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Nellie Bly: life of the week
00:48:22
Trailblazing and fearless, Nellie Bly broke every rule in Victorian journalism. Bob Nicholson unpacks the life of a woman whose headline-grabbing exploits made her a household name
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- [00:00]
Bob Nicholson
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- [01:45]
Kev Lotchen
Hello and welcome to Life of the Week, where leading historians delve into the lives of some of history's most intriguing and and significant figures. From ancient Egyptian pharaohs and medieval warriors to daring 20th century spies. In the late 19th century, when female reporters were largely confined to newspapers society pages, Nellie Bly's daring investigations and headline grabbing exploits made her a household name. She was a pioneer of stunt journalism and perhaps, says Dr. Bob Nicholson, would have been a social influencer had she lived today. Speaking to Kev Lottchen, Bob explores how Bly not only exposed injustice, but also proved that women could excel where they were expected to fail. From tricking her way into an asylum to racing around the world to beat the fictional record set by Phileas Fogg.
- [02:47]
Interviewer
Bob, welcome to the podcast. In this Life of The week episode, we are talking about Nellie Bly. I wonder if you could start off for us by just introducing who she is to someone who might not have heard of her before.
- [03:00]
Bob Nicholson
Nellie Bly is one of the most remarkable women of the late 19th century. I would say she's a journalist at a time when to be a woman in the world of journalism was an incredibly difficult thing. And she doesn't just do it in a basic run of the mill sort of way. She is behind some of the most extraordinary and remarkable stories of that period. Most famously, she gets committed to a madhouse for 10 days where she convinces people that she's insane and reports on conditions in there later on. A few years later, she also tries to beat Phileas Fogg's trip around the world, which she famously did in the novel, of course, in 80 days, she aims to do it in 75, at a time when even just traveling around a city, your own home city, as a woman, would have been extraordinary. So she does some genuinely remarkable things, becomes one of the most talked about women of the late 19th century. And her life, you know, quite frankly, is just remarkable.
- [03:51]
Interviewer
Let's start that life at the beginning. I mean, one thing we should say, the world knows her now as Nellie Bly. That's not her name.
- [03:58]
Bob Nicholson
No, no. So she's born Elizabeth Jane Cochrane in 1864, though actually all of her family and friends knew her by the nickname Pink. So already we have three names for Nellie Blynn, but Elizabeth Cochrane was her sort of official born name. And she was born in Pennsylvania in a place called Cochran's Mills, a kind of small hamlet just outside of Pittsburgh. It's named after her dad, which kind of gives you a sense of a family background here. So he owned the mill that Cochrane's and Mills was named after. So actually she was relatively wealthy, at least initially when she was first born. But then her father dies when she's about 6. And the problem there is that, I mean, he has, I think, about 15 different children. She's like the 13th by two different wives. And he doesn't leave a will. Her father's estate was divided up amongst all those children, so he was quite rich. But if you're spreading that among 15 people, it isn't very much at all. And so her mother has to remarry and remarries badly. You know, she marries a drunkard, an abusive man who is, you know, pretty horrible. And over the sort of years between when. I think between when Nellie's about 9 and 14, she's living in this abusive household, you have economic stability. And so from a really early age, understandably, she was looking for ways to strike out on her own. If you're a young girl living out in fairly rural Pennsylvania, what can you do? Where are you going to find money? Well, maybe if you're lucky, you're going to marry somebody rich. But if you don't have prospects yourself, that's going to be a tall order. One of the only options she really had was maybe to become a teacher. That would be one of the classic jobs you might do. A sort of lower middle class woman or somebody who aspired that world. And so she tries to use some of her inheritance to go off to a boarding school when she's 15. She spends a term there and the money runs out after a term and she has to drop out. So she's living a really precarious existence. And ultimately the only way she was gonna break out of that is if she did something about it herself. And that really, I would say, is like the defining feature of her as a journalist, as a woman, just as a person. She doesn't take no for an answer. And right the way through her life, she manages to fight her way out of these difficult positions just through sheer force of will. And I think her upbringing definitely must have played a formative role in that. She must have realized that nobody was gonna solve these problems for her. She had to do it herself.
- [06:11]
Interviewer
We're gonna hear a lot more about that kind of self determination on Nettie Bly's book. Because you're right, it goes throughout her entire career. So she's born Elizabeth Jane Cochran. She's soon to become Nellie Bly. How does she make that transition?
- [06:25]
Bob Nicholson
She's quite lucky that nearby in Pittsburgh, you know, major industrial city, they've got a lot of newspapers. I think there are about seven different daily papers, all operating in Pittsburgh at this time, all competing for readers, all looking for sort of new novelties. And one of the papers there was called the Pittsburgh Dispatch. And this is the one that ultimately she gets her first break in. And she gets a break basically by writing a letter of complaint. They had a columnist there called the Quiet Observer. He was known by, you know, writing under a sort of pseudonym. And he'd written this article sort of railing against women who were trying to break out of their sphere, as he put it. I think one of the phrases he used was describing them as those restless, dissatisfied females who think they're out of their spheres and go around giving everyone fits for not helping them to Find them, you know, he said, better that they make their homes a little paradise. So it's that classic Victorian view that women belong in the home, they don't belong in the world of work. Anyway, he publishes this column and lots and lots of women write into the paper indignantly, basically saying, well, what am I supposed to do? I've got no money, I can't make a home, I need to work, I need to break out of my sphere. And Bly is one of those girls who writes in, she signs her a letter, a lonely orphan girl. So they don't even know her name, they don't know her dress. And there is something about that piece that catches the editor's eye. It's not necessarily that it's well written. In fact, actually, one of the criticisms that is levelled at Bly, right, the way through her career is that as a writer, she's not great. You know, she doesn't have a background in education, so she's not a sort of great literary talent. But there's something just so direct and personal and powerful about the way that she was sticking up for herself and articulating her needs as a woman. And so the paper decide to figure out who she is. They place an advert in the Dispatch saying, you know, would the lonely orphan girl who wrote into us please come in and see us? And so she does. She turns up at their offices and manages to kind of impress them enough that they actually give her a job writing articles.
