Bohemian Days in Fleet Street

Transcribed from the 1913 John Long edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
BY A JOURNALIST
LONDON JOHN LONG, LIMITED NORRIS STREET, HAYMARKET MCMXIII
First published in 1913
Books beget books, even when they are books of autobiography. Not that the writer of reminiscence will admit as much. He is—if you believe him—the victim of an irrepressible impulse, or he has at length (usually at great length) yielded to the solicitations of a large circle of acquaintances. I am impelled to my present enterprise by no sense of my own aptitude, nor have my discerning friends urged that some record of my experiences would supply a long-felt want. My book—like a great many other books—owes its existence to a book that went before it. In other and plainer words, if Mr. Philip Gibbs had not written his novel entitled “The Street of Adventure,” this present collection of reminiscences would never have been attempted. And I should, perhaps, apologize to Mr. Gibbs for saddling him with the awful responsibility. The novel to which allusion has been made—and a very excellent one it is—suddenly, but with much distinctness, suggested my course. The muck-rake of reminiscence is deliberately taken up because I represent a condition of Press life that has apparently ceased to exist. If one accepts the statements of Mr. Gibbs—and there is every reason why one should—the Fleet Street of to-day bears no sort of resemblance to the Fleet Street of yesterday. If I describe the London Press and the London Pressman of less than two decades ago, I am describing a state of things that has been reformed off the face of the earth, and a race of men extinct as the Dodo.
To an old member of the Press this is the real significance of “The Street of Adventure,” for the story describes—with entire candour and accuracy; one can entertain no doubt about that—the working of the Metropolitan Press and its personnel as they exist at this the dawn of the century. I have read chapter after chapter of the story with a growing sentiment of astonishment and dismay. The accomplished author describes, at first hand, a conjuncture of men and conditions so different to that existing in my time that I completely fail to recognize in this picture of the present a single salient characteristic of the past. Had the writer discovered for us evidences of a natural progress of evolution, a survival of fitness, an institution rising on stepping-stones of its dead self to higher things, this book had never been conceived. But this melancholy tale suggests a sad and sudden deterioration, the inauguration of a period of decadence, the setting in of a newspaper rot. It is in the belief that a certain interest must centre about times that have gone beyond recall, and round the names of the men whose successors are ruthlessly painted for us in the pages before me, that I address myself to the task of fixing the random recollection of some twenty jocund years.