The Man who Made the Headlines
William Stead conceived modern print journalism in the belief that newspapers could change the world.
1871-1912
Queen Victoria 1837-1901 to King Edward VII 1901-1910
William Stead, by A. D. Lewis.
By A. D. Lewis, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.
William Thomas Stead (1849-1912), photographed sometime before 1895. He was born in Embleton, Northumberland, and began his career as a freelance journalist in 1870 with the newly-founded ‘Northern Echo’, becoming editor a year later. He inherited a campaigning spirit from his mother, a farmer’s daughter, and his father, a Congregationalist minister, which he put to work in the cause of ‘Government by journalism’ — the belief that newspapers were a means to influence policy.
Introduction
Driven by a sense of moral crusade, William Stead (1849-1912) transformed newspaper journalism from simple reporting into political activism, pioneering now familiar techniques from headlines, illustrations, interviews and editorial comment to the plain speech and lurid storylines of the tabloids.
WHEN William Stead became editor of the ‘Northern Echo’ in 1871, he was just twenty-two. The country’s youngest editor seized the opportunity afforded by Darlington’s railway connections to expand the newspaper’s circulation to a national reach, and scorning impartiality, helped William Gladstone’s Liberal Party to power in 1880. That year, he was headhunted for the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ in London, and continued to revolutionise print journalism with maps and diagrams, subheadings, and editorial comment carefully moulding public opinion.
Indeed, Stead began making the news. Shortly after the Gazette featured General Gordon in 1884 — the first newspaper interview — Gladstone reluctantly sent Gordon to quell the troubled Sudan.* When he died in the siege of Khartoum, Stead whipped up such public outrage that Gladstone resigned. In 1885, the Criminal Law Amendment Act raised the age of consent to sixteen after Stead posed as a buyer for thirteen-year-old prostitute Eliza Armstrong,* and reported the whole sordid transaction. Stead was briefly jailed — but saw the law nicknamed ‘Stead’s Act’.
General Charles Gordon (1833-1885). See The Siege of Khartoum. Gladstone and Gordon differed sharply over the threat posed by Muhammad Ahmad, the self-proclaimed ‘Mahdi’, with Gladstone inclined to regard him as a freedom-fighter, and Gordon to regard him as an extremist. He may, of course, have been both.
Eliza was sold into prostitution by her father, a chimney sweep. Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s play ‘Pygmalion’ (later the musical ‘My Fair Lady’) was named after her.