- [08:19]
Interviewer
It's so interesting, I thought, that she uses the synonym lonely orphan girl.
- [08:23]
Bob Nicholson
Well, particularly because she's not an orphan. Right. Her mother is very much alive and she's living with her. And so I think something there. We see this in a lot of Bly's journalism. She's very good at making herself the. A central character in things. It's not just the story, it's not just her views, it's about her. And so I think, you know, she's pulling at the heartstrings there, bending the truth a little bit in the way she presented herself in that first piece. But it did the trick, right? It got through. It cut through all those other letters and was enough to get her that foot in the door.
- [08:50]
Interviewer
Is it unusual to have women writers on newspapers at this time? And would it be unusual for them to have a pen name?
- [08:57]
Bob Nicholson
Yes. It wasn't completely unheard of to have women in journalism. In fact, you can go back to 1850s and earlier, and occasionally papers will employ women, but often they'll employ them to do a very limited style of journalism. And it'll be your sort of society journalism, talking about, you know, sort of gossipy journalism about the sort of great and the good in the community. It'll be fashion journalism, it'll be talking about marriages, all those stereotypical things that they might imagine a woman's eye might be more suited to. So even if you look at handbooks at this time, and there were handbooks produced, you know, so you want to enter journalism as a woman and you might think, oh, that's so progressive. You know, they're finally getting a shot and you read the intro and it'll basically say, don't try your hand at all. These other forms of journalism, it will never work. Limit yourself to the sort of the domestic and the society pages. And they would argue, they would say, for instance, that you can't send a woman to report on crime because nobody is going to be honest with her. They're going to want to spare her delicate feelings of all the horrible details. So I think there was this belief effectively that women weren't cut out for proper journalism, as we might think of it, all those things that a man might do. So while there were some women working in this world, it would be rare to find a woman working in the newsroom in the same way that a male reporter would be. It was still very much a kind of male dominated industry and an enormous amount of prejudice existing about women's just ability to function in that world, to cope with the stresses, the strains, the kind of indignities of being a journalist. They just thought women weren't suited to it. So for Nellie Bly to kind of try and force herself into that world, while she wasn't the first to do it, she was still very much blazing a trail and very much sort of coming up against a lot of resistance from people, from readers, from advertisers, from editors who were cautious about the idea of employing women to do this work.
- [10:40]
Interviewer
So on the face of it, the industry is quite progressive, actually. It's still quite diminishing.
- [10:45]
Bob Nicholson
It's getting better. I suppose we can see by the late 19th century, Nellie Bly is a kind of key figure in this. Papers were starting to give women a chance, but still in a very limited range of options. If you wanted to break out of those society pages gossiping about marriages and about dresses and about what to cook, how to look after children, that was the real challenge, breaking out of that little sort of pen, that enclosure that women journalists were restricted to.
- [11:11]
Interviewer
So Nellie has been hired by The Pittsburgh Dispatch. She's been given, I believe, the pen name Nellie Bly.
- [11:17]
Bob Nicholson
Yeah. So they give it to her. And this is interesting straight away that she doesn't come up with that name at all. It's not a great invention of hers. Supposedly the story is that the editor thinks, well, we've got to give her a pen name. She can't write under her own name. That would be considered a bit improper, a bit indelicate. So he supposedly just asks around the office, anybody got any ideas for what we can call her? And it turns out that there was a popular song, I mean, a few decades earlier in Pittsburgh about somebody called Nellie Bly. And somebody just pipes up and says, how about that kind of interesting sounding name? And in the absence of anything else, they just go for it. They misspell it. You know, it was supposed to be Nelly with a Y in the song, but it's an IE for Nellie Bly. And that sort of little moment of chance sticks with her for the rest of her career and it becomes her calling card. I guess at that moment she's just some random girl who's turned up at their offices that they're allowing to write a couple of articles that they couldn't possibly have imagined that that name they picked for her would be like, heard around the world within a few years. And I think they could only ever imagine that she'd be few weeks time she'd be gone, they'd never hear from her again. But they were very wrong.
- [12:20]
Interviewer
They imagined that. Tell us what actually happened.
- [12:23]
Bob Nicholson
So she does pretty well at the Pittsburgh Dispatch. You know, she writes some quite sort of eye catching stories about the plight of working class women and manages to kind of just break out of that single issue that she was initially kind of brought on to talk about. And so she writes about, you know, working class factory girls. I think what she's really good at is focusing on their personal lives. So she doesn't just write about, you know, the conditions in the factory. She'll talk about what they get up to afterwards, their lives, their loves. So she's really good at kind of capturing people, I suppose, and their world. And it turns out that readers really respond to it. They try to sort of move her off that onto the kind of more conventional. You know, I think she has to write gardening column or gardening advising at some point. But she keeps trying to kind of push beyond this. She's never satisfied with just sticking with those kind of more run of the mill stories. So much so, in fact, pretty much entirely under her own steam. She decides to move to Mexico to work as their foreign correspondent, which is, again, an extraordinary thing. I mean, she takes her mum, she doesn't go entirely on her own, but for a young girl, I mean, at this point, she's in her early 20s. She moves out to Mexico for several weeks, writing articles on what she's seen there. I think, again, that's indicative of the way she was. You know, she was always looking for that new angle, that new frontier, to kind of reach. She wasn't just gonna sit there in Pittsburgh writing the same kind of articles over and over again. And she does really well out of it, very successful. Until one day she just doesn't turn up for work. Leaves them a note saying, I am off to New York, look out for me. So without a job, without an opportunity, without any kind of link in the city, she decides, right, you know, I guess Pittsburgh's small time now. You know, she's gonna go and conquer the Big Apple.
