← After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal
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- [00:00]
A
Hello everyone, it's us, your hosts, Maddy Pelling and Anthony Delaney.
- [00:04]
B
But before we begin the show, we want to ask for a few seconds.
- [00:08]
A
Of your time if you're enjoying After Dark. And we love you if you are, we would love you just a little bit more if you could vote for us in the Listener's Choice category at the British Podcast Awards.
- [00:18]
B
So go to the Show Notes now, click the link and just then search for After Dark. Fill in your name and your email and don't forget to confirm they will send you an email you need to confirm the the whole process probably takes about 30 seconds.
- [00:31]
A
If you've already voted, we are so, so grateful if you haven't stop what you are doing right now. Vote for us before you enjoy this show.
- [00:40]
C
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- [03:07]
A
Hi there, it's Maddie. I'm just jumping in to let you know that this episode contains some sensitive content. So if that's not for you, check out our back catalogue of amazing episodes. And if you're sticking with us, enjoy.
- [03:19]
B
Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Anthony.
- [03:21]
A
And I'm Maddie.
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B
And today's episode we are talking about a scandal that shook Victorian England and the man who uncovered it.
- [03:34]
A
1885 Britain. Sitting in an armchair by a fire in a grand townhouse is a Victorian gentleman reading his paper of choice, the reliable Pall Mal Gazette. At least it was reliable until its new editor, W.T. stead, arrived. Our gentleman furrows his brow as he reads a warning that Stead has added to today's edition. It reads, we say quite frankly today, that all those who are squeamish and all those who are prudish, and all those who prefer to live in a fool's paradise of imaginary innocence and purity, selfishly oblivious to the horrible realities which torment those lives of which are passed in a London inferno. Will do well to not read the Pall Mall Gazette of Monday and the three following days. Our gentleman snorts. What utter bosh. By the time Monday comes around, he's forgotten all about the warning. He settles down again to read his paper, but this time he does not lift his head from the page beside him. The fire dies down and the evening outside darkens into night. Even by today's standard, the story he reads is shocking. Young working class girls being sold into the sex trade, often against their will, often unknowingly written, of course, in the most lurid, sensational style. All across the country, gentlemen sitting by their fires are sucked deeper and deeper into WT Stead's ever more graphic story of trafficked women and the city that swallows them up. When the next day dawns, there will be outrage, but it will be twofold. Yes, there will be cries that something must be done to stop this abuse, but there will be even louder bellows that this filth should not be appearing in a newspaper at all and that WT Stead has gone too far.
- [06:07]
B
Now, if you have been listening to After Dark for quite some time, then you'll know that we often talk about the role of the media in our episodes and how they come to inform an awful lot of the information that we know 200 years later, 150 years later. But that is so key to some of the crimes that we discuss, particularly relating to the 19th century. So today we are taking the bull by the horns and we are looking at the life of one of, if not the, I suppose, most sensational, most scandalous journalists of the 19th century who shaped some of those headlines. And that, of course, is W.T. stead. Now, you may not have heard of him, but he uncovered scandals that outraged Victorian Britain. He believed in spiritualism and he spoke with ghosts, which, of course, haven't we all. And to round it all off, he died, and this is unbelievable, he died on Titanic. So he is basically After Dark in one person. Now, to help us navigate the life of this remarkable man, we have Dr. Bob Nicholson, who is a historian at Edge Hill University and he specializes in the history of Victorian press and crime. And he is the presenter of the BBC podcast Killing Victoria. I have a caveat before we begin, however. Next week we are going to talk to Bob about Jack the Ripper and how the media invented the image of Jack that we know today. So I want you to hold that topic in your mind as we go through, through this story, keep hold of the information and take that into next week's episode as well. But before we do, let's get on with what's ahead of us today. And that is W.T. stead. Bob, thank you so much for coming to After Dark.
- [07:38]
F
Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here and to talk about who is, I think, my favourite Victorian.
- [07:43]
A
Wow. I mean, that's top of a long list, surely. That's quite impressive, Bob, we're so excited to have you. I was saying before we started that Killing Victoria is one of my favourite ever podcasts and if After Dark listeners haven't heard it, go and listen to it on BBC Sounds. It's so brilliant. It really is.
- [07:57]
F
Thank you very much.
- [07:58]
A
You're very welcome. Honestly, I've spent many an hour listening and relistening to it. Now, let's begin. Before we get into wt, stud himself with a sense of the media landscape in Victorian Britain in the 1880s. Of course, it's a decade that, as Anthony said, is famous for Jack the Ripper, but we're setting our story today a little bit before that. So give us a sense, Bob, of how print media works in this moment.
