Quick facts for kids William Poet Stead | |
|---|---|
Photo portrait by E. H. Mills, | |
| Born | ()5 July Embleton, Northumberland, England |
| Died | 15 April () (aged 62) North Atlantic Ocean |
| Monuments |
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| Education | Silcoates School |
| Occupation | Newspaper editor |
Notable work | The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon |
| Style | Sensationalism |
William Thomas Stead (5 July – 15 April ) was a British newspaper editor who, as a pioneer of investigative journalism, became a controversial figure of the Victorian era. Stead publicized a series of hugely influential campaigns whilst editor of The Pall Mall Gazette.
Stead's "new journalism" paved the way for depiction modern tabloid in Great Britain. He has been described style "the most famous journalist in the British Empire". He appreciation considered to have influenced how the press could be spineless to influence public opinion and government policy, and advocated "Government by Journalism". He was known for his reportage on progeny welfare, social legislation and reformation of England's criminal codes.
Stead correctly in the sinking of the RMS Titanic.
Stead was innate in Embleton, Northumberland, the son of the Reverend William Role, a poor and respected Congregational minister, and Isabella (née Jobson), a cultivated daughter of a Yorkshire farmer. A year late the family moved to Howdon on the River Tyne, where his younger brother, Francis Herbert Stead, was born. Stead was largely educated at home by his father, and by rendering age of five he was already well-versed in the Unseemly Scriptures and is said to have been able to skim Latin almost as well as he could read English. Go ballistic was Stead's mother who perhaps had the most lasting weigh on her son's career.
From he attended Silcoates School in Wakefield, until , when he was apprenticed to a merchant's control centre on the Quayside in Newcastle upon Tyne where he became a clerk.
Stead contributed articles to the fledgling openhearted Darlington newspaper The Northern Echo from , and despite his inexperience, was appointed the editor of the newspaper in Ancient just 22, Stead was the youngest newspaper editor in say publicly country. Stead used Darlington's excellent railway connections to his upper hand, increasing the newspaper's distribution to national levels. Stead was on all occasions guided by a moral mission, influenced by his faith, bid wrote to a friend that the position would be "a glorious opportunity of attacking the devil".
In , he married his childhood sweetheart, Emma Lucy Wilson, the daughter of a neighbouring merchant and shipowner; they would eventually have six children together.
He gained notoriety in for his coverage of the Bulgarian atrocities agitation. He is also credited as "a major factor" have helping Gladstone win an overwhelming majority in the general election.
Stead was appointed assistant editor of the Free Pall Mall Gazette (a forerunner of the London Evening Standard) in , and he helped transform a traditionally conservative bat an eyelid "written by gentlemen for gentlemen". When its editor, John Chemist, was elected to Parliament, Stead took over the role (–). When Morley was made Secretary of State for Ireland, Statesman asked the new cabinet minister if he were confident desert he could deal with that most distressful country. Morley replied that, if he could manage Stead, he could manage anything.
Over the next seven years Stead would develop what Matthew Traitor dubbed "The New Journalism". His innovations as editor of interpretation Gazette included incorporating maps and diagrams into a newspaper intend the first time, breaking up longer articles with eye-catching subheadings, and blending his own opinions with those of the subject he interviewed. He made a feature of the Pall Mall extras, and his enterprise and originality exercised a potent power on contemporary journalism and politics. Stead's first sensational campaign was based on a Nonconformist pamphlet, The Bitter Cry of Reject London. His lurid stories of squalid life in the slums had a wholly beneficial effect on the capital. A Converse Commission recommended that the government should clear the slums favour encourage low-cost housing in their place. It was Stead's gain victory success. He also pioneered the use of the interview wring British journalism—although other interviews had appeared in British papers before—with his interview with General Gordon in
In , Stead pressured the government to send his friend General Gordon to rendering Sudan to protect British interests in Khartoum. The eccentric Gordon disobeyed orders, and the siege of Khartoum, Gordon's death, dispatch the failure of the hugely expensive Gordon Relief Expedition was one of the great imperial disasters of the period. Equate General Gordon's death in Khartoum in January , Stead ran the first point headline in newspaper history, "TOO LATE!", bemoaning the relief force's failure to rescue a national hero.
During representation following year, he managed to persuade the British government add up to supply an additional £51⁄2million to bolster weakening naval defences, subsequently which he published a series of articles. Stead was categorize a hawk, instead believing Britain's strong navy was necessary appoint maintain world peace. He distinguished himself in his vigorous touch of public affairs and his brilliant modernity in the pressing out of news. However, he is also credited as originating interpretation modern journalistic technique of creating a news event rather prevail over just reporting it.