- [13:59]
Interviewer
She's gone to the Big Apple. She has no plan. How does she create adventures for herself there?
- [14:04]
Bob Nicholson
She might have imagined that she could just rock up in New York and go to one of the newspaper offices and be hired. But it's not that easy. It takes her months of basically trying to eke out a living, running through her savings. Her mum moves out with her as well. So they sort of. They do this together. And then she has an idea, a way to kind of break through. I mean, at this point, she can't even get into the newspaper buildings. You know, you go to newspaper rows. It was known in New York, and you'll have, like, layers and layers and layers of guards before you can get to an editor. I mean, editors would have been absolutely besieged by everybody in the city wanting to speak to them. And she can never quite get through. And it's just this bright idea. She's going to write an article about the difficulty of getting started as a woman in journalism. And with that pretense, she manages to basically get into the rooms of all of the great editors in New York City and interviews them and gets a sense of actually what are they looking for. And eventually she manages to kind of use all these connections to get into the offices of the New York World, which is one of the big papers in New York at this time. It's owned by Joseph Pulitzer. We now associate the name with the Pulitzer Prize. Right. He's one of the absolute key figures of journalism at this time. A real pioneer. His papers were always more sensational, more sort of risque or, you know, pushing at boundaries, constantly looking for an edge. And these were the papers in New York at this time, were basically in a constant state of war with each other. Anyway, she manages through all these connections to sort of get another chat with the editor, Pulitzer's World, and manages to basically talk them into hiring her. And they give her the most extraordinary first assignment and it's the thing that would basically make her name.
- [15:37]
Interviewer
And is this the asylum assignment?
- [15:38]
Bob Nicholson
It is, yeah. In that meeting that she has with the editor, they basically say to her, well, we've got an idea for you. How about you try and get locked in a mental asylum and report on the conditions inside? Which is an incredible ask.
- [15:52]
Interviewer
And she says yes to this, obviously.
- [15:54]
Bob Nicholson
She does immediately. And again, that absolutely characterises Nellie Bly, that she's incredibly strong willed and I don't think ever sort of believed there was something she couldn't do.
- [16:02]
Interviewer
How does one get locked up in an asylum?
- [16:05]
Bob Nicholson
Yeah, so, I mean, this is the extraordinary details of the story. It's not as if they had all of this set up. They didn't have, you know, some doctors who were sneakily gonna get her in there and keep an eye on her. She does it entirely on her own, for real. So, in short, this is what she does. Firstly, she practices in the mirror. She tries to figure out, like, how can I look insane? So she practices her vacant stare. She puts on a slight accent, then she changes her clothes. She tries to look like she might be more of a kind of working class, down at heel person who's struggling in the city. She leaves behind all of her belongings, introduces herself as Nellie Brown. Now, so her initials are the same in case there's any sort of little clue that might trip people up. And she goes to stay in a kind of temporary home for working women in the city, which would be a kind of place you'd stay if you couldn't put a roof over your head. And when she's there, she just tries her best to act mad, basically, in a kind of subtle way. And it's a real tightrope because you don't want to overdo it by then seeming sort of ridiculous, but you don't want to underdo it and people just kind of be sympathetic. So she does things like, you know, refusing to go to sleep, constantly talking about some suitcases, some trunks that she's lost. When people ask her who she is, she says, I can't remember, I don't know who I am. So it's the kind of feigning Amnesia routine. Anyway, the people at this boarding house start to get worried about her and think, blimey, I'm not sure I want to be alone with this woman because she seems a little bit unhinged. They call for the police. The police then basically take her to court just all same day, where a judge examines her. And in her version of the story, he's quite sort of kind figure who wants to look after her. What she really wants is for someone to just like, send her straight to an asylum. So she's constantly got this kind of challenge of trying to convince people that she's mad, but not, I guess, to also terribly mistreat her. Anyway, long story short, the judge basically sends her to a hospital in New York to be examined. And from there they are absolutely convinced she's mad. Every doctor is 100% certain. And they send her to Blackwell's island, which is the main asylum on a small island in the river between Manhattan and Queens. And she is carted off there, potentially with no way to get out. Now, New York world say, in 10 days we'll come and get you out. But that's a heck of a thing to be hoping for.
- [18:11]
Interviewer
I was gonna chip in on this. So Nellie sounds like she set up this entire thing off her own back. It's not like she's had, like, a false identity created for her. And don't worry, someone knows about it. I mean, this is kind of like action movie plot waiting to happen where she gets lost in the asylum. Does she have any way she knows she can get out?
