Secrets of a Titanic Victim: the story of the real My Fair Lady - Tapa blanda

1912 was the year W T Stead drowned in the Titanic disaster, and  the year George Bernard Shaw wrote Pygmalion, the main character being young Eliza from Lisson Grove. Shaw had worked for Stead on the Pall Mall Gazette in the era of its most scandalous headline: 'The £5 virgin'. Stead's special notoriety arose from a sensational stunt in which he claimed he had personally witnessed the purchase of a young girl caled 'Lily' and her sale to a brothel for the sum of £5. His audacious claims were to pass into journalistic legend and within a month the age of consent for girls was raised from thirteen to sixteen. The true story of the £5 virgin is what this book is about . Just about everything in Stead's supposedly irrefutable story of the purchase of the girl of thirteen was either fabricated or inaccurate. Gavin Weightman's meticulous detective work makes for a shocking indictment of Stead's journalistic methods. But it allows the real 'Lily' to emerge. She was a young girl called Eliza from Lisson Grove. Gavin Weightman's previous books include the best-selling Frozen Water Trade.

To mark the hundredth anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic Gavin Weightman has written an account of it most prominent victim and the scandalous crime that defined his life. The man was W. T. Stead, former editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, and easily the most notorious newspaper man of his generation, who was both idolised and despised for his campaigning style on both sides of the Atlantic. When the news broke that he had not survived the Titanic disaster the newspapers were filled with column inches about his exploits. None was more controversial than his abduction in 1885 of a thirteen year old London girl whom he arranged to have indecently assaulted and spirited away to France to be cared for by his friends in the Salvation Army. It was a stunt which shocked Parliament into raising the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen, where it remains today. A journalistic triumph, perhaps, but at what cost to a desperately poor London family and an entirely innocent cockney girl? Stead, along with others, was tried at the Old Bailey and sent to prison for abducting the girl and arranging for her virginity to be checked by a French abortionist. George Bernard Shaw, a book reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette in 1885 despised Stead for this journalistic stunt. With subtle satire he wove many of the details of the scandal into his play Pygmalion which he was finishing when the Stead obituaries appeared. Eliza, the girl Stead abducted, became the Eliza of My Fair Lady.