Frederic Whyte (1867–1940)

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I confess I didn't know a lot about Stead before I read this. He was born in 1849 and famously died in 1912. From 1871 he began to make a career as a crusading journalist on the Northern Echo (which is of course still going); in 1880 he moved from Darlington to London to join the staff of the daily Pall Mall Gazette, and became its editor in 1883. He fell out with the P.M.G. in 1889 and in 1890 started his own monthly, The Review of Reviews which he kept show more up until he died. In 1904 he tried to start a daily paper (called, with startling originality, The Daily Paper) and hired Frederic Whyte as the book review editor, but it folded in weeks. Twenty years earlier he had been the first - but far from the last - editor to commission a theatre review from George Bernard Shaw.

Anyone interested in the late Victorian and Edwardian history of any of the subjects which Stead campaigned on - child prostitution (against); sending General Gordon to Khartoum (in favour); Cecil Rhodes (mixed); the Boer War (against); Irish Home Rule (in favour); religion (in favour); spiritualism (in favour); world peace (also in favour) - will find much in terms of primary source material here. This is a book much more about trees than about the forest; for each of the memorable events in Stead's career, we get substantial excerpts from Stead's own correspondence, both incoming and outgoing, plus where possible the reminiscences of other protagonists (Whyte was writing in 1925, but had obviously started a few years before).

Stead comes across as opinionated, eloquent, persuasive, and fundamentally good at heart, but very poor at acquiring and managing allies, and much better at making enemies through his writing, both through actual hostility and through journalistic indiscretion. His enthusiasm for spiritualism must strike most of us now as pretty barmy, and Whyte doesn't pull his punches on that score. But on the other big issues he was more right (Boer War, Ireland, prostitution) than wrong (General Gordon).

His death came about as a result of accepting an invitation to speak on the same platform as President Taft at a meeting in New York on the topic of "World Peace", as part of a new American movement to encourage men and boys to participate more in the Church. His last editorial in the Review of Reviews explains the whole scheme (which seems well-meaning but also wacky) in great detail, and signs off confidently,

"I expect to leave by the Titanic on April 10th, and hope I shall be back in London in May."

Of course, he never made it to New York. show less

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Published in 1898, this was my distant relative's first book (and he didn't write another until 1925). It's very difficult to write about performances that happened long ago, by actors who are long dead, and yet make it interesting. I think Whyte does it as well as is possible. It's a chatty account of great actors of the nineteenth century, illustrated with lots and lots of photographs (or engravings, for the older subjects) some of which are really show more striking - Edmund Kean, for instance, looks extraordinary. My copy of the book as a dozen or so extra contemporary loose-leaf photographs of contemporary actors tucked inside it as an unexpected bonus.

Whyte runs through several generations of great British actors, but also extends his view to the United States, writing for example of how Junius Brutus Booth emigrated from London to a career of success in which he was followed by his son Edwin; and also of how the play Our American Cousin had provided a ready-made role for the best American actors to perform in Europe. The off-stage part played by Junius Booth's younger son at a Washington DC performance of Our American Cousin on 14 April 1865 is not mentioned. I discovered while checking this on WikiPedia that Junius Booth's younger brother Algernon, who stayed in England, apparently was the great-great-great-grandfather of Cherie Booth, who is married to Tony Blair.

Whyte is also very keen to emphasise the Irish links of all the key theatrical figures he possibly can (in the year this book was published, he was heckled while giving a public lecture on "Irish Actors and Dramatists" by both George Bernard Shaw and Bram Stoker, who were in the audience). I was surprised that I knew one he missed - William Betty, who (as reported here and elsewhere) took the London stage by storm aged 13 in 1804, was brought up in Dromore, Co Down.

I was especially struck by Whyte's exhortation to the reader, after quoting extensively from someone else's glowing review of Mrs Patrick Campbell's 1895 performance as Juliet, as follows:

"The theatrical dilettante of a hundred years hence, who may turn over these pages at the British Museum, will accept this passage, I imagine, as we accepted those in which [Charles] Lamb and [his colleagues] sang the praises of the players of their time.

"Do so, Casual Reader of 1998! Do so, without hesitation!"

It is startling to be addressed so directly from the past, by a writer who was born precisely a hundred years before me. OK, it's eight years later than he was aiming for, but it's a good shot none the less. show less

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I think this is an entertaining little book about Sweden. Karin, Frederic's wife, contributes a couple of chapters, about the Gotha Canal and the region of Dalecarlia (now generally called Dalarna). But it's Frederic's writing that really shines. He doesn't quite sell me on the northern mining districts, but he does sell me on Gothenburg, and by an odd coincidence I read the two chapters on the diplomatic mission of Bulstrode Whitelocke to the court of show more Queen Christina in 1655-1656 while waiting in a pub for a British diplomat friend to turn up.

One aspect of Swedish culture which I confess I had not really thought of much at all is the writing of Selma Lagerlöf, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1909, the first woman and the first Swede to do so. Whyte is very big on Lagerlöf, devoting a longish early chapter to her hero Nils Holgersson and then coming back to her for a later chapter on touring her house in Värmland. Sounds like she may well be worth a try. show less

http://nhw.livejournal.com/762813.html

This is the autobiography of Frederic Whyte (1867-1940), a distant cousin of mine who was active in the literary world of London in the quarter-century before the first world war. (Indeed, although the sub-title on the cover page of the book is "Memories of the Day before Yesterday", the running title on the right-hand pages is "Memories of Literary London".)

A lot of it is literary name-dropping, often of people I haven't heard of - though there is one show more amusing moment when Whyte, giving a rare public speech in 1898, is heckled from the audience by both George Bernard Shaw and Bram Stoker, which sounds to me like a truly frightening experience. Thirty years later, Whyte wrote to Shaw to offer his services as editor of Shaw's correspondence; Shaw replied, "I do not think it would be possible to publish much of my correspondence until the year 2028 or thereabouts; but, of course, you would make an excellent editor if you could manage to live so long." He also writes of Arthur Conan Doyle ("he looked like two stolid policemen rolled into one") as being a fellow-Irishman, which came as a surprise to me but I see on checking that both of Doyle's parents were Irish Catholics.

But Whyte also writes with deep affection of various writers of whom I have never heard: Tighe Hopkins, Arthur Diosy, his one-time flatmate Herbert Compton. Funny how history filters out some people.

Whyte was educated at a suspiciously numerous list of boarding schools (checking the family genealogy I see that his father had died in 1883 when Frederic was 16); his first job, in 1887-88, was as a Reuters correspondent in Constantinople; he then got hired as an editor at the publisher Cassell's, where he worked from 1889 to 1905; he then decided to go freelance, translating books and doing other bits of writing with a couple of other short-lived regular publishing jobs.

Frederic Whyte was pro-Home Rule, and very much an agnostic; his Irish relatives were all fervent Unionists and devout Catholics (in the days when that was a less unlikely combination than it is now); but they appear to have agreed to get along.

There are a couple of other chapters randomly thrown in on the art of translation, and the claims of phrenology (this one featuring heavily both Alfred Russel Wallace and G.K. Chesterton). He also reflects rather ambiguously on the first world war, rather giving the impression that while he thought it was a bad idea at the time (it may not be insignificant that this was precisely the point that he moved to Sweden), from the viewpoint of 1931 he is no longer so sure.

Anyway, an interesting book which enlightened me on various points. show less