortune. The proprietor Bell arrived from London to offer Stead the position of editor of the Northern Echo at a salary of £150 for the first year. Copleston intended to emigrate to the United States (FW 1: 30). Stead had never yet set foot inside a newspaper office and would do so as the youngest editor in England. Pondering the terms, he wrote to his pastor the Rev. Henry B. Kendall for advice, thrilling with the glorious opportunity of attacking the devil,⁶ which meant the badness of things. Stead must be Liberal, Nonconformist, and Free Trade, All of which I am of course. He consulted everyone, amusing Thomas Wemyss Reid of the Leeds Mercury by dropping into the office and talking all night, telling this accomplished editor how a newspaper should be run.⁷ It was a prideful but teary farewell from Howdon, whose youth were accustomed to meeting Stead’s train on the weekends and accompanying him in a wide line while chattering about their affairs (ES 50-51). He was resigning his duties in two communities: leader of the Howdon Sunday School, secretary of the Tract Society, conductor of the Cottage Meeting, President of the Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Society, secretary of the Newcastle Mendicity Society, and organizer of house-to-house visits with the Newcastle poor. He had developed a special gift for addressing children (FW 1: 28). The Northern Echo, by custom, throughout July of 1871 bore no mark of editorial transference. A page of advertisements served as wrapper for a total of four pages measuring 17-1/2 inches by 15 inches of six columns costing half a penny, extended by three and a half inches in 1873.⁸ Despite its modest appearance, its titled daily leader or editorial in Stead’s hands was often read aloud in pubs and adapted for sermons;⁹ soon the paper became the Voice of the North and a power in the land.

All unknown, Stead was gravitating southward toward London: from Embleton near the Scottish border, south to Howdon and Newcastle, and farther south to Darlington in North Yorkshire, from which London was only 188 miles from York by rail.

2

Attacking the Devil: Darlington, The Northern Echo, 1871-1880

After initial smooth sailing, Stead’s proprietor Bell commanded No more undignified running! and demanded that the editor wear a tall hat and kid gloves, advisements that Stead mostly ignored. Communicating clearly, on the inspiration of Richard H. Hutton, editor of the Spectator, became his foremost endeavor. He found a distinct devil to be attacked in the person of Mrs. Mary Anne Cotton, who earned a livelihood by insuring husbands and paramours, and then burying men and children while avoiding the authorities. She had murdered with arsenic a total of eighteen people when Stead arranged the exhumation of corpses and waited while a jury of matrons presided over her trial while enciente with the only child permitted to live. Stead’s leader triumphed: Hanged! Yes. It might have been worse. She might have been boiled alive; on 24 March 1873, he brought out for it the Northern Echo’s first special edition.

Within a year of beginning work in 1871, he caused the Northern Echo to suppress betting news, a formidable task. Stead felt uneasy unless working with the last pound of steam on and lifelong ignored his own physical limitations; consequently, only a month in the editorial chair, his doctor ordered him to cease either his local duties or his editing. Choosing editing, he labored under a conviction that he must educate, evangelize, and civilize the ignorant masses and communicate England’s duty to civilize the world. He preached consistently his doctrine of Imperialism, as prescribed by W. E. Forster, within the limits of sanity and the ten Commandments. Britain and the English-speaking race must police the world and fill it with a law-abiding Christian race. Stead promoted England as a peacemaker, lobbied for a United States of Europe, and cultivated friendly relations with Russia, the Power with which there is the most danger of collision (R. Scott 109). He argued for arbitration of the United States’ claims for indemnity for the destruction of the Alabama (31 Jan 1872). When Britain agreed to pay $15,500,000 or £3æ million in compensation, Stead was greatly encouraged. Thereby William Gladstone, the prime minister, achieved a triumph of rational internationalism.¹