- [18:29]
Bob Nicholson
No, not at all. I mean, she's entirely dependent on somebody from the outside coming to release her. So she's sent to Blackwell's island and is then there for 10 days. And after a while, she starts to experiment with, well, what if I start to act sane and basically tell them I am completely sane? Well, she can't tell them I was a journalist and I'm doing all this for a story. Because that sounds like the maddest thing you could possibly say, right? So, yeah, there is no way for her to get out until somebody from the outside comes and secures her release. So for those 10 days, she is entirely at the mercy of the people of the asylum. And what she discovers there is exactly what, I guess, the New York World were hoping she would find, which is that it's a place that's absolutely ridden with abuses, with terrible kind of treatment of patients. And she describes in vivid detail, you know, the terrible food she would have to eat, the times that she would be plunged into an ice cold bath and scrubbed by one of the other patients and then placed into kind of just a wet nightgown in which she had to sleep in an ice cold cell. You get these really vivid, horrible descriptions to the point where actually you start to think, my God, she could have died in there or become seriously, seriously ill. So she does it absolutely for real. There is no fakery involved, there's no safety net. And she does it entirely off her own back. None of this was prepared for her by the paper. They give her an assignment and say, crack on whenever you're ready and off she goes and she makes it happen.
- [19:50]
Interviewer
Extraordinarily she does it and she's only there for 10 days, you said. And yet she kind of discovers all of this in that time, I think.
- [19:58]
Bob Nicholson
Almost within a day. I mean, her description of the first day there covers so many of these abuses that you really get the impression that this was not just, you know, her exaggerating it for the effect, for the story, that this really was an asylum with some, you know, some deeply serious problems. There have been rumors circulating before she went in and certain sort of scandals that are broken about the behaviour of doctors. But of course, until you get somebody in there actually experiencing it day to day, there's no way you can know. And that was the great triumph of her story. And that's what, I guess what the New York world wanted her to do was to get that perspective that nobody else had managed to get. No other journalist reporting on that story in the city was able to get that firsthand view of somebody who actually experienced what it was like spending nights in the asylum day after day. And those 10 days, it doesn't sound like much, but those would have been long days when you're locked in there in those conditions. And she discovers a whole range of abuses, kind of unprofessional behavior by doctors particularly. It was actually, it was the kind of nurses and attendants that looked after them day to day who were particularly abusive. They would beat and choke patients, they would refuse them food, they would sort of tease them and goad them. They wouldn't give them enough clothes to wear to keep warm. Her account is filled with these kind of little skin crawling details. She talks about an occasion when everybody was sort of being bathed in these cold ice baths and there's like, you know, dozens of patients there and they only have two towels to kind of go around between each other. And some of these patients have like terrible skin conditions and things like that. So there's A lot of little details in there, small things that really hammer home the horror of it. It's an incredibly powerful expose that she writes when she gets out.
- [21:35]
Interviewer
And what's the reaction when that is published?
- [21:37]
Bob Nicholson
One of the interesting things is it's published in two parts. So you actually get. Part one comes out on a Sunday and it ends with her boarding the boat and been taken off to the asylum. So she leaves on a cliffhanger. So the immediate reaction is, my God, you know what's going to happen. Everybody's kind of curious. And the other angle to this is that actually when she was convincing people that she was insane, a lot of journalists report on the story. You know, this poor strange woman who has turned up and doesn't know who she is and needs help. So she fools the journalists as well, and they've written all these reports about her. So one of the first reactions is from the other papers who've been duped. Being a bit embarrassed, they desperately then try and get in first before her next installment comes out a week later. So there's a real sort of journalistic frenzy around it. There's two main reactions. On the one hand, people are astonished by her, by what she's managed to do. She becomes as much the story as the asylum. But the conditions in the asylum that she uncovers are so shocking, so horrifying to people that ultimately it is enough to put pressure on the government to invest more money in the asylums to make sure that they are reformed. So it's an example of journalism really managing to make a change in the world. And it's the kind of change that wasn't happening through standard reporting. It took something special. And it was Bly's approach to that that really gave that story power.
- [22:50]
Interviewer
So she's become an investigative journalist now, is what we're saying.
- [22:53]
Bob Nicholson
Exactly. That's the phrase we'd use now. At the time, they called them stunt reporters or stunt journalists, kind of suggesting that there was something a little bit perhaps sort of performative about that, that it wasn't necessarily just sort of straightforward investigation, but was done for effect. And there's a bit of truth in that, that ultimately, what makes that story so compelling, it's not just what she finds, it's her narrative. And if you read it, and actually, I would encourage listeners to go and read it, you can. You can go and read 10 days in a Madhouse online quite easily. It's all freely available. It's very long. Firstly, I mean, it's page after page of the newspaper. Was filled with this, but it's written like a novel. You know, you kind of follow her through every step of it. So the story isn't just the horrors there. You could have written those in a fairly straightforward article. We really become fascinated with her and with her journey and the jeopardy of going undercover becomes just as important as anything else. So, yeah, absolutely. She's an example of an investigative journalist and that was the template that would work for her for the rest of her career, really. The story is, what is she doing?
- [23:53]
Kev Lotchen
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- [24:25]
Interviewer
As a historian of Victorian popular culture, what do you make of the term stunt journalism?
- [24:31]
Bob Nicholson
Stunt journalism is a really interesting term. I think from its critics, it suggests something superficial, a kind of grasping for attention. Right. The vast majority of journalists in the 19th century would have been completely anonymous. You wouldn't have known their names, their articles, but were never signed. So bly, in a way, it books that trend in that her name is plastered at the top of a lot of her columns. It's a kind of personal branding. And also she's making the news. She's not just responding to things as they're kind of played out in a courtroom, she's directly investigating. So in some ways it breaks the mould of what a conventional journalist would do. And some people at the time definitely don't like that. They find it a bit kind of, I guess, like she's showing off that she wants to put herself at the centre. And she was occasionally accused of slipping lots of references to how pretty she was in her articles or how sort of men would respond to her. So there's a suggestion there. There's a bit of ego about it, and I think that's. There's probably some truth in that, but it also added personality and that was one of the key things people wanted.
