Early Life
He was born in Embleton, Northumberland, the son of a Congregational minister, the Rev William Stead and Isabella (née Jobson), a cultivated daughter of a Yorkshire farmer. A year later the family moved to Howdon on the River Tyne. Stead was largely educated at home by his father, and by the age of five he was already well-versed in the Holy Scriptures and is said to have been able to read Latin almost as well as he could read English. It was Stead's mother who perhaps had the most lasting influence on her son's career. One of Stead's favourite childhood memories was of his mother leading a local campaign against the government's controversial Contagious Diseases Acts — which required prostitutes living in garrison towns to undergo medical examination.
In 1862 he attended Silcoates School in Wakefield, but in 1864 he was apprenticed to a merchant's office on the Quayside in Newcastle upon Tyne where he became a clerk.
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“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
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