- [08:23]
F
Yeah, this is a really fascinating moment in the history of journalism and you could say a real turning point in the history of journalism. So if we track back several decades earlier, we would be living in a world where newspapers were chiefly bought by the middle classes, by the elites, principally because they were really expensive. To buy a copy of the Times in, say, the 1840s, 1850s might cost five or six pence, which doesn't sound like much, but that's about 20 quid in modern terms. So imagine a world where your daily paper cost £20. Well, by the 1880s, that's all begun to change. Taxes that the government were putting on newspapers have been repealed, literacy rates are rising, and we're now living in a world where the vast majority of people firstly, can read. They've got the skills to do it and they've got the money to be able to afford newspapers. You're now buying newspapers for a penny, for relatively small amounts of money. And that means that by the time we get into the 1880s, newspapers are no longer selling maybe 40, 50,000 copies a time, they're selling 400,000 copies a time. It's a massive step change in the number of people read newspapers. And as a result, newspapers have to change now that they're targeting a different kind of reader. You're no longer able just to provide dry parliamentary news, the sort of prices at the Stock Exchange that a man of business might be interested in. Now you're competing with each other to try and win over a mass readership. And to do that, you've got to catch their attention.
- [09:44]
B
And one of the people who tries bloody hard and succeeds quite well in capturing that attention is our man today, which is W.T. stead. Now, it's a name I've heard of in the periphery of different things. I haven't heard much about him specifically, but before I ask you to give us the expert insight, I just want to alert listeners to this picture that I have in front of me, and we'll share this on social, so people know what we're talking about. I'm hesitant to say this, Bob, because you said he's potentially one of your favorite Victorians and maybe you can convince me, but by looking at this picture, I think him and I would not have got on very well because there is an element of an amount of bravado in this picture. So, okay, let me describe it for you. It is a Victorian photograph in black and white. At the center of an image is a Victorian man who is looking directly at the camera. His hairline's receding slightly. He has a very full beard. He is sitting on a chair, but he is slouched on a chair and his legs are raised on what looks like the end of a bed maybe or something, or the end of some kind of a furniture thing. Anyway, his legs are up in the air. Like his legs are almost on par with his head. That's how high his legs are raised. And he is directly looking at us, almost confrontational, as if to say, go on podcast in 2025. Take the piss out of me if you think you're big enough to do it. He's an arresting man. He is not somebody that you could just pass by without taking notice of. And maybe that's part of the intrigue and the mystique. But Bob, tell us who this man, this enigma is.
- [11:17]
F
Well, you've done a wonderful job of capturing his character here. And I guess one of the first things to say is that he is a man who divides opinion in quite extreme ways.
- [11:24]
B
I feel okay then.
- [11:25]
F
I feel okay then when I say he's my favourite Victorian, I will say that there are some things he does that I think are de controversial and I'd probably say probably beyond the pale. But I say favourite because he is deeply fascinating.
- [11:35]
B
Sure, sure, sure.
- [11:36]
F
Actually, you're absolutely right. That confrontational look. I mean, this is a man who, if you were to look at him, you would actually say he's a nolly. He dressed incredibly scruffily, he's got a big scruffy beard. When he moved in the kind of circles of high society that an editor is supposed to move in, he was an outcast, an oddball. People did not really believe he belonged there. I mean, there are stories of him turning up at friends dinner parties and been turned away at the door because he just looks too scruffy. So this is a guy who dies, really didn't play by the rules. He's like a kind of classic stereotype of a journalist that you get in a movie, kind of rule breaking maverick character. But that is W.T. stead, he is someone who was determined to sort of kick against the system, against established rules, established society, sometimes in ways, I think that were incredibly brave and virtuous, in other ways that were deeply irritating. So I think your read on him is absolutely right and we'll see when we start looking at some examples of the things he got up to, just why he was so controversial.
- [12:29]
A
Yeah, we will get into them because I think even from reading the notes for this episode, I'm hesitant to decide which side of this debate that I fall on. But yeah, I think you're right, Bob. He's a fascinating person who does some questionable things. What's his background? Because you mentioned that he's something of an outsider and I'm just thinking about how the institution of journalism in Britain works in this moment and the kinds of people who become journalists. And he's not a Londoner, is he? So how does he get into this world?
