Challenging the ‘Golden Goose’? 1885–1900

Abstract

This 15-year period saw some of the most mature and wide-ranging legal reportage, but also the shift towards a new approach for incorporating sensationalism into crime reportage, with a renewed emphasis on investigative journalism. Starting with W.T. Stead’s ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ campaign in 1885, such practices were to challenge the conventions established by lawyers as reporters and journalists for legally responsible and informed reportage with the emphasis on in-trial and post-trial journalism. In many ways, Stead’s reportage in the Pall Mall Gazette was a harbinger of things to come, because, though his own trial for unlawful kidnapping featured heavily in the newspapers, the contextual background to that trial was Stead’s own exercises in investigative journalism. The purpose behind Stead’s series had been to demonstrate the ease with which he and his coadjutors (including Bramwell Booth and Josephine Butler) had procured an under-age girl for the ostensible purposes of facilitating sexual intercourse with a certified virgin. The aim was to ensure that the Criminal Law Amendment Bill currently before Parliament would be passed before the session ended, unlike its predecessors since 1881. These had failed largely due to entrenched positions in the Lords. His investigations into matters then of more moral than criminal concern, in order to promote legislative change in the shape of what became the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, required him and his collaborators to break the existing law.KeywordsPublic ProsecutorExpert TestimonySeptember 1885Criminal Justice ProcessCrime NewsThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.