The editor enters the story
Stead grew up in a Congregational minister’s family in northern England. Still in his early twenties, he became editor of the Northern Echo in Darlington. He moved to London’s Pall Mall Gazette and took charge of it in 1883. His campaigns combined prominent headlines, interviews and a direct appeal to readers to take action.
In 1885 The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon exposed the sexual exploitation of girls. Stead’s own part in procuring a girl, Eliza Armstrong, for the investigation brought a criminal conviction and three months in prison. He subsequently founded the Review of Reviews, through which he addressed an international audience on politics, peace and religion.
New York and a posthumous byline
Satan’s Invisible World Displayed was the Review of Reviews annual for 1898. Its subject is corruption in New York, and its principal evidence comes from the Lexow inquiry into the police. Stead died aboard the Titanic in 1912. The Blue Island appeared afterwards as communications attributed to him, recorded by Pardoe Woodman and Stead’s daughter Estelle. That credit belongs to the history of his Spiritualist reputation.