- [12:57]
F
Yeah, his background is really quite unusual. So he's born in 1849 up in Northumberland, so far away, away from kind of the metropolitan centre of British culture. And he's the son of a non conformist minister and that religious background is quite important for the work that he goes on to do. He's driven in many ways by his religious faith, so he's certainly not born into the world of literature and journalism. Though he's very well educated by his father when he's a kid, but he initially just becomes a clerk, the kind of job that a normal middle class guy might do up in Newcastle, and he starts wr letters and editorials for a local newspaper called the Northern Echo. Now, at this point, not a journalist, he's just basically a guy who thinks, I've got an opinion, I want to send it into my local paper. But they're so impressed with it and I guess so pleased that he was working for free that they keep encouraging him to send stuff into the paper. And so he keeps doing it until a couple of Years later in 1871, when he's in his early 20s, extraordinarily, he is asked to become the paper's editor. And this is without ever having set foot in a newspaper office. He becomes the youngest editor in the country. So already quite an extraordinary beginning. And he hasn't paid his dues in the way that a journalist is maybe supposed to. Maybe you start off at the bottom rung, reporting on the courts or, you know, just running errands around the office and you're supposed to kind of work your way up, pay your dues and eventually get into this position of power. He leapfrogs all of that and is suddenly in charge of what was initially a fairly small scale provincial newspaper. But under his editorship, it becomes incredibly influential.
- [14:27]
B
And let's think for a second about that stereotypical idea of the newspaperman, the journalist, as you're painting this picture, which is incredibly evocative actually, because it's compelling in itself, just his backstory and where he ends up is compelling. You start to wonder to what extent he has influenced the stereotypical idea of what a journalist is, what a newspaperman is. It's such a strong characterization that he is straight away compelling. But the other thing that was really shifting the sands in London at this time was the actual news that he was reporting on. And we don't have time to go into all of the big stories that he covered because there are a lot of them. But I want to hone in on one specific story. And this is a sex trafficking scandal that was happening in London at the time. And we know that Stead had said that he, or apparently had said his mission was to, and I'm quoting here, attack the devil. And I would imagine that he saw covering this story as an opportunity to do that.
- [15:25]
F
Yeah, absolutely. So by this point, he's moved to London and has been hired by a paper called the Pall Mall Gazette, which at the time was quite a respectable evening newspaper. In a way, he's an odd fit because he'd made his name as a bit of a rabble rouser in this newspaper up in Darlington. I mean, even then he was kind of whipping up public outrage at things. He was writing to the government and to foreign heads of state to try and get them involved. So this is very much a guy who was a campaigner who wanted to change the world. And as you say, his mission in life was, as he put it, to attack the devil, to root out evil, injustice and wrongdoing. He much see himself as a kind of white knight, you know, riding into battle, you know, on a virtuous crusade. And when he arrives at the Palmar Gazette, takes a few years for him to sort of find his feet. He starts as an assistant editor, but then he's put in charge of the paper. And it's then, as you say, that he gets involved in the story that would really make his career. And it's a hugely important story in the history of journalism. I mean, if the profession of journalism was to put out like a greatest hits album, this would be on it, along with Watergate. And things like that. It is, you know, one of the great stories in the history of journalism, and you're absolutely right. Its story is an expose of child abuse and of sex trafficking in Victorian London, which was an incredibly difficult subject to write about in a newspaper, not just because it is, as we would now think of it, a horrifying thing to read about, but because this was not the kind of thing a respectable newspaper was ever supposed to talk about. Instead, did it in a way that was, let's just say, not exactly subtle.
- [16:58]
A
Yeah, let's talk a little bit about his style, because on the one hand, we have him, as you say, sort of crusader for morality in Victorian Britain, and he uncovers, or is involved in uncovering this terrible industry. And it's incredibly important. It would be an incredibly important story now, and it certainly was then. But this is where I sort of start to have a problem with him, the sensationalism that he involves. So the title of the first story, I guess, that he breaks on this is Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon. I actually have a little bit of an extract for it and I'm going to read a little bit for listeners, because if you handed this in to an editor now, they would. It'd be covered in red pen when it came back to you. I mean, it's outrageous. So he says, as in the labyrinth of Crete, there was a monster known as the Minotaur who devoured the maidens who were cast into the mazes of that evil place. Take a breath. So in London, there is at least one monster who may be said to be an absolute incarnation of brutal lust. The poor maligned brute of the Cretan labyrinth, but devoured his tale of seven maids and as many boys every ninth year here in London, moving about, clad as respectably in broadcloth and fine linen as any bishop, with no foul shape or semblance of brute beast to mark him off from the rest of his fellows is doctor, and the name is obscured. Now retired from his profession and free to devote his fortune and his leisure to the ruin of maid. I mean, it's pretty full on. It's pretty sensationalized. I must be hard, Bob, working on this material and spending a lot of time wading through this. What do you think of this style? What did readers make of it in the day?
