The Telepathic WT Stead

William T Stead was a towering figure in late Victorian and Edwardian England who was also obsessed with every aspect of the occult.

William T Stead was a towering figure in late Victorian and Edwardian England, a journalist and proprietor who invented the campaigning tabloid expose at the Pall Mall Gazette and then set up the world famous Review of the Reviews in 1890. He was an ardent imperialist, a Liberal radical, a feminist, dissenting Christian, and bugbear of every Prime Minister from 1875 to his death on the Titanic in 1912.

He was also obsessed with every aspect of the occult, from Spiritualism and Theosophy to the new-fangled science of psychical research. He claimed to have powers of telepathic communication, which considerably aided his management of world news, and was also a very chatty spirit after drowning on the Titanic.

Roger Luckhurst teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London. His most recent books include The Mummy's Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy (Oxford, 2012) and a co-edited collection, W. T. Stead: Newspaper Revolutionary (British Library Press, 2012). His edition of H. P. Lovecraft's Classic Horror Tales was published by Oxford in May 2013.

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