Tuesday, 10 June1873, was a red-letter day in Howdon. Flags and streamers waved across Main Street for the wedding of Stead and Emma Lucy Wilson, a childhood sweetheart and daughter of a provision merchant and shipowner of Howdon-on-Tyne. The historian William Richardson records that Special hymns were written by the bridegroom’s brother, Herbert, and a special marriage service by the bridegroom himself, from which the autocratic word ‘obey’ was omitted.² The couple moved to Oaklands at Grainey Hill, two miles out of Darlington, where were born three sons—William Jr, called Willie (30 Mar 1874), Henry (31 Oct 1875), Alfred (16 Jul 1877)—and a daughter Emma Wilson, called Estelle (23 Oct 1879). Boasting three acres and a cow, Grainey Hill was to Stead a prefall paradise, an idyllic environment for rearing children (ES 86-87). Emma assisted Stead in translating his execrable handwriting and educated the children who helped her in the house and helped their father in the garden and field. Mrs. Stead, however, suffered from rural inconveniences and the distance from medical assistance, and Stead found the burdens of agriculture too time-consuming. His wife in 1880 refused to live there any longer in the winter (R. Scott 110). Stead was loathe to depart the dear old place," which some time after their removal to London was demolished leaving nothing except a photograph of a painting and a tethering-stone by which Stead mounted the pony he rode to the office (8 Mar 1933 N. Echo). The stone, moved to the Darlington

Public Library, facing the offices of the Northern Echo, now stands, wrote a local correspondent, as a fitting symbol of his indomitable courage and strength of character (18 Apr 1962 N. Echo)—qualities he owed in part to his mother, who died in 1875, leaving him instructions not to domineer over his wife, not to overtax his strength, and to submit his will to God (R. Scott 103-04).

At the office, Stead’s first article in 1873 against White Slaves on a system maintained between Italy and New York—by which small boys sold for £20 to £60, and girls, as young as age two, for £20 to £100—represented a topic seemingly remote from England (4Jul 1873). Soon, at age twenty-five Stead recognized himself as having gained a position on the platform of the world and could not imagine leaving the Northern Echo, where he worked according to his own limitations and bias (R. Scott 99-102). After Gladstone resigned from the ministry at age sixty-five in 1873, Stead launched a campaign to sway voters to return the elder statesman to office. Special supplements sacrificed front-page advertisements to full-page reports of public meetings. Politics prompted Stead’s first book-length journalistic extravaganza, The Durham Thirteen, surveying the candidates while presenting a disturbing picture of industrial England, in whose towns chemical works distributed acid fumes and trees had put on mourning. Further articles addressed residences befouled by open middens and sewage poisoning the people (23 Feb 7-Apr 1874 N. Echo). Several of Stead’s leaders championed the need for the Public Health Act of 1875. Internationally, Britain was excluded from a conference in Vienna at which Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia debated the Eastern Question, chiefly to roust the Christian European Slavs from Turkish domination. In November Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, acting on news from Frederick Greenwood at the Pall Mall Gazette, purchased from the bankrupt Ismail, Khedive of Egypt, 176,602 Suez Canal shares for four million pounds (R 7: 147).

Burgeoning difficulties in the East demanded much editorial space in 1876, even as the lateness of the hour precluded passage of the CD Acts Repeal Bill, and woman’s suffrage, which Stead advocated, was defeated in Parliament (28 Apr). Stead brooded over the endemic moral lassitude of British men, who flouted male superiority and detested the principles upon which the agitation for Repeal is based (18 Jul 1876). Upon publication of feminist leader Mrs. Josephine Butler’s The New Abolitionists, Stead began a correspondence with her, perceiving that Prostitution wanted its ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ Who was to be its Mrs. Stowe? Faulting the aristocracy for present immorality, Mrs. Butler replied, in the grandest house of the kind in Paris, are to be seen portraits of all the great men who had frequented them—diplomatists, generals, and English Lords. . . . The brothel-keeper put a cross underneath the portrait at each visit, to mark the number of visits made to the house by these great men!³ Stead did not concur with Butler’s faulting of the British aristocracy. In fact, without their assistance his achievements would have been severely restricted.

In the year 1876 the tragedy of the Bulgarian atrocities of Turkish rapine exploded at the tip of Stead’s pen, which urged the people to protest. He developed a plan and a talent for infecting others with an idea and instilling in them the notion that they had originated the project even as he attributed decision and action to the collective body, as in Darlington has spoken. In consequence, that Stead pioneered in altering the course of British foreign policy receives scant, if any, recognition from biographers of Gladstone and other political figures. In 1909 he modestly remembered his part in supporting Gladstone in his protests against a threatened war against Russia on behalf of the Turks. Both Mr. Gladstone and Mr. [John] Bright repeatedly recognised the services which I rendered to the cause of Peace in that campaign (ES 57). In retrospect, he admitted, What made me was the Bulgarian atrocities (R. Scott 96).