- [18:35]
F
Yeah, it's true. The details in this are incredibly graphic. What he's aiming to do here is expose this trade in young women who are being supposedly, he alleges, bought and then raped by men, in many cases rich men. So that's his kind of mission here. Now, the way he chooses to do it, as you've seen in that extract, is not through sort of speaking in sort of slightly abstract terms about it or in a coy way. He attracts it very directly, and in some sections, even more directly than that, talking about the precise things that happened to women in this trade, the kind of rooms where they were kept, the kind of doctors who were brought in to certify their virginity, and all sorts of horrible things like that, he tackles it head on. Now, what Stead would say is that sensationalism is justified if it's in a good cause. I suppose so he would say, I'm not doing this just to print lurid details and try and get readers. He was trying, he would claim, to change the world to right or wrong. And the metaphor, he would say, is that if a man's house is burning down, you're justified at kind of roaring in his ear, for God's sake, man, your house is burning down. You must do something. And that was his attitude towards journalism. He believed that. That he could use the techniques of sensationalism, and he was a real expert at it, to whip up public support, to generate the steam of public opinion that then would pressure the government to do something. And specifically, the thing he wanted them to do was raise the age of consent, which was at this time just 13. So he wanted it to be raised up to 16. And he was campaigning for that. So he had an end in mind. Other journalists might have found ways to do it more subtly. They might have written a kind of strongly worded editorial. But what he does, I mean, the extract you've read out there is a tiny fraction of this story, because he doesn't just write one article about it, he devotes the entire paper to it for pretty much a week. Thousands, tens of thousands of words of this investigation going into extraordinary depth to reveal all of this. And his belief was that this was the only way he was going to force change, that people have been talking about this law to raise the age of consent for years. It had languished in Parliament. Nobody had done anything. So, you know, his metaphor, I guess London was on fire, somebody needed to do something. And he believed in the power of journalism to do that. That was his kind of. His driving belief, was that it was journalism that could achieve this and nothing else.
- [20:50]
B
And of course, not just journalism, but his form of journalism and journalism by him. Right? And this idea that he is at the center of this story to a certain extent, or that he is driving this. It's just so interesting listening to you speak there, Bob, because you can't help but feel that although the agenda quite warranted, it feels personal to him, and therefore it does become personal, because we know that he starts to immerse himself in this world in order to bring it down, it has to be said. But his methods now would potentially be quite questionable. And one of the most questionable things he does, and you've alluded to this, I suppose, is that he, in order to understand the mechanism of this world and how it's happening and all those links that you've talked about, the doctors and the gentlemen that they're being provided to, he buys himself a young girl and he ends up in jail because of this. So he really is living on the coal face of this story. So tell us a little bit about that episode.
- [21:47]
F
Yeah, this is where I think, when we think about, are his methods justified? You know, we're no longer just thinking, oh, is he saying a bit too much for a polite newspaper? This is where I think we start to sort of wonder whether he crossed the line. So, firstly, he arranges this, what he terms a secret commission to be this almost kind of scientific investigators of this dark underworld of London. And he brings together members of the Salvation army who we've been working with, including retired sex workers and other people who've been part of that trade, to try and uncover it. So he interviews a lot of people and at one point, as the kind of cherry on top of the story, the thing that he knows is going to push this over the edge. You're right. He arranges to prove that all of this possible, that there is, to use his phrase, a trade in virgins in the city. And so he hires a former brothel keeper who's now reformed and has kind of of gone straight to try and procure a girl in the way that somebody might do if they were legitimately, you know, wishing to assault her. They do. They manage to find a family who are willing to part with their daughter. She's 13 years old. Now. It later transpires that they weren't told directly that she was going to be abused. It was just sort of hinted at. They were told she's going to a good situation, to a new job, and Obra, you know, were happy for her to go. Then to prove that all of this is, I suppose, that this world is real. That girl is then taken to a doctor who certifies that she is a virgin, and the doctor provides them with chloroform. Which would typically be used during the assault of women, of girls. The girl is then taken to an actual brothel and put into a sort of private room there, which point Stead arrives and I should say at this point, he has been visiting and investigating brothels undercover for some time, you know, posing as a customer. We don't know whether he actually used them and actually paid for sex, but he was certainly in them a lot, put a lot of strain on his marriage. Anyway, he's waiting in a room next door while the girl Eliza was in there. And he goes in and finds her there. She refused the chloroform and at that point, obviously he does not rape her, but he has done everything up to that point. You know, she's been taken away from her family, thinking she's going to a new job, a new life. She's been taken to a doctor who subjected her to a really invasive examination and then taken to a brothel, which must have been an incredibly scary place to go. And this all happened. He did all of this. Now, I think his version of the story, he wasn't involved in all of it. You know, he kind of had assistants doing it for him, but he was certainly directing it all. Now, on the one hand, it's an extraordinary thing to sort of be able to prove that this trait exists and that he was able to go through all of those steps. It certainly addressed a problem he had, which was that how would he prove any of this was real, that it wasn't just rumour, that it wasn't just conjecture. People were very happy to sweep this under the road. So this is what he did. But certainly for me, that's the point where he ethically crosses. He doesn't just like tiptoe over a line, he leaps over it with both feet. And I think he's absolutely on the wrong side of it. And as you say, it comes back to bite him. Because this story is phenomenally successful, gets an enormous public response. It does lead to the passing of a law that raises the age of consent. But afterwards he is tried for abducting the child along with the assistants he worked with and sent to prison.