- [25:27]
Interviewer
From journalists at this time and just of the time. How unique is she in that arena? Like, do other papers have also say more named correspondents pursuing these types of stories?
- [25:38]
Bob Nicholson
Nellie Bai definitely isn't the first stunt journalist. There are some investigative journalists going back decades, but she really helps to inspire a trend. At this time, her story is so incredibly popular that after this, every paper in the city has to have their own Nellie Ply. And there are loads of them. In fact, just at the New York World, there are several other ones that they hire to kind of follow in her footsteps. I mean, Fanny B Merrill, Nell Nelson, Viola Roseborough. These are all names that would become familiar to readers in New York, and all of them chasing after that same sensation that Nellie Bly had managed to achieve. So she's certainly not the only one, but is the one that seems to stand above everybody else in terms of just the scale of her celebrity.
- [26:17]
Interviewer
Let's talk about sensation. So she's published an expose, she's gained quite a high degree of recognition. Where does she go from here?
- [26:25]
Bob Nicholson
Yeah, so I guess at this point she's one of the most famous people in New York. And so she's got options. She does a series of additional. None quite to the same scale as the 10 days in a Madhouse, but she does things where she pretends to be a housemaid to expose the nefarious activities of employment agencies in the city. In another one, she poses as a new mother to expose a trade in newborn babies. She investigates matrimonial agencies, which were kind of like, I guess, sort of a Victorian Tinder almost, where you create a profile and then people sort of write to you and you can kind of look through all these profiles of eligible bachelors. At one point, she pretends to be a chorus girl and learns what it's like to be an actress on the stage. She learns how to fence. She does all these things. And the formula is basically, Nellie Bly does something exciting or out of her comfort zone that is either going to sort of reveal, hey, women can do things that people don't think they can do, or it's going to expose some terrible charlatan or nefarious figure who trusts her. Because usually it's a he. He doesn't recognise that she could potentially be someone who's going to expose him. And one of the big examples of that is she exposes a political lobbyist in Albany in upstate New York, and basically just gets him to openly admit that, yeah, for, you know, X number of hundred dollars, I can get this bill passed or I can bribe so and so to sink this bill, if you want. I mean, he absolutely denies it afterwards, but it completely sinks his career. He underestimates her. And that's ultimately what she's great at. She's able to get people to Trust her. And then basically tears them apart.
- [27:51]
Interviewer
All these instances of her kind of more serious gems are so fascinating to me because I think one of the places that we know her best is this kind of idea that she's a real Phileas Fogg of Jules Verne's novel. I mean, the whole thing is incredible.
- [28:03]
Bob Nicholson
Yeah. By this point, she's established, you know, pretty well as a journalist, sort of minor celebrity. The New York World, her paper, they're always looking for the next big thing, and they hit upon this idea. Well, firstly, I mean, they're interested in this idea of how quickly could somebody travel around the world, you know, could you do it quicker than Phileas Fogg does it in Jules Verne's novel? And then they're ever looking for that new angle, they think, well, what if a woman did it? Because that would be even more extraordinary. And Bly is identified as, you know, the woman for the challenge. So very quickly, with very, very little prep, she's just like a few days to kind of go and source some appropriate clothes, pack her bags, get ready. They kind of plot a route that is going to allow her to circumnavigate the globe, to go from New York on the east coast of America, right the way through Europe, the Middle east, into Asia, to Japan, and then back to San Francisco and across. So it is genuinely a proper around the world trip. And she has to do it, almost all of it, aside from that first leg to Europe, entirely on her own, under her own steam, which is a remarkable thing. I mean, at this time, for a woman to be just out in public or out in the city or to live on her own was considered unusual. You would expect to have a chaperone. So she's breaking all sorts of rules beyond just the extraordinary thing of trying to travel the world. So she sets off. The paper makes a huge, big deal of it. She gets on board a steamer from New York. It's going to take her through to London, the first stop. Meanwhile, a rival paper, Cosmopolitan magazine, decides, oh, we've maybe got our own idea on this. Maybe we can brace her. So they, a day or two later, send another woman, another reporter, Elizabeth Bisland, westwards. So in other words, to San Francisco in the other direction. And they make it into this whole race. And that just adds an extra element of kind of fascination to the public on this. So we basically have two women racing each other around the world in opposite directions for two rival newspapers. And the world is hooked.
- [29:50]
Interviewer
The world's hooked and fascinated by the race. Does Nelly know that she is being raced against?
- [29:57]
Bob Nicholson
No. This is the extraordinary thing, is that because she's moving so quickly, and at this point, obviously we don't have instantaneous communications like the Internet. You'd have telegraph lines circumnavigating the world, but they wouldn't necessarily be able to keep up with her. It's not until she reaches, I think it's either Hong Kong or maybe even Japan, one of the final legs of the journey, does she realise, oh, actually somebody's racing you. And at that point she's told, ah, yeah, and she's two days ahead. So there is this kind of belief that she's not going to make it in time. And Nelly sort of says gamely, oh, well, I don't mind if I lose the race. I'm just going to try and do it in 75 days. That was. That was my aim. I'm not bothered. But of course, she would have been, right, you know, if she doesn't get it to New York first, she's going to completely lose the story. And it's an incredibly complex journey. For the most part, it's a mixture of trains and boats, which means you're always hoping if that boat is delayed, what if you miss your net connection? And it's not just, well, now you're going to lose a few hours, it might be, you lose a week while you wait for the next boat to come in. So everything is incredibly fraught. It's basically an exercise in complicated timetables and of desperately trying to figure out, is that steamer gonna reach Hong Kong in time? And there's moments when you think all is lost. You know, some. A storm has come in and delayed them for a bit, or some bit of bureaucracy means her ship is moored in the bay and she can't go and make the next connection. So there's real drama to it. What you get, though, in those sort of downtime moments when she's in Hong Kong or in Egypt, is she has sometimes a day or two to kind of take a look at her place. So she's not even really able to do proper travel journalism, but you get these little kind of glimpses of what she did. In one place. She buys a monkey as well, which is one of the most extraordinary bits of the story. So in Singapore, she buys a pet monkey and calls it McGinty, and that travels with her for the rest of the journey.
