The Pall Mall Gazette
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
The Minotaur is a painting inspired by reading “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” by William Thomas Stead.
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The Pall Mall Gazette was an evening newspaper founded in London February 7 1865. It was owned by George Murray Smith; its first editor was Frederick Greenwood. In 1921 The Globe merged into the Pall Mall Gazette, which itself was absorbed into the Evening Standard in 1923.
The Pall Mall Gazette takes the name of an imaginary newspaper conceived by William Makepeace Thackeray. Pall Mall is a street in London home to many gentleman's clubs, hence Thackeray's description of his imaginary newspaper in his novel The History of Pendennis:
We address ourselves to the higher circles of society: we care not to disown it--the Pall Mall Gazette is written by gentlemen for gentlemen; its conductors speak to the classes in which they live and were born. The field-preacher has his journal, the radical free-thinker has his journal: why should the Gentlemen of England be unrepresented in the Press?
Under the ownership of George Smith from 1865 to 1880, with Frederick Greenwood as editor, the Pall Mall Gazette was a Conservative newspaper. Greenwood resigned in 1880 when the paper came under new ownership who wished the paper to support Liberal policies.
William Thomas Stead's editorship from 1883 to 1889 saw the paper cover such subjects as child prostitution, their campaign helped get the government to increase the age of consent from 13 to 16 in 1885.
Henry Cust, editor from 1892 to 1896, returned the paper to its Conservative beginnings.
A large number of well-known writers contributed to the Pall Mall Gazette over the years, for example George Bernard Shaw got his first journalistic job writing for the paper. Other contributors included Anthony Trollope, Frederick Engels, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Spencer Walpole and the Jamaican-born popular (but now forgotten) writer E. S. Dallas.
The Pall Mall Gazette is referred to several times in Arthur Conan Doyle's classic detective stories about Sherlock Holmes. Doyle was an ardant realist, constantly making references to Victorian popular society; Watson would often enter the home of Sherlock to disturb him reading a copy of the Pall Mall Gazette.
