Introduction

George Augustus Sala divided opinions. Although his career began in the visual arts as an illustrator and engraver, he would find his metier as a journalist and would go on to write for some of the most important and influential newspapers and periodicals of the nineteenth century, including Charles Dickens’s Household Words , the Illustrated London News, Illustrated Times, Cornhill and the Daily Telegraph. The latter was particularly noted for its ‘roaring young lions’ who created a new journalistic style, a ‘telegraphese’, that played a significant role in the history of journalism, but was held up to ridicule by its detractors. Sala became the editor of a shilling monthly, Temple Bar, and turned to writing novels and plays before becoming one of the first Special Correspondents when in 1863 the Telegraph sent him to America to report on the Civil War. He would provide copy on foreign countries and cultures for the newspaper for the next 25 years. His initials, GAS, signed after an article or a column became known throughout the English-speaking world and Sala came to represent the Fleet Street journalist. He successfully cultivated an image of journalistic and literary Bohemia, of a freedom from society’s conventions with a motto of ‘no method, no system, no management, no earnest purpose.’ ¹ As his career progressed, however, he found himself hobnobbing with some of the most respectable members of the Victorian establishment and P.H. Muir, the editor of Book Collector, described Sala as ‘not only one of the pioneers of modern journalism but a complete apotheosis of his profession.’ ²