- [25:14]
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- [28:14]
A
It'S so hard, isn't it, to kind of work out where to position it him in this history of journalism then, and to work out how we should think of him. Because when I read the extract from the original article, I had such a sense of, you know, the sort of the ridiculous flamboyance of the language. But you spoke so convincingly there, Bob, about sort of the ends justifying the means. And okay, it's written in a sensational way, but it garners all this attention and it does lead to a change in the law. But as you say, I mean, this, this feels ethically not just dubious. This is kind of on the wrong side of that line. Is he lauded then, in the years after this, in his own career, as a hero, someone who's made positive change? Or is he seen as someone who is living within this morally grey area?
- [28:59]
F
I mean, certainly in the immediate aftermath there are two camps. There are people who are incredibly passionately supportive of him, see him as this heroic, almost Christ like figure who is kind of here to sort of right the wrongs of the city. You know, there are demonstrations, there are people donating to his legal fund. He has a very strong fan base. But there are also a lot of people who think that he's gone too far, that he's debased the profession, that it is too much. I think as the sort of heat of that story cools and as time passes, I mean, I should say he's involved in maybe a dozen other massive exposes and stories that are also quite sort of well known at the time, after this kind of period of the 1880s when he's really at the height of his powers, probably the most famous journalist in the world, incredibly influential. Yeah, his sort of reputation does change a bit. And I think certainly we'll talk a bit about his legacy later. But there are monuments to him in Central Park. There's one in London. I mean, this is a guy who makes a mark and certainly had lots of people who really admired him as a man of principle. But certainly at the time he was deeply, deeply divisive. Some people hated him, including many journalists.
- [30:02]
B
It is noteworthy, I think, that Stead himself is willing to engage in the trafficking of women and girls to prove his own point and to prove himself right, to show that this is going on, he's willing to sacrifice this young girl. It does beg the question, I think, how different he was because he's showing, whether he means to or not, that young girls and women are part of this bartering system in Victorian society, or can be, where as long as the men's ends are met in whatever way that looks like journalism, sexually, whatever it is, then the barter of women, the exchange of women and girls, is justified. I think that might surprise people to hear you say that, Bob, that at the time, people thought this had gone too far, that this was slightly disgusting, because we do have this thing with Victorian society that it's wholly misogynistic, which of course it is to a huge, huge, huge extent, almost exclusively. But even for that society, this, for some people, had gone too far and had just essentially used women and girls in the same way that the sex trade was using them or the illicit sex trade was using them. So I think that's a really interesting point to bear in mind. I just want to come in here for a second and we'll come back to him more directly in a minute. But when we are talking next week about Jack the Ripper, and I just want to think ahead a little bit about the idea of sensationalism and questionable journalism, just give us a teaser, Bob, of whether or not we're going to see that next week as well. Just plant the seeds for us now in terms of what we're seeing here.
- [31:41]
F
Yeah, we certainly are. I think Stead was pushing at the limit of what was acceptable and doing it, in his view, in service of a good cause. But in many ways, his journalism and others liking helped to open the door for what would come later. So this is 1885 we're talking about here, for his expose of child abuse. Jack The Ripper is 1888. So through years later, and we'll see in our chat next week, that it's really incredibly graphic and sensational journalism that comes out in the coverage of the Ripper murders, and for which really there could be no equivalent moral justification of, oh, we're doing this because we want to bring about positive change. They were doing it because they wanted to sell papers, pure and simple. Instead, though he's a journalist, he wants to sell papers. I don't think that was ever his main motivation. He was a terrible businessman, really. And he ended up, I should say, as a result of the maiden tribute, ended up losing a lot of advertisers, a lot of readers after that initial surge in sales. Those initial copies of the maiden tribute, his expose of child abuse, were selling over 100,000 copies, maybe 10 times what the Palmar Gazette would normally sell. They were running out of paper. They were having to borrow a paper from newspapers next door. There were knockoff versions of it being sold on the streets. I mean, this was hugely successful, but it was for the wrong audience in many ways. So, yeah, he wasn't, I don't think doing it to make money, maybe for his own ego. I think you're right about that. But, yeah, certainly he helped to pioneer, I guess, what we would term tabloid journalism, which is very much in evidence a few years later in the Ripper murders.
