Wilfrid Meynell (17 November 1852,
Newcastle-upon-Tyne – 20 October 1948,
Pulborough[Obituary, The Times, 22 October 1948]), who sometimes wrote under the
pseudonym John Oldcastle, was a
British newspaper publisher and editor.
Born of an old
Yorkshire family on his father's side, he was related to a family of distinguished Quakers on his mother's side: his grandfather was
Samuel Tuke, and
James Hack Tuke and
Daniel Hack Tuke were uncles.
In 1870, aged 18, Meynell became a
convert to
Roman Catholicism. He married the writer
Alice Thompson in 1877.The pair's first effort at periodical publishing was
The Pen, a short-lived critical monthly review. In 1881 he accepted
Cardinal Manning's invitation to edit the Catholic
Weekly Register, and continued to do so until 1899. Meynell later founded and edited (1883-94) the magazine
Merry England, in which he discovered and sponsored the poet
Francis Thompson.
Meynell wrote biographies of Manning,
John Henry Newman and
Pope Leo XIII. He contributed to a wide range of periodicals including the
Contemporary Review,
The Art Journal, the
Magazine of Art, the
Athenaeum, the
Academy, the
Saturday Review, the
Pall Mall Budget, the
Illustrated London News, the
Daily Chronicle and the
Nineteenth Century. During March 1906,
The Windsor Magazine published an article entitled
Politics - Second Series that was coauthored by Meynell and
Bertram Fletcher Robinson. This article was recently republished in a book entitled
The World of Vanity Fair that was edited by
Paul Spiring (see ).
By the 1920s, Meynell principally wrote for the
Dublin Review and the
Tablet.
Wilfrid and Alice Meynell had nine children, including the founder of
The Nonesuch Press,
Francis Meynell.