JOURNALISM: PATRICK SKENE CAITLINGreviews Muckraker: The Scandalous Life and Times of WT Stead By W Sydney Robinson Robson Press, 281pp. £20
‘THE MEN WITH muck-rakes are often indispensable to the wellbeing of society,” the US president Theodore Roosevelt said, remarkably tolerantly, “but only if they know when to stop raking the muck.” William Thomas Stead (1849-1912) was a muckraker par excellence, a Victorian newspaper editor who thought of himself as “the uncrowned king of an educated democracy” but did not know when to stop what he was doing until he was a passenger aboard Titanic and noticed that the ship was sinking.
Stead (pronounced Sted) was a pioneer investigative journalist and scandalmonger, able to arouse public indignation to influence governmental policies while he increased the circulation of his newspaper. W Sydney Robinson, a freelance journalist with, among others, the Spectator, is himself a resourceful investigator and a connoisseur of human paradox.
In this informative and entertaining biography of a shabby Fleet Street icon with feet of muck, he describes Stead as a “Puritan and sex fanatic, Little Englander and Imperialist, ‘saint’ and criminal convict, Liberal and Russophile, ‘Pope’ and clairvoyant”. Stead was familiar with brothels and once had the telegraphic address “Vatican, London”.
A megalomaniacal, sexually obsessive sociopath who called God his “Senior Partner”, Stead, more than any other newspaperman in the annals of sleaze, made tabloid journalism the racket it is today. The Leveson Inquiry is more than 100 years too late to disentangle improper connections between the press and politicians.
Stead was born in Embleton, Northumberland, one of the six children of the Rev William Stead, a Congregationalist minister and an obdurate conservative. Young William was educated at home until he was 12. His father’s lessons began at 6am and continued all day. The subjects included Latin, Hebrew, French and German. When the children returned from church on Sundays they had to write summaries of their father’s long sermons. Stead later claimed this exercise trained his memory so well he never had to take notes.
At the age of 12 he was sent away to a Congregationalist boarding school. As a schoolboy William wrote pious letters to his sister Mary, urging her to give her heart to God. As a journalist Stead wrote in a hectoring evangelical style, with implications that noncompliance with his advice would invite fire and brimstone.
As a young man Stead contributed fierily opinionated articles to the Northern Echo, in Darlington, without pay. In what he called his apprenticeship he typically deplored “conventional charity”, which, in his opinion, “debases instead of ennobling” and is “the fruitful parent of vice, indolence, ignorance, falsehood and crime”. “Dirty, vicious, drunken and deceitful” people solicited charity “because they find begging pays better than working”.
His articles attracted the attention of the newspaper’s publisher, who, after a dispute with the editor, gave Stead the job. He was still only 21. Just before moving to Darlington to take over, Stead wrote in his diary: “To be an editor! . . . To think, write and speak for thousands . . . God calls . . . and now points . . . to the only true throne in England, the Editor’s chair, and offers me the real sceptre . . . Am I not God’s chosen . . . to be his soldier against wrong?”
He was motivated by self-belief, ambition and the ability to instruct the public in language that excited and inspired them. In 1873 he married Emma Lucy Wilson, who immediately became pregnant with the first of their four children. The marriage did not deter him from relationships with other women.
He sent copies of his articles to about 200 important men, including William Gladstone, whose political opinions he shared. In 1877 Gladstone declared that reading the Northern Echo made it possible “to dispense with the necessity of reading other papers”.
Stead was introduced to Olga Novikov, goddaughter – and, probably, biological daughter – of Tsar Nicholas II. She divided her time between St Petersburg and London, where she kept a suite at Claridge’s, a salon for leading liberals, including Gladstone and Thomas Carlyle. In 1880 she got her friend Stead the deputy editorship of the Pall Mall Gazette, a London newspaper Queen Victoria was said to read every day. From then on Stead’s progress was meteoric.
In an excellent, no-holds-barred account of the Great Sensationalist’s phenomenal career, Robinson relates how Stead revealed “the seething mass of misery and vice” of London’s slums. He announced in print he had bought a 13-year-old virgin for £5. Unfortunately, the girl’s mother, encouraged by the editor of Lloyd’s Weekly Review, Thomas Catling (no ancestor of mine, as far as I know), complained to the police, and Stead spent a short time in jail as an abductor, inflaming notoriety that he welcomed. He was undoubtedly gratified that parliament immediately raised the age of consent for girls from 13 to 16.
Stead’s newspaper was the first to make a headline scream, using 24-point type – TOO LATE! (after the fall of Khartoum) – and the first to introduce a regular gossip column, Tittle-Tattle for the Tea Table. Stead helped bring about the downfall of Parnell, campaigned successfully to enlarge the Royal Navy, met the prince of Wales and described him as “the fat little bald man in red”, travelled far and wide as a self-appointed “Special Commissioner”, endorsed coitus interruptus and spiritualism. The Daily Mail’s obituary praised Stead as “an essentially great journalist”.
Patrick Skene Catling has published novels, and books for children