- [31:36]
Interviewer
Does the monkey make it back to America with her?
- [31:38]
Bob Nicholson
It does, yeah. It lives with her for so many years afterwards in New York, I think there's a brief moment when it catches a terrible cold and people think, oh, God, the monkey's for it. But, yeah, McGinty makes it through as well. There is a happy ending for McGinty the monkey. And it's a real close run thing, right? She gets to San Francisco, she's just on target. Everybody thinks, right, this is like the victory lap now. You know, the boats come in from Japan and people are lined up at stations all around the country, sort of ready to wave her through. And then just when you think it's over, there's a massive snowstorm in the middle of the country, blocking almost all of the railway lines. At which point, the New York World, you know, who can't lose to arrival, right? They're waiting for Bisland, the other woman journalist, to be on a steamship from London or from Britain. And so they basically chart a special train to get her across the country, kind of, you know, managing to navigate through whichever ways were open. And that was the only time they broke their rule. Their main rule was she had to travel on normal sort of transport. It couldn't be that they put on a special boat for her or anything. But I think by that point, people were so invested that they were just desperate for her to make it. And she comes back to an absolute hero's welcome.
- [32:39]
Interviewer
And people were invested, right? The New York World did a whole kind of board game and all this kind of promotion about it. Like, it was a really big deal.
- [32:48]
Bob Nicholson
It's huge. They did a competition where you had to guess exactly how long her trip would take, down to the second. And then if you came closer to the pin, you won a holiday to Europe. And they get about 100,000 entries. I mean, people go absolutely crazy for it. Not just in America either, it's all over Europe, all over the world. I mean, she actually goes to see Jules Verne in France, actually on part of that trip, and meets him. And he's very enamored with her. He and his wife seem to really love her. So it is a global sensation. People that are tracking her, the problem they've got is that for most of that, she can't actually sort of send updates. You'll get occasional telegraph, like, arrived in Singapore, that's it. So they've got a pad and fill, you know, week after week after week to sort of speculate, well, where might she be now? And let's sort of talk about the history of this location. So they do an astonishing job of basically padding out those 70 odd days that she's there. 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes and 14 seconds is the length of her trip. And a lot of that is newspapers desperately trying to fill the gaps when she can't do anything. So actually, it's an act of journalism. It's quite a tricky story to cover, but it's less to do with what she sees and what she does than just her doing it. Her doing it is the story. And that's what people really fall in love with and become fascinated by.
- [33:56]
Interviewer
This is coming back to that point that Nellie Bly isn't reporting the story. Nellie Bly is the story.
- [34:02]
Bob Nicholson
It's unusual the degree to which she centered herself in her stories. I guess it's indicative of the celebrity culture at the time. And that's what makes her journalism so popular that people want to know what she's doing. They're not even necessarily interested in what she thinks, what her opinions are. Her opinions often actually aren't that interesting. And when she's given, like, a column just to write about her general thoughts, it's usually a failure. But what they become invested in is her pluck, her bravery in doing a seemingly impossible thing. And then when she comes back and is a major celebrity, you know, you can buy a Nellie Bly hat. You can get your Nellie Bly kind of signed photos and all these things. She is a proper, bona fide celebrity in the way, actually almost no journalist of the 19th century, you can probably count them on the fingers of one or two hands.
- [34:41]
Interviewer
One detail I absolutely love in this story is that Nellie Bly traveled with just one small piece of luggage. It's incredible she managed to do this with almost nothing.
- [34:51]
Bob Nicholson
Yes. So, I mean, the stereotype at the time is that, well, a woman couldn't do this because she'll need, you know, dozens and dozens of suitcases and a new hat for every location. This is the kind of thing that sort of men at the time were saying. So I think partly just to prove them wrong, she's determined to do it incredibly lightly. So she. She gets a sort of special coat made for her traveling coat, and then just a single with everything else in it. That's all she has. That's all she sort of takes with her. People keep giving her presents. So she accumulates all sorts of random stuff from people she meets on the way. I mean, including the monkey. When she arrives back, she's not traveling quite as lightly as when she set off. Again, I think it's Bly trying to basically subvert those expectations people have of her, as a woman, that she couldn't do this in a way a man would. And she sort of says, yeah, I'll show you. And she does.
- [35:33]
Interviewer
Do you think if you were having to travel all around the world overland, not on a plane, what would be in your kind of carry on? You've only got that one carry on.
- [35:42]
Bob Nicholson
God, I'm not even sure I'd get outside of Ormskirk, where I live, with just one bag. I guess the extraordinary thing is that I don't even know what I would pack. Right. And she leaves so quickly that she couldn't possibly have known either, Right. She has no idea what she's going to be encountering.