Perhaps crediting Stead’s modesty, earlier historians generally agree with present biographer Roy Jenkins that Gladstone knew little about Bulgaria while, bedridden for a month, he probably followed news reports: "W. T. Stead also sent to [castle] Hawarden copies of his Darlington Northern Echo, in which from early August onwards that crusading editor was whipping up a great campaign. Nonetheless Gladstone’s knowledge of Bulgaria was far from profound."⁴ None of the Gladstone biographers reprints Gladstone’s grateful letters to Stead, available both in Estelle Stead’s biography of her father and in Stead’s The MP for Russia. Gladstone’s letter to Stead dated 30 September 1876 concludes the acute discernment with which your articles are written needs no help from me (ES 60; MP 1: 259). Stead’s pamphlet, The Eastern Ogre; or, St. George to the Rescue, was revived ten years later when the topic was the Armenian atrocities (R 14: 355-61).

Great Britain had saved Turkey from destruction in the Crimean War (1853-1856) and continued to fear that Russia would seize the Bosphorus—which, after the Crimean War, was closed to foreign warships—and sided with Turkey, a moribund empire ruled by a sultan incurring extravagant debts that failed to improve with successive sultans. Bulgarians revolted against the heavy taxes of the Turkish pashas waged by a revolutionary committee called comitadjis. The Turkish government sent in irregular troops, the Bashi-Bazouks, who massacred men, women, and children in a total of sixty Bulgarian villages which, in May, 1876, were counted at 12,000 persons (11 Aug N. Echo). Other nations interpreted the strategic placement of the British fleet in Besika Bay as a means of defending the Turks; and Turks looked upon the English as their allies. Serbia and Montenegro declared war against the Turks (5 Jul). Stead held Prime Minister Disraeli, who jested about imaginary tortures, responsible for the blood of the slaughtered Bulgarians (9 Aug) and worried that other nations blamed England. Journalists began the counter movement when Edwin Pears, the correspondent of the London Daily News in Constantinople, notified his paper of the atrocities in Bulgaria (29 Aug). The Daily News despatched an accomplished Irish-American correspondent from Ohio, Januarius A. MacGahan, to verify the atrocities. In August, MacGahan began reporting the sights in village after village like this: I could scarcely go on on account of the odour. One hundred bodies lay dead in the sun, all in a state of putrefaction. The heads of both sexes and of all ages were separated from the trunks (20 Sep). Stead had already leaped into action.

He announced on a Wednesday that a series of town meetings would be held in the North, beginning in Darlington on Friday, to express indignation against the British Government (23 Aug). He urged British union with Russia to oppose the Turks (26 Aug). While Northern towns responded swiftly to his imperious call by holding indignation meetings, Disraeli made his smug status quo speech (1 Sep), to the effect that Britain must continue as is. However, after four months of Turkish slashings and hangings, some factions in the British government began to credit the reports, especially when the Daily News rendered an account of the village-turned-charnel house that MacGahan found at Batak (4 Sep). Additional Northern towns fell into line with a long series of town meetings. Gladstone published his pamphlet The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East and subsequently while speechmaking entered books of famous quotations by inviting the Turks to leave bag and baggage (7 Sep), and appealed for the Government to change its policy. At Blackheath Stead heard Gladstone imply that England and Russia should intervene (11 Sep); the editor proposed a Bulgarian Sunday to collect funds for victims (14 Sep) and brought the churches into such commitment. Walter Baring, sent by the British Ambassador to investigate, scotched some rumors but confirmed and more than confirmed the statements of MacGahan. At Batak, Baring saw the church in which a thousand Christians had been burned alive, the streets where at every step lay human remains rotting and sweltering in the summer sun, and where he counted sixty skulls in one little hollow, nearly all of which had been severed from the bodies by axes and yataghans and provided a figure of 5,000 outraged, tortured, and slaughtered.⁵

Disraeli, newly titled Lord Beaconsfield in 1876, was a flippant scoffer speaking at Aylesbury, even though in May and June he had been secretly receiving confirmatory despatches from the British consuls that he dismissed as coffee house babble.⁶ Creating for Darlington a reputation as the birthplace of the Bulgarian Agitation (MP 1: 276), Stead retaliated against the Aylesbury speech by calling for a second round of town meetings, conceding that the previous meetings, having a purpose shifted from horror to prevention, had been ignored by Her Majesty’s ministers. Visiting in the North (26 Sep), Gladstone responded to Stead by writing that he was not surprised at the energy of the North and that his position forbade him Stead’s rabblerousing tactics. The Northern Echo, he wrote, was admirably got up in every way and concurred with Stead that publicity was the great security of English political life (ES 78-80).

