January–May 1901: A Natural-Born Mountebank

Abstract

January 1901 was a busy month for the world at large, busier for Britain, excessively busy for the newspaper editors of that country. It began busily on the first day of the month, for no less an authority than the Astronomer Royal had decreed this day the first of the new century and this invited stock-taking on a grand scale. Fin de siècle had been the mood of the 1890s, now on 1 January 1901 the mood swung away to encompass the wider fresher vistas of the future. Everyone was caught up in the mystique of the occasion and indulged himself or herself in reveries that encompassed past endeavours, present hopes and future challenges. Every newspaper editor in the country knew this and each, in his different voice, said it. Ponderous platitudes abounded, nowhere more sonorously than in The Times. This paper, aware as always that its was the top voice for the top people and would dominate the yapping of its lesser contemporaries, declared firmly and unfrivolously that ‘An irresistible interest impels all but the most frivolous to look before and after as we enter on the new stage in the immeasurable process of the suns which begins to-day’.¹ It looked after by printing a survey of the past century, year by year, on 31 December and 1 January, to which Kipling’s flair and Alfred Austen’s less obvious talent lent poetic cadence,² and it looked before in a leading article of more than usual sententiousness.