Nellie Bly

She was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in 1864, in a small Pennsylvania settlement named after her family: her father owned the mill at the centre of it. For a few early years the household was comfortable, and the girl her neighbours nicknamed "Pink" had every reason to expect an easy life. Then her father died, and within months the comfort had evaporated. His estate was divided among the children of two marriages, and no proper provision was made for the second; Elizabeth's mother was left close to destitute, with a houseful of children and no income. A second marriage turned violent, and the divorce that ended it was fought in open court, where the teenaged Elizabeth testified. She spent one term at boarding school, hoping to train as a teacher, before the money went. By the time she was eighteen the family had moved to Pittsburgh and was taking in boarders to survive. She added an "e" to the name — Cochrane — because it looked more elegant, and began hunting for work a young woman with no money and no connections might realistically get.

What changed everything took her about an evening to write. In January 1885 the Pittsburgh Dispatch ran a column about what girls were good for, which concluded, more or less, that they were good for the home and not much else. Elizabeth read it, lost her temper, and sent the paper a furious reply signed only "Lonely Orphan Girl". The editor, George Madden, was impressed enough to print an appeal asking the anonymous writer to make herself known. She turned up at the office. Within days she had been given a trial piece, and within weeks she was on the staff — the first regular job of her life. Following the convention of the time, the paper gave her a pen name lifted from a popular song, and Elizabeth Cochrane became Nellie Bly. She was twenty, she had no training whatever, and she began at once on the things nobody else was writing about: divorce, the wretched pay of factory girls, the condition of the city's slums. Readers responded. So did the factory owners who advertised in the paper, rather less warmly.

Complaints from advertisers had a predictable effect. She was quietly moved off serious reporting and onto the women's pages, expected to fill columns with fashion, gardening and society news. She lasted only so long. Aged twenty-one she took herself to Mexico, more or less alone, and spent about six months there as a foreign correspondent, sending back dispatches about ordinary Mexican life, poverty, and the treatment of local journalists under Porfirio Díaz. When she began criticising that government too openly the situation grew uncomfortable and she came home; the pieces later appeared as a book. Back in Pittsburgh, the women's pages were waiting for her again. This time she did not stay. She left a short, cheerful note announcing that she was off to New York, and in 1887, with very little money, she went. For four months in New York she got nowhere at all. Editors would not see her. Her savings shrank week by week. It took pure nerve to change that: she talked her way past the doorkeeper of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and refused to leave until somebody listened.

The assignment she was given at the World was not a gentle introduction. The paper wanted somebody to find out what really happened inside the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island, the city institution in the East River that swallowed New York's poorest women and told the public almost nothing. Rumours of neglect and violence had circulated for years, but nobody outside could confirm them. The plan was simple and alarming: Nellie Bly would feign insanity, get herself committed by the courts, and report from inside as an inmate, not a visitor. Nobody could promise how long it would last, or how she would get out. She prepared for a single night, sitting before a mirror practising vacant stares and wild laughter until she could produce them on demand. The next day she took a room in a boarding house for working women, gave a false name, refused to sleep, and spent the evening telling the lodgers she was frightened of them and her trunks had been stolen. It took less than twenty-four hours. By morning the terrified household had called the police.

What followed exposed the system before she had even reached the island. She was taken to a courtroom, examined briefly by a judge and then by doctors, and declared insane by every professional who looked at her. One physician pronounced her hopeless. A newspaper reported the mystery of the beautiful madwoman nobody could identify. Within a few days she had passed through Bellevue Hospital and been put on the boat to Blackwell's Island — and the moment the gates closed behind her she stopped acting altogether. She spoke normally, answered questions sensibly and made no attempt to appear mad. Not one doctor noticed. What she found inside was worse than the rumours. The food was spoiled beef, water that tasted of dirt, and bread so hard the inmates could barely eat it. New arrivals were stripped and washed in freezing water, bucket after bucket, then dressed in thin clothing and left in unheated rooms. Patients sat upright on hard benches for hours in silence, forbidden to move or talk. Rats ran through the buildings. Attendants mocked, slapped and choked the women who complained.

What disturbed her most was not the cruelty but the population: many of the women did not seem ill at all. Some were simply poor, with nowhere else to be sent. Several were immigrants who spoke no English, could not answer a single question, and had been certified insane on that basis alone. Others, she was convinced, had arrived sane and were being broken by the place itself — the asylum, as she wrote, was a trap: easy to enter, impossible to argue your way out of. She spent ten days there before the World sent a lawyer to get her out, and left knowing the women she had shivered beside were staying. The articles appeared within days, and the ordeal soon afterwards as the book Ten Days in a Mad-House. A grand jury opened an investigation and Bly went with it; the authorities had been warned and much hurriedly cleaned up, but the report was still an indictment of how the city treated its most helpless, and a much larger budget was granted for the care of the insane. She was twenty-three, and famous.

The asylum piece made her the leading practitioner of what the trade called stunt journalism: reporting in which the writer goes undercover and becomes part of the story. Over the next two years she was relentless — she had herself arrested to see how women were treated in jail, took work in a sweatshop, and exposed a lobbyist who boasted of buying votes. Then, in 1889, she suggested something larger. Jules Verne's novel had sent its hero around the world in eighty days; Bly proposed to do it faster, in reality. On 14 November 1889 she left Hoboken, New Jersey, on a steamer with one small bag and the dress she stood up in. She travelled by ship and train through England, France, Italy, Egypt, Ceylon, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan; at Amiens she broke her journey to meet Verne, who wished her luck and doubted she would manage it. A rival magazine, she soon learned, had sent another journalist, Elizabeth Bisland, racing the opposite way on the same day. The World turned it into a spectacle, inviting readers to guess her finishing time.

She reached Jersey City on 25 January 1890. The journey had taken just over seventy-two days — a real record, and a spectacle crowds turned out along the route to watch. Bisland, delayed by a missed connection, arrived days later. For a while Bly was one of the most famous women in America. Then it turns quieter. In 1895 she married Robert Seaman, a millionaire manufacturer forty years her senior, and when he died she took over his firm, the Iron Clad Manufacturing Company, which made steel containers. She ran it herself, held patents connected with its products, and tried to be a model employer. It ended badly: employees embezzled on a large scale, and by the early 1910s the company had collapsed, taking her fortune. So she went back to what she knew. Caught in Europe when the First World War broke out, she sent dispatches from the Eastern Front — one of the first women to report from it — and was briefly arrested as a spy. She returned to New York, wrote an advice column, campaigned for abandoned children, and died of pneumonia in 1922, aged fifty-seven.

The long echo is not really the race. It is the ten days. Bly did not invent undercover reporting, but she made it famous, and the muckraking journalism of the following decades — reporters who went inside slaughterhouses, factories and company towns — worked in the tradition she established. It never went away. It runs through the hidden-camera documentary, the reporter who takes a job in a warehouse or care home, the investigator who spends months building a false identity to record what an institution says when nobody is listening. And with it runs an unsettled argument: deception is the one tool journalism claims to despise, and undercover work is built on it. Most modern codes permit it only as a last resort: when the information is genuinely in the public interest and there is no other way. Critics reply that the public-interest test is elastic, that the reporter's notoriety often becomes the point, and that a stunt is not an investigation. Bly's defenders answer plainly: nobody believed the rumours about Blackwell's Island until someone went inside. The island, renamed Roosevelt Island, is covered in flats now, and the asylum is gone.