As Stead continued his leaders and meetings, the London Times refused to publish notices of the town meetings. Stead called for relief for surviving Bulgarians facing a harsh winter without homes, food, or clothing and continued to denounce Turkish deceit until Russia proposed a six-weeks’ armistice and an immediate suspension of hostilities, rendered Russia to the Rescue! (1 Nov). His public meetings succeeded unexpectedly when support was needed most. In Sheffield, the Liberals conceived of a representative Convention to give formal and emphatic expression to the will of England on the Eastern Question and watched their call for conveners swiftly entrenched for a conference in London (MP 1: 276-80). Town meetings had triumphed and called Gladstone out of retirement: now the greatest in all the land, our dread Achilles, had quitted his tent and was summoning the nation to the fray (ES 62). The gathering at St. James’s Hall on Friday, 8 December 1876, beginning at 11:00 a.m. and ending after 8:00 p.m., thundered with applause for its many speakers. It climaxed with the practiced eloquence of Gladstone whose flashing eye, stentorian voice, and polished periods commanded enthusiasm and even awe as—ever the sagacious politician—he failed to support any particular scheme of reform while asserting that the supreme power should be taken out of the hands of the Turk (9 Dec).

Stead editorialized in defiance of his proprietor Bell’s views and was threatened with death by anonymous scribes who declared that at the first British reverse in the expected war my office would be gutted by the mob hunting for the traitor’s life (ES 56). However, Arouse the nation or be damned was the message, like a divine possession that left Stead weakened, but Bell fortunately was away in Switzerland and I felt that like Jacob I had met the angel of God and I did not know but that I might have a lifelong limp in consequence. He attended the first town meeting at Darlington with fear and trembling; gratefully, upon publication of Gladstone’s pamphlet, he felt that his work was crowned and assumed by other hands (R. Scott 104). He wrote dozens of letters a day and felt himself called to preach a new crusade.

The year 1877 began ominously with the clang of arms [intoxicating] the descendants of the Vikings and the chariot of Mars [blocking] the way of all the peaceful deities (1 Jan 1877 N. Echo). Jingo feeling was intensified. Many of the British, remembering the sacrifices at Sevastopol during the Crimean War, were lusting for war against Russia and could not conceive that British interests better lay with neutralizing the Turks. Countering Lord Beaconsfield’s orientalism and the unpatriotic and criminal language of the Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Morning Post, and the Pall Mall Gazette, Stead perceived the Salisbury policy of cooperation with Russia is nullified by the Beaconsfield policy of defiance (24 Jan). At the same time the Boers who had attained British recognition of the Transvaal Republic were enslaving the natives of South Africa as domestic servants (27 Jan). Stead was also vigilant about the naval maladministration and sounded the alarm for Charles Seely who admonished that one-fifth of the British ironclads were unfit for war (8 Mar). On 14 April 1877 Russia declared war against Turkey and began hostilities on 24 April. The battle of Plevna aroused additional anti-Russian feeling in Britain, and the Music Halls bleated pro-Turkish sentiments (16 Oct). In this year of clashing passions, Stead’s rhetoric, heedless of his life, was increasingly inflammatory. A local outrage upon a female detonated The Decay of English Heroism, in which he likened the deterioration of English manhood to the rapacities of the Turks (10 Oct). Declaiming that the Church of England had failed to take the lead in awakening the national conscience and that politics had passively consented to evil, Stead nearly surpassed himself in vehemence with the Church and Dissent editorial: Fifty thousand men are lying dead in the East at this hour who would have been living if there had been no Established Church (14 Nov).

After ten years as "an eager advocate of an Anglo-Russian entente, and for two years on the war-path against Turkish misrule" (MP 1: 379), Stead met Mme. Olga Novikoff (1840-1925)—god-daughter of Tsar Nicholas I and unofficial ambassadress for Russia—who first addressed the British public in print in 1876. Her admirer Edward

Reviews for Maiden Tribute

[longreader_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A massive, important biography and study of the life of W. T. Stead, one of the most important figures in the history of British journalism, founder of the Review of Reviews, a major crusader in reducing the prostitution of young women in late 19th century England and revisions in English law to raise the age of consent for young women. The most important book on this major journalist who died on the Titanic.