- [35:54]
Interviewer
It's something like two days, isn't it, between her accepting the assignment and actually leaving. It's not long at all.
- [35:59]
Bob Nicholson
Oh, no. I mean, she goes to one of her dressmakers and basically says, right, I need you to make the this for me overnight. You'll either do it or you won't. And they do it for her. So she doesn't even have time to think about it, really. She just goes for it. She just basically stuffs in what she can and hits the road. And I think that's what's so compelling about it, right? She doesn't get worried about those things. She doesn't get hung up on them. All those things that people might say, well, some people suggest you should take a gun, for instance. And she decides, nah, not gonna do it. Just gonna travel completely unprotected and assume everything will be all right. And there are some dicey moments when she encounters some characters who might be a bit dodgy, but manages to kind of, you know, find somebody who'll look after her.
- [36:34]
Interviewer
So Nellie is a celebrity journalist, but actually she doesn't stay a journalist for the entirety of her life. She actually then becomes a business owner not too far into the future.
- [36:45]
Bob Nicholson
Yeah, I mean, in some ways, this is one of the most surprising things that ever happens to her, which is quite a thing to say after all of the stories she'd been involved in. She comes back a celebrity, has a few kind of actually quite rocky years after that, where I think she believes that the world didn't really give her enough recognition for what she'd achieved, and she kind of breaks ties with them for a bit. She gets quite a lot of money to write novels, but soon discovers that she cannot write novels at all. And that's all a bit of a disaster. She tries to move to Chicago for a bit to make a living there. So even after all that celebrity, she's not quite solidly made it. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, she meets a man named Robert Livingstone seaman, who was 70 years old and an industrialist. He ran a company called the Ironclad manufacturing company. Nelly's 31, he's 70. We don't know how they meet him, but within a couple of weeks they're married. And given, you know, everything else she does, I guess it's not surprising that she rushes into something absolutely headlong and with sort of no regard for the risk. Everybody is deeply confused. All of her friends, family, don't really know what has happened here. His family are deeply opposed to her, to the match, and the assumption there is that she's a gold digger, right? That she's just in search of his money. He's a very wealthy guy, very, very well to do. And so they marry very, very, very quickly. And initially it's a deeply unhappy marriage. Robert hires men to follow her. She doesn't even want to eat in the house. It seems like very quickly, whatever spark there had been there, if there had been one at all, is kind of falling apart. And yet somehow, after a while, things just start to even out. They begin to connect with one another and in the end they're married for nine years, some of which seem to have been relatively happy. And during that time she begins to take an increasingly active role in his business and not just sort of being sort of curious about it or reporting on it, but actively intervening in the day to day running of this ironclad manufacturing company. So this is a company that makes things like milk cans and barrels and tanks and kitchen sinks, all sorts of metalwork in a factory in New York. And yes, he gets actively involved in the business, particularly after he dies. So he dies in 1904, he's hit by a horse and wagon and never quite recovers from his injuries, by which point she'd managed to outmanoeuvre all of his family members and basically get herself named in the will as the inheritor of pretty much all of his estates. So she's suddenly no longer a journalist, she's now having to run this massive manufacturing company with no experience in this really at all. But like everything else she does, she just says, well, I'll have a go at that. And initially she seems to make a real success of it. I mean, this is in her words, but she talks about like massively increasing the profits, transforming the company's revenue, really making it into a, you know, huge concern in some versions of the story. It's even suggested that she kind of invents new processes for manufacturing barrels and holds various patents. Some of that's a little bit murky as to whether she really is the person behind that, but certainly she's actively involved. She uses all of those things she learned as an investigator investigating the plight of women factory workers to basically try and create really good conditions for workers. You know, they have an incredible library that they can all access, kind of social clubs, all this kind of stuff, and it seems to be going really, really well until a few years after her husband dies, they start to realise that money is just disappearing from the firm and she brings in auditors to check and they sort of think that everything's broadly fine, but then eventually everything crashes down. There are loads of creditors asking for sort of unpaid debts. And Bly does everything she can. She sells property, she does all sorts of things to try and keep it afloat. But it turns out that one of the men in the business who she trusted the most, it was one of her closest confidants there, had basically been ripping her off the whole time and had sent tens of thousands of dollars to pay for his own brother's debts. We're talking tens of millions of dollars in modern terms there. And it basically just guts the whole company. They're not able to recover. So it's a great tragedy in a way. I mean, she did say to herself that she was never really that interested in the money side of things. And it looks like people in the business really managed to take advantage of her due to that. But certainly for a while, for a good decade or so, she's a leading industrialist. I mean, they have a face on the adverts for the company. Buy milk cans from the Ironclad Manufacturing company and they'll be Nellie Bly advertising them. So, as in everything she does, she goes for it.
- [40:45]
Interviewer
Well, clearly putting that celebrity to good use in the marketing.
- [40:48]
Bob Nicholson
Absolutely, yeah. She would still have been a known name at that point, even though her journalism, she was no longer actively writing quite as much. That name still sort of loomed large. People still would have known who she was. And now, of course, it almost feels like a story, you know, Nelly Blythe, the industrialist. It's like all the kind of previous ones. But of course, this was real. And, yeah, people seem to have really continued to be fascinated in her story. There would occasionally be, like, interviews with her and profiles of her in the press, trying to capture what she was up to now.
- [41:15]
Interviewer
And she does come back into the world. Of journalism after this interlude. Right.
- [41:20]
Bob Nicholson
She does so, I mean, she keeps her hand in occasionally kind of writing pieces for most of her life. But eventually, I mean, most sensationally, she goes to report on the First World War on the Eastern Front. So again, never one to do things by heart.
