J. S. Wood

Joseph Snell Wood (4 January 1853 – 20 December 1920), usually known as J. S. Wood, was a business man and journalist in London. For some twenty-five years he was the editor, chairman, and managing director of The Gentlewoman, a prominent illustrated paper for women which he had founded in 1890, and he was also chairman of Press Printers Limited.

Born in Stepney, the first son of another Joseph Wood, by his marriage to Elizabeth, a daughter of Andrew Snell, of Sandford, Devon, Wood's early work was connected with a variety of charitable hospitals in London. From 1888 to 1916 he was Deputy Chairman of the Royal Irish Industries Association, which helped people working in cottage industries in Ireland.

In 1890, Wood established a new illustrated paper for women, The Gentlewoman, which he managed. This became the focal point of Wood's publishing career, and The Gentlewoman was successful in attracting many well-known writers of the day. At the very outset, he showed an innovative touch by serialising a novel in the paper's first twenty issues, unusual in two ways: not only was it written by readers of the paper, instead of professional writers, but a different reader wrote each chapter. In 1891 this notion was developed further when he commissioned a serial novel called "The Fate of Fenella", for which twenty-four writers including Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, and Mrs Trollope each produced one chapter "without any plan or collaboration".

In 1894 Wood founded the Society of Women Journalists, which only two years later had more than two hundred members. A Conservative in politics, he was a member of the Carlton Club and of the Grand Council of the Primrose League, of which Douglas Sladen called him "one of the real founders".

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