William Nathan Stedman

William Nathan Stedman (1861-1919) was a British printer, publisher, and second-hand bookseller, the proprietor of bookshops in Sydney, Australia (49 Liverpool Street) and London, England (5, The Exchange, East Finchley), who is most notorious as a poet of ill repute, his verse typically found to be very poor. Politically, Stedman was an apparent supporter of Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, and vehement in his opposition to William Gladstone, whom Stedman claimed was responsible for the Whitechapel murders and held to be a mesmericly-empowered Anti-Christ, this latter allegation being partly supported on an isopsephic basis, calculating GLADSTONE to be 666 (by transliterating E as the long Eta, ē, 8, rather than Epsilon, e, 5). Criminally, Stedman was one of several men, including William James Morgan and Sir Gilbert Edward Campbell, who were convicted of fraud in 1892 stemming from the operation of certain "bogus literary societies."[I]

Selected Works

 * &mdash; reviewed in the Bookseller as "seventeen effusions" that "may doubtless be of interest to their authors and his friends, but we fail to see why they should be circulated beyond the limited indicated."
 * &mdash; reviewed in the Bookseller as "seventeen effusions" that "may doubtless be of interest to their authors and his friends, but we fail to see why they should be circulated beyond the limited indicated."

International Society of Literature, Science, and Art (1891-'92)
Stedman, along with William James Morgan and several others, established the International Society of Literature, Science, and Art, in connection with the Artists' Alliance, an institution that was ultimately brought down when all its executives were convicted on fraud charges.



For his role, Steadman was found guilty of conspiracy to commit fraud and obtaining money by false pretenses, being sentenced to fifteen months' hard labour.


 * Court Transcript, https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=def4-847-18920912&div=t18920912-847#highlight