- [41:32]
Interviewer
So obviously, if she's reporting on Eastern Front In World War I, it's 1914. Nellie is many more years into her career. How is that different for her from when she started out in the kind of perception of women journalists?
- [41:45]
Bob Nicholson
Yeah, well, when she started out, her youth was one of the key selling points of her character. The women like her were often referred to as newspaper girls. And in fact, Nellie would often describe herself as being a few years younger than she was, just to keep that sort of pretense coming up of it is a kind of a young girl breaking into a man's world. By the time the First World War comes along, she's in her mid-40s, so a very different kind of woman. She's got a long life experience behind her now, and so she's no longer able to quite trade on that same branding, I suppose, that she had before. But her celebrity still lingers. People are still fascinated by what Nellie Bly might do. And she did have a real ability as an interviewer, even if she wasn't necessarily the best writer. She was really good at getting details out of people, getting them to say things that they wouldn't say to other people. And those skills remained right the way through her career. And it made her a different kind of war correspondent, perhaps, than the usual men who would have been out there reporting on the front.
- [42:36]
Interviewer
Now, the First World War brings us into the final decade of Nelly's life. What happens to her in the end?
- [42:43]
Bob Nicholson
Yeah, I mean, really sadly, she dies quite young, aged just 57, of pneumonia in 1922. So she doesn't get to live the kind of incredibly long life. But my word, what a packed life those 57 years are. It feels like enough adventures for multiple lifetimes. By the time she finally does pass away.
- [43:01]
Interviewer
You talked a lot about how she puts herself in the heart of the story. She makes herself the story. How is she remembered immediately after she passes away?
- [43:11]
Bob Nicholson
There are children's books written about her, about her kind of inspirational, pioneering work as a woman in a man's world. So her celebrity really is enduring. Whereas a lot of journalists, you know, they might have one big story and then fade away. She really does manage to sustain that fame for a remarkable long period of time. And people still remember her now which is not true of the vast majority of other journalists from the 19th century. So she really is, you know, quite unique, is it fair to say?
- [43:37]
Interviewer
Do you think that she is ahead of her time in the sense that she's operating in a world where women were expected to do less and here she is basically breaking every mould she can find?
- [43:49]
Bob Nicholson
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, she is absolute trailblazer in terms of the role of women in journalism. Certainly not the only person at this time, but she's the one that I think people sort of are most aware of at the time. She's the one that really helps to push through some of those boundaries. And after her come endless numbers of women, particularly stunt journalists on those first years in the 1880s, all trying to work in the mold of a Nellie Bly. After a while it becomes a sort of slightly less desirable job because, you know, it's a pretty dangerous thing to do. But she does really break through that barrier and really demonstrate that actually, you know, you can be a great journalist and be a woman and not just write about weddings and about fashion and about society. Really no topic seems to have been beyond her. She threw herself into absolutely everything, whether it's learning to fence, learning to be a chorus girl, being admitted to a madhouse, reporting on a war, being a foreign correspondent. In the end, she ticks off almost every aspect of journalism. All the things that people told her you can't do, a woman can't do, she did them.
- [44:45]
Interviewer
How do you feel she'd adapt to modern journalism?
- [44:48]
Bob Nicholson
That's really interesting. I think she would have been absolutely tailor made for kind of modern celebrity culture. You know, she would have been right at home in the idea of us kind of wanting to know a bit more about the journalist and than the story. I guess I would sort of see her as a bit like a kind of Louis Theroux kind of figure. You know, somebody who puts themselves in strange situations, interviews people and manages to get things out of them that other interviewers don't do. So I could sort of see her doing something like that. She would just be huge on TikTok or social media, right. She'd be doing something there and finding a way to sort of turn her personal branding into money for her. I think she would thrive. I think she's of her time and the things she's writing about are of their time. But her ability to capture the public's attention and to keep coming up with new ideas is amazing. I mean, you read some of the sort of titles of her articles and they could almost be clickbaity YouTube videos. You know, Nellie Bly as an elephant tamer. Nellie Bly and the tiger. What becomes of babies? I mean, slightly different language, but. But all of that stuff feels like something I want to click on. I think she would be just fine in the modern landscape of journalism.
- [45:44]
Interviewer
Nellie bly as the TikTok influencer. You didn't know you missed. If I could ask you one final question. We've talked through Nellie Bly's kind of life, all these kind of deeds and her position world. If there's one myth or misconception you want to clear up, what would you say?
- [45:59]
Bob Nicholson
I think sometimes the stereotype of Nellie Bly is that she's this person who just like barges into a newspaper office and sort of says, right, I'm doing this. She's cannier than that. She's cleverer than that. So I think sometimes people there is a kind of stereotype of her as just this person who. A kind of loose cannon who does whatever she wants. Actually, I think she plays the game much more smartly and more cleverly than sometimes people give her credit for. She knew when to push. She knew when to kind of let people take credit for things. So she's a really canny operator, not just somebody who wouldn't take no for an answer.
- [46:28]
Kev Lotchen
That was Bob Nicholson, a historian at Edge Hill University, an expert in 19th century popular culture, speaking to Kev Lotchen. Thanks for listening to today's Life of the Week. Be sure to join us again next time to learn about another fascinating figure from the past. This is the story of the one As a custodial supervisor at a high school, he knows that during cold and flu season, germs spread fast. It's why he partners with Grainger to stay fully stocked on the products and supplies he needs, from tissues to disinfectants to floor scrubbers, all so that he can help students, staff and teachers stay healthy and focused. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.