Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Stead, William Thomas
STEAD, WILLIAM THOMAS (1849–1912), journalist and author, the son of the Rev. William Stead, Congregational minister, of Yorkshire farmer stock, by his wife, Isabella, daughter of John Jobson, also a Yorkshire farmer, was born at the Manse, Embleton, Northumberland, 5 July 1849. In 1850 the family settled at Howden-on-Tyne. Taught only by his father until he was twelve, Stead went in 1861 to Silcoates School, near Wakefield. In 1863 he was apprenticed office-boy in a merchant's counting-house on Quayside, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. In February 1870 he began to contribute articles to the Northern Echo, a liberal daily paper which had just been founded at Darlington, and his contributions were held to be so remarkable that in April 1871 he was appointed editor, although he had never been inside a newspaper office. In 1873 he married Emma Lucy, daughter of Henry Wilson of Howden-on-Tyne, by whom he had six children. During the years 1876–1879 he won high praise for the Northern Echo by his ardent support of Mr. Gladstone in the agitation against Turkey over the Bulgarian atrocities.
In September 1880 Stead moved to London in order to act as assistant-editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, which had recently become a liberal organ under the control of Mr. John (later Viscount) Morley. Morley and Stead worked together excellently until August 1883, when Stead became editor, Morley having been elected M.P. for Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Stead's reputation reached its zenith during the following seven years, when with Mr. Alfred (afterwards Viscount) Milner as his very active and sympathetic lieutenant, he inaugurated the ‘new journalism’, as Matthew Arnold called it. The Pall Mall, until then a sedate chronicle and review of the day's events, suddenly became the initiator of all kinds of new programmes and movements, political and social, besides astonishing people by its dash and unconventionality. In January 1884 General Gordon, who had been on the point of resigning from the army, was dispatched on his fateful mission o Khartoum, as the direct result of an ‘interview’ with him published in the Pall Mall and reinforced by a leading article in which Stead urged this step upon the government. Towards the end of 1884 Stead's articles in the Pall Mall, headed The Truth about the Navy, again forced the government's hand, and compelled the Earl of Northbrook [q.v.], then first lord of the Admiralty, to ask for a supplementary grant of three and a half millions in order to strengthen the naval defences. In July 1885 Stead achieved wide notoriety by an exposure of criminal vice in England under the heading The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon. As the almost immediate outcome of these revelations a Criminal Law Amendment Act, raising the age of consent to sixteen years, was passed by parliament after years of obstruction and opposition. A lack of precaution in securing the evidence requisite for his purpose entailed on Stead a sentence of three months' imprisonment. ‘I cannot find words to tell you how I honour and reverence you for what you have done for the weakest and most helpless among women’, wrote Mrs. Millicent Garrett Fawcett to him while he was in Holloway jail; ‘I always felt that by some legal quibble you might be tripped up, as it were: but this is as nothing; your work will stand.’ Mrs. Fawcett's view was shared by Cardinal Manning, Lord Shaftesbury, Dr. Temple, then bishop of London, and most of the social reformers, but Stead's action was violently condemned by the London daily press and by the British public in general, and he was reviled as a dealer in pornography.
After a great variety of other noteworthy exploits, Stead abandoned daily journalism and started his well-known Review of Reviews in January 1890; American and Australian editions of it were founded in 1891 and 1892 respectively. From 1893 to 1897, having become keenly interested in psychical matters, he edited also Borderland, a periodical devoted to this subject. In Letters from Julia (1897) he published a selection from communications which he said he wrote quite involuntarily with his own hand at the dictation of the departed spirit of a young American lady, Julia Ames, whom he had met not long before her death in 1891. ‘If I am remembered a hundred years hence’, he said once to a friend, ‘it will be as Julia's amanuensis.’ Throughout the 'nineties and down to the time of his death Stead's spiritualistic beliefs remained unshaken, although they subjected him to much ridicule, alienated friends, and weakened his influence and prestige. Despite this, he was perhaps the most powerful, as he was certainly the most resolute, supporter of the peace movement set on foot in 1898 by the rescript of the Tsar Nicholas II.
Although he had hitherto been one of the strongest champions in England of Cecil Rhodes, Stead was the most uncompromising of all the opponents of the war in South Africa (1899–1902), and thereby he accentuated his unpopularity. A morning journal which he founded in January 1904, the Daily Paper, failed completely, lasting only five weeks. He persisted in his efforts to keep up the strength of the British navy, with the watchword, ‘Two keels to one’; but he devoted the best of his energies throughout the remainder of his career to the preaching of peace through arbitration. Bound for New York on the maiden voyage of the White Star liner Titanic, in order to take part in a peace congress, he lost his life in the tragic disaster of 15 April 1912, when the great ship struck an iceberg and sank with the loss of 1,500 lives. When last seen by survivors Stead was assisting women and children to make their escape from the vessel.
The younger generation learned with surprise from the obituary notices what a potent figure Stead once had been. Lord Esher declared roundly that ‘no events happened to the country since the year 1880’ which had ‘not been influenced by the personality of Mr. Stead’. Mr. H. W. Massingham maintained that no pen in England had ‘wielded an ascendancy comparable with Stead's’ from the time of the Bulgarian atrocities down to the South African War. To Stead's goodness and unselfishness, courage and generosity there were tributes innumerable.
[Estelle W. Stead, My Father. Personal and Spiritual Reminiscences, 1912; Edith Harper, Stead, the Man, 1914; Frederic Whyte, The Life of W. T. Stead, 1925; Review of Reviews, January–June 1912.]