Tabloid journalism begins with W.T. Stead, who as editor of the Pall Mall Gazette in the 1880s brought news and scandal to the newly literate masses, transforming public culture and politics with it.
The son of a Congregationalist preacher, Stead grew up in a strict religious household in Northumberland, in a home where theatre was “the Devil’s chapel” and novels “the Devil’s Bible”. Taught to read by his father, the newsman’s nonconformism would inform his campaigns after he moved from the Northern Echo to the Gazette in London.
Stead was most of all famous for the first great newspaper investigation, in 1885, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon“, on the scandal of child prostitution. Stead had bought a girl called Eliza for £5, on the premise that she was to be taken to a brothel on the continent, using quite dubious methods that got him sent to jail for three months.
Despite this, the story succeeded – a national scandal which led to a change in the law, the age of consent raised from 13 to 16. The idea of English girls being trafficked into sex outraged and horrified the public, Stead’s story imprinted itself deeply into the public psyche, to the extent of influencing George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion — thus, Eliza Doolittle.
On the continent it helped to inspire a genre of vaguely pornographic literature about the sexual perversion rife in England, a fantasy that belied the fact that late Victorian London was not a nest of vice, relatively speaking. Most measures of squalor and child abuse had declined in the 19th century and a teenage girl by the end of the century was relatively safe, compared to a predecessor in almost any era; public moral outrage offered protection, even if it could be unforgiving for those same girls who transgressed.
Stead would become the most famous journalist of the era, so renowned that in 1912 he was invited to New York by the US President to attend a conference — and so booked a ticket on a famously unsinkable new liner. He was last seen helping women and children trying to get on to lifeboats, and, true to the chapel ethos of his parents, gave away his lifejacket. He was among the 1,500 who lost their lives on the Titanic.
Ed West, “Our Modern Babylon”, Wrong Side of History, 2023-02-11.
May 14, 2023
QotD: The original tabloid journalist
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