Muckraker

Muckraker
Author: W. Sydney Robinson
Publisher: Robson Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2012
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

First rocketing to fame when he 'purchased' a 13-yearold girl as part of a campaign against child prostitution, W. T. Stead was the pioneer of investigative reporting. As criminal convict, Puritan, sex-fanatic, occultist, social reformer and stuntman, Stead's notoriety escalated throughout his life until his tragic death in the Titanic disaster. This book traces the rise and fall of W. T. Stead, from his childhood as the son of a strict Nonconformist minister in Newcastle, to his rapid and Machiavellian career as an influential investigative journalist, and his last years when he was ridiculed as a madman for his devotion to the occult. Stead's campaigns - all conducted with his trademark invincible zeal - are vividly described, ranging from the reform of London slums to denouncing an ex-slave trader who claimed to be the Messiah. A hundred years after his death, author Will Robinson presents new material about Stead's life taken from his personal papers, previously suppressed by his wife, giving us a fuller portrait than ever before of the sensational father of journalistic campaigning.

W.T. Stead

W.T. Stead
Author: Stewart Jay Brown
Publisher:
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2019
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0198832532

W. T. Stead (1849-1912) was a newspaper editor, author, social reformer, advocate for women rights, peace campaigner, spiritualist, and one of the best-known public figures in the late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. W. T. Stead: Nonconformist and Newspaper Prophet provides a compelling religious biography of Stead, offering particular attention to his conception of journalism--in an age of growing mass literacy--as a means to communicate religious truth and morality, and his view of the editor's desk as a modern pulpit. Leading scholar, Stewart J. Brown explores how his Nonconformist Conscience and sense of divine calling infused Stead's newspaper crusades-most famously his 'Maiden Tribute' campaign against child prostitution. The biography also examines Stead's growing interest in spiritualism and the occult, as he searched for the evidence of an afterlife that might draw people in a more secular age back to faith. It discusses his imperialism and his belief in the English-speaking peoples of the British Empire and American Republic as God's new chosen people for the spread of civilisation; and it highlights how his growing understanding of other faiths and cultures--but more especially his moral revulsion over the South African War of 1899-1902--brought him to question those beliefs. Finally, it assesses the influence of religious faith on his campaigns for world peace and the arbitration of international disputes.

From the Old World to the New

From the Old World to the New
Author: William Thomas Stead
Publisher:
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2017-02-04
Genre:
ISBN: 9783743435667

From the Old World to the New - A Christmas Story of the Chicago Exhibition is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1892. Hansebooks is editor of the literature on different topic areas such as research and science, travel and expeditions, cooking and nutrition, medicine, and other genres. As a publisher we focus on the preservation of historical literature. Many works of historical writers and scientists are available today as antiques only. Hansebooks newly publishes these books and contributes to the preservation of literature which has become rare and historical knowledge for the future.

The Blue Island

The Blue Island
Author: William T. Stead
Publisher:
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2013-08-25
Genre: Channeling (Spiritualism)
ISBN: 9780989396271

This volume contains four classic spiritualist works, three by W. T. Stead and one by his daughter, Estelle. William T. Stead (1849-1912) was a well-known British investigative journalist who became interested in Spiritualism in the 1890s. In 1892, through the gift of automatic writing, he began receiving spirit communications from the recently deceased American temperance reformer and newspaperwoman Julia T. Ames, describing conditions in the next world. He published her messages in Borderland, the spiritualist quarterly he founded in 1893, and later in book form under the title After Death, or Letters From Julia. In 1909, following Julia's suggestions from beyond, Stead established Julia's Bureau in London, where inquirers could obtain information about the spirit world from a group of resident mediums. During this time he wrote his personal account, How I Know that the Dead Return. On April 10, 1912, Stead boarded the S.S. Titanic bound from Southampton to New York, to take part in a peace congress at Carnegie Hall. On the morning of April 15 the ship struck an iceberg and Stead, along with hundreds of others, drowned. At that time his daughter, Estelle, an actress and also a spiritualist, was on tour with her own Shakespearean company. Amongst its members was a psychically gifted man named Pardoe Woodman, who foretold the disaster as they sat talking after tea. Through Woodman's clairvoyant powers W. T. Stead was able to communicate the messages contained in The Blue Island, "experiences of a new arrival beyond the veil." Estelle Stead carried on her father's work after his death. In When We Speak with the Dead she explained the possibilities and limitations of communication as viewed from her own experience, which included messages from her father "across the border."

