scarcely regarded as a literary occupation at all." But because the income derived from it was certain and regular, it was "accepted, not without some sacrifice of pride, as an occupation by literary men ."[1]
Sir Wemyss Reid, writing of the press about 1857, says that "the Press—at all events in provincial towns—in those days was the reverse of respectable in the eyes of the world; and truly there was some reason for the low esteem in which it was held . The ordinary reporter on a country paper was generally illiterate, he was too often intemperate, and he was invariably ill-paid ."[2] Conditions had not improved when Catling found a few years later that "no landlord or landlady would listen to the application of any journeyman for a decent house. Time after time I was refused as a tenant, even when payment of rent in advance was offered."[3]
When Lord Lyndhurst invited the editor of The Times to dinner it "made a great uproar,"[4] but a recent journalist can facetiously remark that an "editor attends more public banquets than a cabinet minister."[5]
The wheel turns round and Moberly Bell is cited as saying, only twenty years ago, that it was an unheard of thing for a member of the editorial staff of The Times to be seen talking with any member of the commercial department. Men working on the paper were forbidden to know each other.[6] In 1918 the wheel again turned when in Iowa the occupation was officially declared to be an unessential industry and its members therefore subject to the draft.[7]
A pendant to the social position of the editor is the very considerable number of editors who have been imprisoned - usually
- ↑ A. A. Watts, Alaric Watts, I, 156 .
- ↑ S. J. Reid, Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid, p . 37.
- ↑ My Life's Pilgrimage, p. 81.
- ↑ Greville Memoirs, III, 159, 169.
- ↑ J. Pendleton, "The Humors of Newspaper Editing," Littell's Living Age, August 1, 1896, 210: 305-309.
- ↑ H. Simonis, The Street of Ink, pp. 4–5.
- ↑ New York Times, August 8, 1918; Secretary Baker on the status of newspaper men with reference to the draft, ib., August 9, 1918.
See also ruling of United States immigration officials in Montreal that a newspaper man is a member of a learned profession . —New York Evening Post, March 4, 1922.
