1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Steevens, George Warrington

STEEVENS, GEORGE WARRINGTON (1860–1900), English journalist, was born at Sydenham, near London, on the 10th of December 1869, and was educated at the City of London School and Balliol College, Oxford, of which he was a scholar. He first began to write in undergraduate periodicals. In 1893 he was elected a fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, and in the same year spent some time at Cambridge, editing a weekly periodical, the Cambridge Observer, and becoming a contributor to the National Observer, then edited by Mr W. E. Henley. He then married and went to London, and joined the staff of the Pall Mall Gazette, contributing also to the New Review and Blackwood’s Magazine. Some of his articles were reprinted in Monologues of the Dead. In 1896 he joined the staff of the London Daily Mail, then just started, and went on various special missions for that paper, which resulted in more than one series of articles, afterwards turned into books. In this way he published The Land of the Dollar (1897), With the Conquering Turk (1897), Egypt in 1898, and With Kitchener to Khartoum (1899). In September 1899 he went to South Africa and joined Sir George White’s force in Natal as war-correspondent, being subsequently besieged in Ladysmith. He died during the siege, of enteric fever, on the 15th of January 1900. The articles he had sent home from South Africa were published posthumously in a volume called From Capetown to Ladysmith. Steevens had a remarkable gift of seizing the salient facts and principal characteristics in anything he wished to describe, and putting them in a vivid and readable way. His early death removed an interesting personality in English journalism.