Society journalism had been founded just before I began to earn a “living wage” in Fleet Street, but its development and popularity were items of later history. The ball was set rolling by Mr. Thomas Gibson Bowles—to become known in other times as the intractable Conservative Member of Parliament, and the beloved “Tommy” Bowles of the man in the street. The familiar sobriquet only got into print after Bowles captured King’s Lynn in the Tory interest, but he was called by that playful diminutive long before he entered the House of Commons, although he himself was probably unaware, as he would certainly resent, the fact. Pottinger Stephens bestowed upon him the familiar name, and in Fleet Street and the Strand he was always known to his Press contemporaries as “Tommy.”
That this gentleman should have turned Liberal in his old age, and that he should have captured his ancient Conservative stronghold in Lynn for the Rads, will not seem at all extraordinary to those who are a little behind the scenes. Those who accomplish a great deal for their party naturally expect that their party will do a little for them, provided they possess the necessary qualifications. Tommy certainly had the qualifications, and it is equally certain that he “put in” a lot of good work for the Tories; but he was never a persona grata with his leaders. The Conservatives are rather stupid on matters of birth and parentage, and Bowles did not come up to their standards. Having fought and lost two elections “on his own,” the party sent him down to a forlorn hope at Lynn. To their surprise and disgust he won the seat. For years he served the Tories loyally in Parliament, but when there came a division of loaves and fishes, Bowles was invariably left out of the reckoning. In the last Parliament in which he sat on the Conservative benches, he fell foul of his party, and personally attacked his hereditary leaders. From his place he alluded to the Salisbury administration as “the Hôtel Cecil,” and described the Front Bench as “a gallery of family portraits.”
Bowles acquired his knowledge of journalism and his respect for the conventions of Society on the Morning Post. He had started life, I believe, in Somerset House, which was just over the way, and he became imbued with the notion—a very profitable notion, as it turned out—that a paper chiefly devoted to the “hupper suckles,” written in their interests, and employing what he used to call “the passwords of Society,” should be a financial success. To what extent (at that period) Bowles was in Society, or how he obtained a knowledge of its passwords, or what those cryptic passwords were, I have never been able to find out; but, as one astute editorial admonition is “Know what you don’t know!” those same passwords may have been part of a pleasant myth.
His paper was duly launched at the price of twopence, and under the admirable title of Vanity Fair. But the paper, smartly and even wittily written as it was, would have failed to reach the somewhat inaccessible class for which its founder proposed to cater had it not been for his discovery of Pellegrini, and the appearance in Vanity Fair of that Italian artist’s inimitable cartoons. The price was raised to sixpence, the paper hit those remote circles for which it had been destined, “Tommy’s” career was assured, and Society journalism was established in our midst.
A tremendous number of imitators have sprung up from time to time—“they had their day, and ceased to be”—but there were only two other publications that enjoyed permanent success; and those two, with the first Society organ founded by Mr. Bowles, constituted, and still constitute, what is understood as Society journalism. The second paper in the trio was The World, founded by Edmund Yates; and the third was Truth, established by Henry Labouchere. I was fortunate enough to write for all three; for two of them I have written voluminously.
Bowles used to aver that he had no staff. He wrote a great deal of the paper himself, and his “Jehu Junior” articles, written to accompany the cartoons, were models of what essays should be. Light, epigrammatic, pungent, and excessively neat, they were the one possible accompaniment to “Ape’s” caricatures. A sentence from the “Jehu Junior” article always appeared beneath the picture. I can recall a couple. Beneath the first picture of Disraeli was inscribed: “He educated his party, and dished the Whigs to pass Reform, but to have become what he is from what he was is the greatest reform of all.” When Bishop Magee made his great speech in the House of Lords in defence of the Irish Church, his likeness appeared in the Vanity Fair gallery, and it had appended to it this extract from the article by Bowles: “If eloquence could justify injustice, he would have saved the Irish Church.” And the output of the able little editor was always up to sample.
Although Bowles professed to conduct his paper without the aid of a staff, he engaged regular contributors, which is pretty much the same thing. These gentlemen were never consulted in a body. “Collectivity” was never “pretty Fanny’s way,” as the Tory party, too late, discovered. But individual members of the body of contributors were occasionally summoned to meet their editor and proprietor at his chambers. When I was first ushered into the august presence, Bowles had rooms in Palace Chambers, at the corner of St. James’s Street, over against the Palace itself. He had just commenced his yachting career at that period, and adopted the mariner’s pose ashore to the extent of receiving you in his bare feet—to give the impression, I suppose, of rolling seas and a slippery deck.
But if one did not meet one’s confreres in the rooms of the editor, we were bound to encounter in the outer world—perhaps at the printer’s or elsewhere. The printer was Peter Rankin, of Drury Court—a dour and adventurous Scot who, having conveyed a newspaper by means of registration from its rightful owner, continued the management of the property on his own account. He had not the success which usually attends these Napoleonic sportsmen in the Street of Adventure. He came to grief and death, and nobody seemed to care. At his printing-offices I met for the first time Willmott Dixon, then a contributor under the Bowles banner. Dixon was at that time a fresh-coloured, stout, broad-shouldered man with an indomitably sweet temper which indicated its permanence in a dimple in the cheek.
Willmott Dixon had brought into Fleet Street with him much of the ebullient spirit and readiness for practical fun for which he was noted at Cambridge in his undergraduate days. Bon-vivant, raconteur, and essentially good fellow, he was in general demand as a companion. After the days of our Vanity, I was associated with Dixon on many other papers, for he had the pen of a ready writer, and was in considerable demand. Of all the men I have known, he was the quickest producer of “copy,” and he seemed capable of coming up with his tale of work under any and all conditions. His sporting articles and stories under the nom de plume of “Thormanby” are well known, and his accounts of the old prize-fights are the best ever written. The amount of “copy” produced by Dixon would equal that of any three ordinary journalists, taking a period of years in the productive stage of each. But why should I speak of Willmott Dixon in the past tense? He is now a hale young fellow of seventy, and within the last few years he has published three successful novels under his own name, one collection of sporting stories under his nom de plume of “Thormanby,” and an autobiography entitled “The Spice of Life.” This is the sort of veteran whom Mr. Philip Gibbs should take down Fleet Street with him one fine day, with the idea of presenting him to the young gentlemen who weep and have hysterics when a newspaper happens to put up the shutters. Very few, I imagine, of the invertebrate Press gang of the period will be writing saleable novels at seventy!
Henry Pottinger Stephens, another of Vanity’s regular contributors, I first met at the office of the publisher. We were both there on the same errand, I believe, stalking an oof bird. Stephens had just returned from Paris, where he had been acting as one of the correspondents of the Times. He also was to be my associate in other papers, my companion in other adventures. To these I may recur in another chapter.