- [33:07]
A
Yes, it's interesting that you say the Pall Mall Gazette is kind of the wrong readership in a lot of ways. And I wonder, we described at the beginning sort of respectable gentlemen sitting by the fire reading this. And I wonder if there was a sort of fatigue, I suppose, with these readers who wanted to imagine themselves in their own comfortable world and maybe not look to the peripheries and the shadows of the society they lived in. And to be constantly bombarded by this very, I mean, righteous, but also very moralistic and sensational journalism may have. Yeah, sort of put them off, I suppose. But talk to me then, Barr, because this next part of the story is such a strange twist, and I'm really not sure how to reconcile it. But talk to me about what happens to Stead later in life and in particular his move towards spiritualism. We've encountered on this podcast before for figures like Arthur Conan Doyle who also turn to this movement. But Stead, as someone who seems so invested his life's work is exposing all kinds of conspiracy and wrongdoing. This seems unlikely to me. So what goes on here?
- [34:13]
F
It is a really strange twist in a life story that has sort of twist after twist after twist. This is the one that I wouldn't have seen coming, having read his journalism in the 1880s. So I mentioned earlier, when I was talking about his earlier life, that he was a deeply religious man. And I think that's important to bear in mind that that was definitely motivating a lot of his work. But he was very open minded as well, not religious in a kind of closed minded, closed down sort of way. He was open to discussing things, open to new ideas. And if you think about really what spiritualism is for people who aren't familiar with it, really, it's an attempt to reconcile religious faith with modern science. It's this belief that there is an afterlife, a spirit world, and that through science we might be able to measure it, discover it, interact with it. And it seems to us kind of slightly kooky. Right. You know, the idea that you might be able to speak to ghosts, but you've got to think that this is a time when people were encountering new technologies, things like telephones, telegraphs, that would have seemed like magic mere decades before. The idea that you could send a message around the world through electrical impulses. Well, if you are somebody who believes in a space spirit and you have a religious faith, why wouldn't you think, well, maybe finally science is going to uncover that spirit world? And Stead believed in that really passionately. So we know that he went to seances quite a lot in the 1880s when he was still editor of the Palmar Gazette, but was sort of interested in them. And there are some stories of them sort of flattering him, saying, you will be a great communicator with the spirit world. And he definitely has an ego, and I think was very open to being flattered into those kind of roles. But he gets very drawn into that world, I think, initially out of a sense of genuine scientific curiosity. So after he leaves the Palmar Gazette, and he leaves largely because he falls out with the owners and the readership. Too much sensation, too much scandal, they fatigue a bit. And he sets up his own paper called the Review of Reviews, which is a kind of like a paper that sort of takes all the news from all around the world and all sorts of other magazines and sort of publishes a best off of them. It's a kind of compilation of news, still quite successful. But as a Christmas edition of that, he publishes a special edition called Real Ghost Stories, which are all kind of stories purporting to be real life examples of ghost stories. And it's a real hit. So he gets sort of drawn into that world and he speaks to people who are part of that world of spiritualism, becomes increasingly interested in it. But this is where I guess he sort of goes from being an interested observer to being slightly sort of off the deep end with it. He starts to believe that he can receive telepathic messages, that people can communicate with him through automatic writing. And it was this idea that you could sit there with a pen and a blank piece of paper and enter a kind of fugue state, a kind of almost like a dream, and just start automatically writing. And that words would start appearing on the page, and those words would have been somehow telepathically communicated to you by somebody else. And he believes that he can telepathically communicate with one of his editors. And, you know, wherever she might be, he sort of reaches out to her and sort of receives this message. And obviously, I should say, personal level, I don't believe this is true. I don't think he was actually receiving messages telepathically or from the spirit world, but he, I'm convinced, authentically believed he was. So while there are some people involved in spiritualism who are charlatans, who are con artists running their seances, knocking underneath the table, all that stuff, Stead is a true believer in the strongest sense of the world, and he stakes his public reputation on it. And in particular, he starts to believe that he's receiving messages from beyond the grave from an American journalist, a woman named Julia who had died a couple of years earlier. He'd met her maybe once, become a bit infatuated with her, I think, and he starts to believe that he is receiving messages from her and that therefore, you know, he can interview her about the life beyond. He starts to, through her, interview famous dead celebrities who sort of give him interviews and, surprise, surprise, seem to agree with what Stead thinks and write it very much in his style, but he really goes in on this. He starts publishing a quarterly magazine called Borderland, which is all about this kind of psychical research. And I think this, probably more than anything else, is what starts to weaken his reputation with the public, who do start to think, wow, you know, he's always been a bit of an enthusiast, always sort of willing to kind of go all in on a topic. But with this, yeah, it's pushing it a bit. But, yeah, I genuinely think for him, he thought that this was real. And, I mean, some of it, I think, was motivated by the death of his son, who dies quite young, and he starts to believe that he can receive messages from his son, and he gets really drawn into that community, you know, like Conan Doyle, who you mentioned before, who was a true believer, a lot of this stuff as well. So there we have, you know, two men of science, two men of reason, and very, very bright guys who were absolutely convinced that this stuff was real. And, yeah, for the rest of his life, it's a major part of his identity and his daughter's identity, you know, she really goes all in on it, too, and believes that she's communicating with Stead after his death.
