Female Journalists in Late 19th Century London

“A lady journalist, it is reported, has been informing an interviewer, that she makes by her profession, and by working no more than an hour and a half everyday, the very respectable income of a thousand pounds a year…a thousand pounds a year! Hark! Do you hear? It is the frou-frou of a hundred thousand skirts, the rush of two thousand feet, the cry of an hundred thousand tongues…all roads that lead to London are variegated with all the hues that feminine costume can assume; there is a movement…there is a swift and valuable current; they pour by their thousands out of trains,…the offices of all the journals are blocked…What a chance! What a chance!”

So wrote English novelist and historian Walter Besant in 1893.

Yes, by the 1890s, women were already journalists in England and in American cities, and yes, coming up against patronizing words like those above and in the workplace.

And so when I needed a fictional female journalist for my Sherlockian series An Irregular Detective Mystery, I looked to England in the 1880s to 1890s.

One was Mary Frances Billington. She helped to create the Southern Echo newspaper in 1888. She moved on to the Daily Graphic in 1890, and on to the Daily Telegraph in 1897. During her tenure as journalist, she donned full diving gear underwater at the Royal Navy Exhibition, and covered the funeral of Alfred, Lord Tennyson at Westminster Abbey.

There was also Eliza Lynn Linton. She arrived in London in 1845. She started out writing novels, though many were unsuccessful. She also spent some time as a journalist, knew George Eliot, and joined the staff of the Morning Chronicle in 1849, which made her the first woman to be paid a salary as a journalist. In Paris, she was a correspondent for The Leader (a paper her husband founded), she was a regular contributor to Charles Dickens’s Household Words, to St James’s Gazette, the Daily News, Ainsworth’s Magazine, The Cornhill Magazine and several other newspapers.

There was also Nellie Bly in America (real name Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman), who did journalistic stunts like beating the Jules Verne Around the World in 80 Days in 72 days. She also posed as a mental patient in an asylum to expose the ill-treatment of the mentally ill.

And there were many, many more.

So when I created Ellsie Moira Littleton who writes for the Daily Chronicle (a real newspaper), it wasn’t just a stunt move like Nellie Bly to make an unusual character. They were already there in England and in America, striving to make their mark (and doing it!) in sometimes often dangerous ways, and for nearly all the major newspapers of the day.

In fact, I was treading in my own footsteps, because as I was struggling to get that first contract for my novels, I, too, took to journalism to see if someone, ANYONE would pay for my writing. (I learned the craft in high school! See my ode to my high school journalism teacher) Besides on-spec articles I wrote for quirky magazines, I also wrote as a stringer for two dailies and four weekly newspapers…while raising a 3-year-old. Writing as a reporter is a very healthy exercise for anyone wanting to hone their writing skills for novels. It trains you to work to a deadline, you need to write fast and accurately, and it directs you to get to the point! Features and longer news stories also tutor you to develop a beginning, middle, and ending. It’s where a lot of our favorite authors began, after all: Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Jack London, and many more.

So I get Ellsie. I didn’t have to fight to get what she got (equal salary with men) but it helps you to find a voice, and to speak up with that voice for yourself. No one else will do it for you.