City of Dreadful Delight

City of Dreadful Delight
Author: Judith R. Walkowitz
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2013-06-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 022608101X

From tabloid exposes of child prostitution to the grisly tales of Jack the Ripper, narratives of sexual danger pulsated through Victorian London. Expertly blending social history and cultural criticism, Judith Walkowitz shows how these narratives reveal the complex dramas of power, politics, and sexuality that were being played out in late nineteenth-century Britain, and how they influenced the language of politics, journalism, and fiction. Victorian London was a world where long-standing traditions of class and gender were challenged by a range of public spectacles, mass media scandals, new commercial spaces, and a proliferation of new sexual categories and identities. In the midst of this changing culture, women of many classes challenged the traditional privileges of elite males and asserted their presence in the public domain. An important catalyst in this conflict, argues Walkowitz, was W. T. Stead's widely read 1885 article about child prostitution. Capitalizing on the uproar caused by the piece and the volatile political climate of the time, women spoke of sexual danger, articulating their own grievances against men, inserting themselves into the public discussion of sex to an unprecedented extent, and gaining new entree to public spaces and journalistic practices. The ultimate manifestation of class anxiety and gender antagonism came in 1888 with the tabloid tales of Jack the Ripper. In between, there were quotidien stories of sexual possibility and urban adventure, and Walkowitz examines them all, showing how women were not simply figures in the imaginary landscape of male spectators, but also central actors in the stories of metropolotin life that reverberated in courtrooms, learned journals, drawing rooms, street corners, and in the letters columns of the daily press. A model of cultural history, this ambitious book will stimulate and enlighten readers across a broad range of interests.

Dreamworlds of Race

Dreamworlds of Race
Author: Duncan Bell
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 484
Release: 2022-06-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0691235112

How transatlantic thinkers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries promoted the unification of Britain and the United States Between the late nineteenth century and the First World War an ocean-spanning network of prominent individuals advocated the unification of Britain and the United States. They dreamt of the final consolidation of the Angloworld. Scholars, journalists, politicians, businessmen, and science fiction writers invested the “Anglo-Saxons” with extraordinary power. The most ambitious hailed them as a people destined to bring peace and justice to the earth. More modest visions still imagined them as likely to shape the twentieth century. Dreamworlds of Race explores this remarkable moment in the intellectual history of racial domination, political utopianism, and world order. Focusing on a quartet of extraordinary figures—Andrew Carnegie, W. T. Stead, Cecil J. Rhodes, and H. G. Wells—Duncan Bell shows how unionists on both sides of the Atlantic reimagined citizenship, empire, patriotism, race, war, and peace in their quest to secure global supremacy. Yet even as they dreamt of an Anglo-dominated world, the unionists disagreed over the meaning of race, the legitimacy of imperialism, the nature of political belonging, and the ultimate form and purpose of unification. The racial dreamworld was an object of competing claims and fantasies. Exploring speculative fiction as well as more conventional forms of political writing, Bell reads unionist arguments as expressions of the utopianism circulating through fin-de-siècle Anglo-American culture, and juxtaposes them with pan-Africanist critiques of racial domination and late twentieth-century fictional narratives of Anglo-American empire. Tracing how intellectual elites promoted an ambitious project of political and racial unification between Britain and the United States, Dreamworlds of Race analyzes ideas of empire and world order that reverberate to this day.

The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon

The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon
Author: William Thomas Stead
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2007
Genre: Child prostitution
ISBN: 9780979111600

"The persistence of organized prostitution reflected one of the less savory aspects of Victorian life. In particular, attention was increasingly paid to the large number of young girls drawn into this way of life. Legislation, in the form of the Criminal Law Amendment Bill, was introduced in Parliament in the early 1880s with the intent of protecting young women. This was to be done through the dual means of raising the age of female consent from 13 to 16 and making brothels more susceptible to legal controls. For several years the Bill languished in Parliament. At a crucial moment, support for it was energized by a sensational report, serialized in the daily Pall Mall Gazette in 1885, documenting the complexity and reach of organized prostitution as an industry and its reliance on sophisticated techniques for the entrapment of young girls. The full text of this report, by the crusading journalist W.T. Stead, is reprinted here in its entirety for the first time since its original publication. Its impact was tremendous and the report itself is thought to have provided the necessary impetus for the enactment of the most influential piece of legislation in British history relating to sexuality and its exploitation. It is a major primary source documenting Victorian attitudes toward female sexuality and its exploitation and is here generally accessible to the modern reader for the first time. Annotations to the original text identify people and places mentioned and other references made by Stead. An introductory essay places Stead's work in its historical context and identifies the various legal efforts made to combat organized prostitution from the 1820s onward. This essay also addresses one section of the Act, the so-called Labouchère Amendment, which provided the principal legal means for harassing homosexuals for the following eighty years."--From publisher description.