(2 of 2)
Yates's mother, Elizabeth Brunton Yates, was Dickens' favorite actress. Yates, who was born in 1831, was a clerk in the General Post Office when he turned to spare time journalism in 1852. He wrote for Chambers' Journal, the Daily News and Dickens' Household Words, meanwhile trying to persuade London newspapers to let him do a gossip column for them. In 1855 a new paper called the Illustrated Times let him try this new experiment in journalism. It was so successful that within three years Yates was invited to edit a new paper, Town Talk.
In his second issue of Town Talk Yates wrote an impertinent, unfriendly piece about Thackeray, accusing him, among other things, of "an extravagant adulation of birth and position." Thackeray accused Yates of picking up gossip at the Garrick Club and managed to have him blackballed. Dickens, who had been the subject of a flattering piece in the first issue, defended Yates, although he condemned the article and wrote that the entire incident, which had become a literary sensation, was "a frightful mess, muddle, complication and botheration." The incident definitely scarred Dickens' and Thackeray's relationship. Yates remembered it bitterly all his life, and in the issue of Time for January, 1880 (see cut) gave his own version of the old scandal.
For a while, Yates, who had gone to America in 1872 to lecture, was European correspondent for James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald. In 1874 he started The World, a respectable and, within six months, very profitable magazine. In 1884, five years after founding Time, he gave up its editorship. The year before, in The World, he had managed to turn out a spicy paragraph on the Earl of Lonsdale which the court found libelous. He served seven weeks in prison and, although he went on writing after his release, his health broke down. In 1894, he died. Time, which continued under various editors, finally ceased publication in 1891. Although no figures can be found, its circulation probably did not exceed 2,000 monthly copies.
Cordially yours,