The Times Saturday Review carried an interview by Valerie Grove with Gillian Slovo on the occasion of the publication of her latest novel about General Gordon of Khartoum.
William Stead, the campaigning journalist, is one of the characters in the novel.
This 2012 interview tells us that Stead had published what is ‘widely acknowledged as the first newspaper interview’ with Gordon in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1884.
The word British* should presumably be used to qualify that status as ‘first newspaper interview’, unless the information I gleaned recently in relation to Sir Arthur Sullivan is wrong.
I shall try to remember to check with Manchester Central Library’s superb collection of Victorian periodicals to get the full sense of how this interview was presented to readers, just as soon as the refurbished building is open again. Assuming of course that the periodicals have been thought worth the space they occupy, not thrown away to make room for superior modern digital methods of accessing our history.
* The Spartacus website gives the author Henry M Hyndman as the source for this assertion. Hyndman does acknowledge Stead’s ‘ American instructors’.
