Bohemian Days in Fleet Street

BOOKS beget books, even when they are books of autobiography. Not that the writer of reminiscence will admit as much. He is—if you believe him—the victim of an irrepressible imp...

NOWADAYS, I understand, there are schools to educate young gentlemen for the Press. Indeed, in my own time a school of journalism was founded by a man who had taken to the calli...

THE receipt of a cheque in payment for the Robertson article in _Once a Week_ convinced me, not only that I had discovered my _métier_, but that I had formally entered upon a pr...

A call to the Bar and a residence in the Temple necessitate a somewhat intimate acquaintance with Fleet Street. But, of course, they do not make of one a Fleet Street man in the...

SOCIETY journalism had been founded just before I began to earn a “living wage” in Fleet Street, but its development and popularity were items of later history. The ball was set...

TO anyone born with a taste for the theatre, a _flair_ for the public demand in stage entertainment, and a desire for the society of actors and actresses, the position of dramat...

IN the course of the decades of which I am writing, London became the centre of a silent, gradual, irresistible, and altogether welcome revolution. It witnessed the passing away...

LONDON streets have been cleared of their professional “odd fish” owing to the parental solicitude of the police. The expensive operations of the London County Council having sw...

MY odd fish should have been disposed of in a single chapter, but one has lingered over the memory of them. After all, they contributed the comic element—or some of it—to many h...

THE promotion of clubs became a very busy industry under the consulate of Plancus. Of these promotions but few survive, and of these few none are of the proprietary kind. A club...

THERE are jokers and jokers. Professors of the art of practical joking are disappearing before an advancing civilization like the Red Indian of the Far West. The evanishment of...

JAMES ANSDELL was a retired Cape merchant. He was a genial, generous, and clever little man, and bore a somewhat striking facial resemblance to Livingstone the explorer. Why on...

FLEET STREET is haunted by the ghosts of dead newspapers. At midnight they flit—in white sheets, of course—out of the doors and windows of old offices in the thoroughfare itself...

NEARLY opposite the old Gaiety Theatre in the Strand stood the offices of Gaze and Co., the tourists’ agents. And in the early seventies the upper part of the premises had been...

TO the patrons of the music-halls of my early days about town, and to the performers in them, those places of entertainment were never known as “halls,” but always as “’alls.” N...

PEOPLE have short memories—particularly in the matter of benefits received. To-day, for instance, it is the usual and the correct thing to credit the London County Council with...

MEMBERS of the literary staff of a newspaper were, in the far-off and half-forgotten days, deputed to write graphic descriptions of what are known as “the classic events” of the...

TWO American managers had made themselves very well known to the Street of Adventure in the early eighties. It was before the advent of the mighty Frohman and other engineers of...

“ALL things earthly,” said the wit, “have an end—except Upper Wimpole Street.” And the end of the Press has been cheerfully foretold by the Jeremiahs of Fleet Street. So obvious...