Abstract
‘I asked for nothing but “a fair field and no favour”’, Hulda Friederichs once explained of her working life as a full-time staff journalist at the Pall Mall Gazette.1 The Prussian-born Friederichs did seem to overcome the challenges of gender and national biases in her professional career: she was one of the first women journalists in Britain to be employed on the same terms and conditions as her male colleagues under W.T. Stead at the Pall Mall Gazette in the early 1880s, and from 1896, as editor of George Newnes’ Westminster Budget, she was left ‘entirely free’ to dictate the content and form of that illustrated family weekly.2 In what has been called a ‘landmark appointment’,3 Friederichs capitalized fully on the opportunity to set the agenda of the Budget for almost nine years. Little is known of Friederichs’ personal history, however: details of her Prussian origins and her education in Cologne are obscure and to this day she remains a marginal figure in accounts of fin-de-siècle literary history. If Friederichs’ name is recognized at all it is usually because of her association with leading newspaper men: namely Newnes, whose biography she wrote in 1911, and Stead, for whom she worked at the Pall Mall Gazette (henceforth, PMG) from around the time of his early association with the paper in 1882. By the late 1880s she was the paper’s ‘chief interviewer’.4 The PMG has secured its place in literary history for Stead’s championing of reforming new journalism; not just for the controversial content Stead sought out for its pages but also for its innovative use of new journalistic forms.
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Notes
Hulda Friederichs, The Life of Sir George Newnes, Bart. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 229–31. Friederichs’ Life of Sir George Newnes, Bart included Newnes’ autobiographical notes and was written the year after his death. It was republished in 2008 and remains the standard reference work for information about his life. Among her other works are a biography of Gladstone, In the Evening of his Days. A Study of Mr Gladstone in Retirement (London: Westminster Gazette, 1896); The Romance of the Salvation Army (London: Cassel, 1907); a cowritten biography of the Salvation Army’s founder, General Booth (London: Nelson, 1913); and a number of translations of works from Russian and German.
See Kate Jackson’s George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain 1880–1910 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001) for a more recent account of Newnes’ role in the development of the popular press in late nineteenth-century Britain.
Friederichs is given the title of ‘chief interviewer’ in Saxon Mill’s biography of E.T. Cook, assistant editor of the PMG under Stead, and editor from 1890–92. See J. Saxon Mills, Sir Edward Cook KBE, a Biography (London: Constable, 1921), 123.
Matt Rubery observes that journalists such as William Beatty Kingston, Howard Rusel, and George Augustus Sala all used the interview mode but ‘the practice was still uncommon until editor W.T. Stead began to make regular use of interviews during the 1880s,’ see Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism, general eds, Laurel Brake and Marysa Deemor (London: British Library/Sage, 2008), 325. Similar claims are made in Barbara Garlick and Margaret Harris, eds, Victorian Journalism: Exotic and Domestic: Essays in Honour of P.D. Edwards (Queensland: Queensland University Press, 1998), 166,
and Harold Herd, The March of Journalism: the Story of the British Press from 1622 to the Present Day (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1952), 288, where the development of the interview is included as one of the key technical innovations introduced to the PMG by Stead, along with more regular use of illustrations and of crossheads.
Among other leading periodicals, including Strand Magazine, Friederichs also wrote for The Women’s Penny Paper, ‘the only paper in the world conducted, written (printed and published) by women,’ in 1891; this became the Woman’s Herald in 1891, where the term ‘New Woman’ was reputedly invented in an article published on 17 August 1893, ‘The Social Standing of the New Woman’. See Michelle Elizabeth Tusan, ‘Inventing the New Woman: Print Culture and Identity Politics During the Fin-de-siècle,’ Victorian Periodicals Review 31, no. 2 (Summer 1998), 169–82: 169. Tusan outlines the tension between the representations of the politically committed woman of the new century as the ‘New Woman’ in the women’s press from 1893–97 and the ‘counter image of the New Woman as a dystopian vision of society gone wrong’ that was promoted in the mainstream news (169).
Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 2.
W.T. Stead, ‘Future of Journalism,’ Contemporary Review 50 (Nov. 1886), 663.
W.T. Stead’s ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ appeared in the PMG from the 6–10 July 1885 and produced enormous outcry with much criticism directed towards Stead and his paper for the sensational treatment of material, including the use of cross-headings such as ‘The Violation of Virgins’, and ‘Strapping Girls Down’. See R. L. Schultz, Crusader in Babylon: W. T. Stead and the Pall Mall Gazette (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1972).
[Hulda Friederichs], ‘Darwinism at the Music Hall: A Chat with “Professor” Petrescu on the Art of Balancing,’ PMG (3 November 1890), 3. Patricia O’Hara notes that New Women writers are ‘mostly silent about the music hall and the women who performed there’, while the ‘At Home’ profiles, through which the general public met the stars of the music hall, had a general purpose to ‘gentrify and domesticate’ these women. See Patricia O’Hara, ‘The Women of Today: The Fin-de-Siècle Women of The Music Hall and Theatre Review,’ Victorian Periodicals Review 30, no. 2 (Summer 1997), 141–56: 143, 147. Friederichs’ piece, as I suggest, offers a more complicated intervention into these gendered spheres in her critique of the male impresarios of the music halls, rather than through the domestication of music-hall women.
Margaret D. Stetz, ‘Publishing Industries and Practices’ in The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, ed. Gail Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 113–130: 115.
Richard Salmon, ‘“Signs of Intimacy”’: the Literary Celebrity in the “Age of Interviewing”,’ Victorian Literature and Culture 25, no. 1 (1997), 159–77: 159.
Salmon, ‘“A Simulacra of Power”: Intimacy and Abstraction in the Rhetoric of New Journalism,’ Victorian Periodicals Review 30, no. 1 (Spring 1997), 41–52: 43.
P.D. Edwards, Dickens’s ‘Young Men’ George Augustus Sala, Edmund Yates and the World of Victorian Journalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 4. Edwards notes that Sala complained of his work for Household Words in the early 1850s in particular that the ‘need to conform to the Dickensian style of the magazine, and the fact that all of his contributions were anonymous, retarded the growth of his reputation’; the same could be argued of Friederichs’ work for the PMG, but as Edwards argues of Sala, ‘in reality, much of his writing for Household Words was widely recognized and admired and it opened the way for him to become, within ten or twelve years, one of the 2 or 3 best known journalists in England’ (5).
Alexis Easley, First-Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media 1830–1870 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 2.
Stephen Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain, vol. 1 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981), 343.
Sally Ledger, ‘The New Woman and Feminist Fictions’ in The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, ed. Gail Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 153–68: 153–4.
Barbara Onslow, Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Macmillan, 2000), 225. A summary of Westminster Gazette journalists in the Bookman in 1898 points up Friederichs’ ‘bright and varied work … especially in the way of interviewing’ and notes that ‘she has probably penetrated further into the Gladstone circle than any other journalist and is an acknowledged authority on domestic life at Hawarden’; see ‘The Journalist: The Staff of the Westminster Gazette,’ The Bookman (January 1898), 124–5, 125.
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© 2012 Fionnuala Dillane
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Dillane, F. (2012). ‘A fair field and no favour’: Hulda Friederichs, the Interview, and the New Woman. In: Gray, F.E. (eds) Women in Journalism at the Fin de Siècle. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137001306_9
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