- [38:46]
A
I feel like I need to sit down after that. That was a wild ride. I think now Stead would be like a celebrity that gets a podcast and then everyone listens to it and goes, oh, that's the real him. Oh, okay. Oh, wow, Right. Let's avoid that. I was kind of so interested, Bob, what you're saying about how he initially starts that kind of that compilation newspaper and that kind of curating other stories and like again, as you and Anthony have both said in this, like, his ego comes out so much. And then you were talking about him gathering those so called real ghost stories and, you know, he becomes the 19th century sort of. Danny Robbins, uncanny podcaster. We can sort of read that within the parameters of the profession that he's had, right, that he's interested in storytelling, he's interested in how you tell a story, how you grab people's attention, rehashing other people's words, other people's reports and things like, I can understand all of that, but the believing in the telepathy, I mean, it'd be very handy as a journalist to be able to do that, right? Like, you wouldn't have to ever leave your bedroom, let alone an office or anything, to be able to write up your reports and interviews. But I can absolutely understand why he sort of fell off the deep end and people lost faith in him. Anthony, what do you make of this? I mean, this is a lot to take in. This just seems like I can understand his position as a sort of enthusiast and how people would be able to marry these two versions of him together. But this seems like a slightly sad end for someone who started with such a clear vision of how they wanted to change the world. And I suppose it's maybe fair to say he's still at the end of his life searching for what the world should be in these different realms, these different ways of perceiving things. But it's frustrating me, really.
- [40:20]
B
I mean, you say sad ends, there's yet another twist to come in. This, of course, which is quite a sad end, actually, but also seems bizarrely, dramatically, I don't want to say fitting, because that seems a little macabre. But of course, this is how this man dies, and that is on the Titanic. I mean, we say this so often in after arc. If you were to write a book of fiction and send this to an editor, they'd be like, sorry now, it was too much. The scandal with the sex trafficking was a lot. And then the spiritualism was too much. We can't have him dying on the Titanic. It's just a step too far. And yet this is what is happening here. Tell us about what we know about this point in his life, Bob.
- [41:02]
F
Yeah, I mean, so, yeah, there is always an extra chapter to set each time you think he's kind of beaten and he's done, and there's always a little bit more. So, I mean, he continues to be active in the world of journalism, so he never quite is right at the beating heart of it, again, in the way that he was in the 1880s. But he still remains very active, active, still very well known, still publishing, still producing newspapers. And by this point, by the time we reach 1912, I mean, he's done a wide range of things, but at this point, he's campaigning for world peace. So never a man to kind of just sort of take it easy and sort of tackle a nice little easy problem. Now in a world that's on the edge of war. He'd been very against the Boer War in earlier years. He's really campaigning for world peace. And it supposedly was right on the cusp of being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. So, like, still very much a prominent global figure, traveling the world, campaigning in this way. And he was always a man that was fascinated with the United States, with America. A lot of his journalism was inspired by American papers. He'd always sort of looked to America with great interest as a sort of cultural space, as a space of ideas and. Yeah, as part of his campaigns, he boards the Titanic in 1912, along with many other people. Though he's possibly the most famous British person to die on it at the time. You know, the newspapers at the time, big portraits of him on there. We know relatively little about his last minutes, as it were. There are some stories that say that, you know, he was helping women and children get into lifeboats, others that say he was silently, you know, reading a prayer book. But. But he does go down on the ship. He isn't one of the ones who's rescued. He dies in the most sensational way possible. But there's another twist. There is always a twist with stead. And I've got to tell you about this one, because it could never be this simple. Right. 20 years earlier, he writes his first work of film. He calls it from the Old World to the New. And it is a guide on visiting what was then the World's Fair in Chicago, like a major exposition. Now, he'd never been to America, but he entirely imagined what it would be like to travel there and go to this place. And he writes basically, a fictionalised guidebook of it, but because it's a fictionalised thing and he can't just write a simple guidebook on that journey across the Atlantic. In this story, a ship hits an iceberg and sinks. So he pretty much manages to predict his own death. In his writing 20 years earlier, spiritualism is real.
