Episode 41. W. T. Stead: Newspaper Prophet

SYNOPSIS

Born the son of a Congregational minister in the provincial town of Howden, near Newcastle in 1849, William Thomas (W. T.) Stead was raised in the religious and political traditions of the British Nonconformist Conscience. A developing interest in the 17C parliamentarian, Oliver Cromwell, through the work of Thomas Carlyle and other writers, led Stead to a strong sense of personal destiny,  He gained an early opportunity to work out this sense of mission when he became the Editor of the Northern Echo, a half-penny daily newspaper in the northern town of Darlington, in 1870, increasing its circulation from 10,000 to 13,000 by 1875.  

News of Stead’s crusading skills spread to London, partly through the wealthy, well-connected and enigmatic Russian, Madame Olga Novikoff, who introduced Stead to Carlyle and other members of her elite circle. In 1880 Stead moved his family to London to take up the assistant editorship of the prestigious, Pall Mall Gazette.   The move instigated thirty years of political crusading, most notably Stead’s campaign against child prostitution, making Stead the most controversial and innovative investigative journalist in Britain.  The interview also covers Stead’s growing interest in spiritualism and his untimely death on board the Titanic in 1912.      

GUEST

Stewart J. Brown is Emeritus Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Edinburgh. He has lectured widely in Europe, China, Australia, India and the USA, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He served as co-editor of the Scottish Historical Review from 1993 to 1999.  His 2019 biography of W T Stead was published in the Spiritual Lives series of Oxford University Press, under the general editorship of Professor Timothy Larsen.  

Stewart’s interview with Simon Machin was recorded online on 7 December 2023.