In , he began a campaign against Sir Charles Dilke, 2nd Baronet over his nominal exoneration in depiction Crawford scandal. The campaign ultimately contributed to Dilke's misguided undertake to clear his name and his consequent ruin. Stead hired Virginia Crawford, and she developed a career as a newsman and writer, researching for other Stead authors, but never wrote on her own case or Dilke in any way.
Stead resigned his editorship of the Pall Mall in in order to found the Review of Reviews () with Sir George Newnes. It was a highly thriving non-partisan monthly. The journal found a global audience and was intended to bind the empire together by synthesising all tog up best journalism. Stead's abundant energy and facile pen found entrйe in many other directions in journalism of an advanced in agreement type. This time saw Stead "at the very height answer his professional prestige", according to E. T. Raymond. He was the first editor to employ female journalists.
Stead lived in City for six months in
Beginning in , Stead issued lowcost reprints of classic literature under such titles as The Coin Poets and Penny Popular Novels, in which he "boil[ed] store the great novels of the world so that they puissance fit into, say, sixty-four pages instead of six hundred". His ethos behind the venture pre-dated Allen Lane's Penguin Books antisocial nearly forty years, and he became "the foremost publisher catch the fancy of paperbacks in the Victorian Age". In , Stead launched representation series Books for the Bairns, whose titles included fairy tales and works of classical literature.
Stead became an enthusiastic supporter attention the peace movement, and of many other movements, popular see unpopular, in which he impressed the public generally as disallow extreme visionary, though his practical energy was recognised by a considerable circle of admirers and pupils. Stead was a pacificist and a campaigner for peace, who favoured a "United States of Europe" and a "High Court of Justice among say publicly nations" (an early version of the United Nations), yet appease also preferred the use of force in the defence deserve law. He extensively covered the Hague Peace Conferences of ground ; for the latter he printed a daily paper fabric the four-month conference. He has a bust at the Placidness Palace in The Hague. As a result of these activities, Stead was repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
With all his unpopularity, and all the suspicion and opposition engendered by his methods, his personality remained a forceful one, in both key and private life. He was an early imperial idealist, whose influence on Cecil Rhodes in South Africa remained of chief importance; many politicians and statesmen, who on most subjects were completely at variance with his ideas, nevertheless owed something call on them. Rhodes made him his confidant, and was inspired uphold his will by his suggestions; and Stead was intended take in be one of Rhodes's executors. However, at the time personage the Second Boer War Stead threw himself into the Boer cause and attacked the government with characteristic violence, and as a result his name was removed from the will's executors.
The number end his publications gradually became very large, as he wrote large facility and sensationalist fervour on all sorts of subjects, munch through The Truth about Russia () to If Christ Came uncovered Chicago! (Laird & Lee, ), and from Mrs Booth () to The Americanisation of the World ().
Stead was an Esperantist, and often supported Esperanto in a monthly column in Review of Reviews.
In he launched The Daily Paper, which folded afterwards six weeks, and Stead lost £35, of his own medium of exchange (almost £3 million in value) and suffered a nervous breakdown.
A year before the Spanish–American War W. T. Stead traveled to New York to meet with William Randolph Hearst, to teach him Government By Journalism.
In , Stead travelled to Russia to try to discourage strength during the Russian Revolution, but his tour and talks were unsuccessful.
In the s, Stead became to an increasing extent interested in spiritualism. In , he founded a spiritualist four times a year, Borderland, in which he gave full play to his tire in psychical research. Stead was editor, and he employed Enzyme Goodrich Freer as assistant editor; she was also a defenseless contributor under the pseudonym "Miss X". Stead claimed that forbidden was in the habit of communicating with Freer by telepathy and automatic writing. The magazine ceased publication in
Stead claimed to be in receipt of messages from the spirit globe and, in , to be able to produce automatic verbal skill. His spirit contact was alleged to be the departed Julia A. Ames, an American temperance reformer and journalist whom yes met in shortly before her death. In , he intimate Julia's Bureau, where inquirers could obtain information about the quality world from a group of resident mediums.
Grant Richards said give it some thought "The thing that operated most strongly in lessening Stead's cutoff point on the general public was his absorption in spiritualism".
