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William Thomas Stead was an English newspaper editor who, as a pioneer of investigative journalism, became a controversial figure of the Victorian era. Stead published a series of hugely influential campaigns whilst editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, including his 1885 series of articles, The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon. These were written in support of a bill, later dubbed the "Stead Act", tha…
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culture · English newspaper editor (1849–1912) · writer · journalist · Esperantist · journal editor · opinion journalist · peace movement · also William Thomas Stead, W. T. Stead, William Stead, William T. Stead, Stead
Born 5 July 1849 · Died 15 April 1912 · Q288301
19 published statements · 0 followers
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Julius and Agnes Zancig confessed that their mind reading act was a trick and published the secret code and all the details of the trick method they had used under the title of Our Secrets
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Died 1912-04-15.
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Established Julia's Bureau, where inquirers could obtain information about the spirit world from a group of resident mediums
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Stead travelled to Russia to try to discourage violence during the Russian Revolution, but his tour and talks were unsuccessful
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Launched The Daily Paper, which folded after six weeks, and Stead lost £35,000 of his own money (almost £3 million in 2012 value) and suffered a nervous breakdown
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Had been published on Pietrus Botha in a weekly magazine with a portrait and personal details
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Stead launched the series Books for the Bairns, whose titles included fairy tales and works of classical literature
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Stead issued affordable reprints of classic literature under such titles as The Penny Poets and Penny Popular Novels, in which he "boil[ed] down the great novels of the world so that they might fit into, say, sixty-four
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Founded a spiritualist quarterly, Borderland, in which he gave full play to his interest in psychical research
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Stead published a story titled "From the Old World to the New", in which a vessel, the Majestic, rescues survivors of another ship that collided with an iceberg
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In order to found the Review of Reviews (1890) with Sir George Newnes
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Began a campaign against Sir Charles Dilke, 2nd Baronet, over his nominal exoneration in the Crawford scandal
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In the wake of Josephine Butler's fight for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, Stead entered upon a crusade against child prostitution by publishing a series of four articles entitled 'The Maiden Tribute of Mode
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Stead pressured the government to send his friend General Gordon to the Sudan to protect British interests in Khartoum
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And he helped transform a traditionally conservative newspaper "written by gentlemen for gentlemen"
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Stead joined a campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Act, befriending the feminist Josephine Butler
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For his coverage of the Bulgarian atrocities agitation
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Married his childhood sweetheart, Emma Lucy Wilson, the daughter of a local merchant and shipowner; they would eventually have six children
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Born 1849-07-05.
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