- [43:16]
A
It's all real. He's, oh, my God.
- [43:19]
F
It's quite extraordinary. And supposedly, anyway, I mean, the Titanic obviously is a, it's a, it's a terrible disaster. And for the days afterwards, people don't really know who survived. So there are lots of, I've seen, I've been through lots of stead's papers and his family's papers, looking at, you know, his letters and things and really tragically, you see some initial messages coming into his wife congratulating her on his survival when people think he's made it. And then you finally get all the letters of condor and saying that no, he didn't make it. But supposedly his friends, his daughter, his families, they all gather in the offices of the Review of Reviews to kind of mourn him. But also because, you know, he basically, they're assuming he's going to come back, right? He's going to come back and give us a message from the spirit world. And they say he does that supposedly, you know, he appears and says all that I have told you is true. Which is, I think, an amazing ending. Whether it happened, well, I suspect it didn't happen, but they certainly believed it happened. And what a fitting ending for someone who, oh, we skirted that line.
- [44:29]
H
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- [45:51]
D
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- [46:29]
A
I'm going to be thinking about WT Stead for days now, Bob, so you've ruined my weekend for me. I'm just going to be reading about him and thinking about him the whole time. Tell me this as a final discussion point. First of all, what do you make of him as a Victorian, but also, do you think that the world now could do with more WT studs or is he just tipping the balance on the scales a little bit too far in the wrong direction?
- [46:52]
F
Yeah, I mean, I think that, yeah, there's certainly things he did that I wouldn't personally support, but I think I just find him endlessly fascinating. He is never dull and we've barely even touched on, maybe we only touched on maybe like a fraction of all the things he gets involved in. You could write a history of the Victorians purely through looking at him, I think as a sort of, as a person who is just interested in everything, connected to everything, involved in everything. So I find him deeply fascinating. Anthony, your initial read of him in that photo I think is absolutely right. I think I would have found him intensely irritating, but also deeply fascinating at the same time. I would have probably fallen out with him if we were friends, but I would have always been interested in what he was up to. And I think that's my ultimate take on him, is that he is a one off. He's an incredibly unusual character and breaks many rules a Victorian society, but is, I think, genuinely, I think, motivated by a desire to do good. So even though I think in many cases he does the wrong thing, he lies, he breaks rules, he does things that we would see as morally objectionable. He is driven by a genuine desire to help people, people. A lot of his work, I should say. He's also a great champion of women. He gives lots of jobs to women journalists for the first time, you know, and in many ways he's very progressive. But yeah, whenever I find a Victorian and think, oh, I found someone who I really love and admire, you will always find a terrible flaw. There will always be something there. You're just waiting for the, ah, there's the horrendous racism. Oh, there is, there's the colonialism instead. Definitely acted as if he was some kind of saint or some kind of like, you know, like, like, like Jesus walking the earth again. He is definitely flawed, but flawed in a way. I think that just makes him so, so fascinating.
- [48:24]
B
Tell me this then. When and how can we twist your arm to write the book? Of W.T. stead.
- [48:31]
F
Oh, there's a few people have done biographies on him already, so I've been sort of thinking about it because I would kind of like to do more about him. For now, though, what I would say is that there's a great website called the WTSead resource site attackingthedevil.co.uk, which has loads of his writings on. So actually, if listeners, if you want to go and read a bit more of his stuff, including the Maiden tribute, which is all up there, I recommend you do it is, you know, a tough read in many ways, but gripping in others. And I think there's no better way to get to know the man than through his writing. So I would recommend go straight to the man himself rather than me.
- [48:59]
A
Well, I know what I'm going to be doing as soon as we're finished with this interview. Bob will be back with us next week for an episode on the press creation of Jack the Ripper. So stay tuned for that. If you want to let us know ideas for episodes and give us feedback or just tell us how much you're enjoying the show, you can do so at asking@darkestoryhit.com that's after dark@historyhit.com See you next time.
- [49:29]
F
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- [49:43]
A
What do you think makes the perfect snack?
- [49:46]
E
Hmm, it's gotta be when I'm really craving it and it's convenient.
- [49:49]
A
Could you be more specific?
- [49:50]
E
When it's cravenient. Okay, like a freshly baked cookie made with real butter available right down the street at am pm. Or a savory breakfast sandwich I can grab in just a second at a.m. pM.
- [50:00]
A
I'm seeing a pattern here.
- [50:01]
E
Well, yeah, we're talking about what I.
- [50:03]
A
Crave, which is anything from am pm.
- [50:05]
E
What more could you want? Stop ampm where the snacks and drinks are perfectly craveable and convenient. That's cravenience ampm. Too much good stuff.