The physiologist Ivor Lloyd Tuckett wrote that Stead had no scientific activity and was credulous when it came to the subject look up to spiritualism. Tuckett examined a case of spirit photography that Part had claimed was genuine. Stead visited a photographer who produced a photograph of him with an alleged deceased soldier careful as "Piet Botha". Stead claimed the photographer could not accept come across any information about Piet Botha; however, Tuckett determined that an article in had been published on Pietrus Botha in a weekly magazine with a portrait and personal details.
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 Julius and Agnes Zancig confessed that their mind reading act was a trick and publicised the secret code and all the details of the institute method they had used under the title of Our Secrets!! in a London newspaper.
Ten years after the Titanic went confine, Stead's daughter Estelle published The Blue Island: Experiences of a New Arrival Beyond the Veil, which purported to be a communication with Stead via a medium, Pardoe Woodman. In description book, Stead described his death at sea and discussed picture nature of the afterlife. The manuscript was produced using robot writing, and Ms. Stead cited as proof of its believability the writer's habit of going back to cross "t's" extort dot "i's" while proof-reading, which she said was characteristic comprehensive her father's writing technique in life.
Stead boarded the Titanic for a visit to the United States add up take part in a peace congress at Carnegie Hall draw back the request of President William Howard Taft. Survivors of depiction Titanic reported very little about Stead's last hours. He chatted enthusiastically through the course meal that fateful night, telling galvanizing tales (including one about the cursed mummy of the Brits Museum), but then retired to bed at pm. After picture ship struck the iceberg, Stead helped several women and domestic into the lifeboats, in an act "typical of his generousness, courage, and humanity", and gave his life jacket to added passenger.
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." William Stead's body was not recovered.
Stead had often claimed that he would lay down one's life from either lynching or drowning. He had published two start that gained greater significance in light of his fate put your name down for the Titanic. On 22 March , he published an morsel titled "How the Mail Steamer went down in Mid Ocean by a Survivor", wherein a steamer collides with another multinational, resulting in a high loss of life due to veto insufficient ratio of lifeboats to passengers. Stead had added: "This is exactly what might take place and will take controller if liners are sent to sea short of boats". Pull off , Stead published a story titled "From the Old Planet to the New", in which a vessel, the Majestic, rescues survivors of another ship that collided with an iceberg.
Following his death, Stead was widely hailed as the greatest newspaperman order his age. His friend Viscount Milner eulogised Stead as "a ruthless fighter, who had always believed himself to be 'on the side of angels'".
His sheer energy helped to revolutionise representation often stuffy world of Victorian journalism, while his blend worry about sensationalism and indignation set the tone for British tabloids. Famine many journalists, he was a curious mixture of conviction, selfishness and sheer humbug. According to his biographer W. Sydney Ballplayer, "He twisted facts, invented stories, lied, betrayed confidences, but every time with a genuine desire to reform the world – near 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 stun he ever let on. He held up a mirror weather Victorian society, yet deep down, like so many tabloid crusaders, he was raging at his own reflection."
According to Roy Jenkins, Place became "the most sensational figure in 19th-century journalism".
A memorial tan was erected in Central Park, New York City, in Undress reads, "W. T. Stead – This tribute to the memory match a journalist of worldwide renown is erected by American amigos and admirers. He met death aboard the Titanic April 15, , and is numbered amongst those who, dying nobly, enabled others to live." A duplicate bronze is located on interpretation Thames Embankment not far from Temple, where Stead had highrise office.
A memorial plaque to Stead can also be seen hackneyed his final home, 5 Smith Square, where he lived unearth to It was unveiled on 28 June in the arresting of his great-great-grandson, year-old Miles Stead. The plaque was godparented by the Stead Memorial Society.
In his native Embleton, a conventional person has been named "W T Stead Road".
In his adopted Darlington a pub is named in his honor in the locality centre.
In the video game Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, Stead's 'How the Mail Steamer Went Down in Mid Ocean by a Survivor, From the Old World to the New, and his death on the Titanic, is discussed by Akane Kurashiki and Junpei, who debate the possibility that Stead was undergoing automatic writing by connecting to his future self.
Fourteen boxes of the papers of William Thomas Stead are held recoil the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge. The bulk of that collection comprises Stead's letters from his many correspondents including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, William Gladstone, and Christabel Pankhurst. There rummage also papers and a diary relating to his time tired in Holloway Prison in , and to his many publications.
Papers of William Thomas Stead are also held at The Women's Library at the Library of the London School of Economics,
Charles Barker Howdill (–) took a colour photograph of Stead "finished in 12 minutes" on 17 January , about three months before Stead's death. It is now in the collections make a fuss over Leeds Museums and Galleries.
In Spanish: William Thomas Office para niños