The Pall Mall Gazette


The Pall Mall Gazette was an evening newspaper founded in London on 7 February 1865 by George Murray Smith; its first editor was Frederick Greenwood. In 1921, The Globe merged into The Pall Mall Gazette, which itself was absorbed into The Evening Standard in 1923.
Beginning late in 1868, at least through the 1880s, a selection or digest of its contents was published as the weekly Pall Mall Budget

History

The Pall Mall Gazette took the name of a fictional newspaper conceived by William Makepeace Thackeray. Pall Mall is a street in London where many gentlemen's clubs are located, hence Thackeray's description of this imaginary newspaper in his novel The History of Pendennis :
We address ourselves to the higher circles of society: we care not to disown it—The Pall Mall Gazette is written by gentlemen for gentlemen; its conductors speak to the classes in which they live and were born. The field-preacher has his journal, the radical free-thinker has his journal: why should the Gentlemen of England be unrepresented in the Press?

Under the ownership of George Smith from 1865 to 1880, with Frederick Greenwood as editor, The Pall Mall Gazette was a Conservative newspaper. Greenwood resigned in 1880, when the paper's new owner wished for it to support the policies of the Liberal Party.
William Thomas Stead's editorship from 1883 to 1889 saw the paper cover such subjects as child prostitution; his campaign compelled the government to increase the age of consent from 13 to 16 in 1885. This was one of the first examples of investigative journalism, and Stead was arrested for "unlawful taking of a child". The affair distressed its owner, Thompson, who dismissed Stead, and hired the handsome society figure, Henry Cust, editor from 1892 to 1896, who returned the paper to its Conservative beginnings.
Thompson sold the paper to William Waldorf Astor in 1896. Sir Douglas Straight was editor until 1909, followed by F. J. Higginbottom, under whom the paper declined. Circulation doubled between 1911-15 under the editor James Louis Garvin, but the paper declined once more under its last editor D. L. Sutherland. It was absorbed into The Evening Standard in 1923.
Several well-known writers contributed to The Pall Mall Gazette over the years. George Bernard Shaw gained his first job in journalism writing for the paper. Other contributors have included Anthony Trollope, Friedrich Engels, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Whibley, Sir Spencer Walpole, Arthur Patchett Martin, and Jamaican-born writer Eneas Sweetland Dallas.

Ownership