Introduction: Reassessing the Strand Magazine, 1891–1918

"THE STRAND to some extent revolutionized Magazines in this country," the hundredth issue of the Strand Magazine (1891–1950) boldly declared in 1899.¹ Since its inception in January 1891, George Newnes's heavily illustrated sixpenny monthly had offered its readers outstanding value for money. The magazine's satisfying mix of short fiction, serialised novels, illustrated interviews, puzzles, scientific curiosities, travel writing, and articles about celebrities and the royal family ensured its continued popularity well into the twentieth century. In 1966 the Strand's final editor and biographer, Reginald Pound, described the monthly as a British "national institution" that was "as much a symbol of immutable British order as Bank Holidays and the Changing of the Guard."²

Yet this leading British fiction monthly that endured for six decades has received relatively little sustained scholarly attention. This special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review reassesses the significance of the Strand in the British cultural imagination from the 1890s to the end of the First World War. The essays collected here explore the heterogeneity and cultural readability of this key periodical, including its editorial policies; use of illustration; intertextual mixture of fictional, factual, and human-interest material; participation in socio-cultural debates; and construction of reader communities and readerly identities. These essays seek to shed light on some of the forgotten contributors, artists, and personalities who helped to establish the Strand's leading position in the periodical market in the first half of its sixty-year run. Together, they demonstrate the Strand's significant contributions to British middlebrow culture in diverse fields including the short story form, genre fiction, continental fiction in translation, illustration, celebrity culture, science and communications technology, spiritualism, and war journalism.

A somewhat nebulous term, the "middlebrow" carries negative associations with unambitious popular culture aimed at a culturally conservative audience in search of social respectability and inexpensive, unintellectual leisure pursuits.³ Middlebrow culture is usually seen as reflecting rather than shaping contemporary trends and debates, and its consumers are perceived as conservative followers rather than radical modernisers. In an academic culture that valorises novelty, experimentation, transgression, and rupture, the middlebrow is often dismissed as unworthy of serious scholarship. As Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor note, until relatively recently scholars have also neglected the illustrated press, which targeted newly literate and middlebrow readers, as reflective and passive rather than active and innovative.⁴ By reassessing the Strand's contributions to British culture at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, this special issue seeks to extend current critical approaches to middlebrow culture. While the essays identify instances in which the Strand conformed to middlebrow tastes and confirmed existing notions of respectability, they also reveal how the magazine shaped readerly identities, contributed to artistic developments, and influenced or questioned current intellectual, artistic, and social debates.

Readership Communities

Founded in 1891 by the enterprising publisher George Newnes (1855–1910), who had made his fortune from the penny weekly Tit-Bits (1881–1984), the Strand Magazine was launched as a British alternative to the American Scribner's and Harper's.⁵ At sixpence, the Strand offered its readers 112, later 120, heavily illustrated two-columned pages of "cheap, healthful literature" per month, consisting of a varied diet of "stories and articles by the best British writers, and special translations from the first foreign authors … illustrated by eminent artists."⁶ By 1896 its circulation had reached approximately 400,000 and would remain at this level through the early twentieth century and the First World War.⁷

The Strand relied on the commercial acumen of Newnes, who famously claimed to be "the average man" and thus to know his leisure needs.⁸ "Few firms," the Literary Year-Book observed of Newnes's publishing empire in 1897, "can boast the attention of so wide a circle of general readers."⁹ The Strand enjoyed a remarkable degree of editorial continuity with Herbert Greenhough Smith (1855–1935) serving as literary editor from 1891 to 1930. Smith was eminently suited to this role because he was the Cambridge-educated son of an engineer and therefore "both a professional and an educated man."¹⁰ His credentials are characteristic of some of the social changes, aspirations, and anxieties that the Strand was poised to address during the "critical historical matrix" of the fin de siècle, "an epoch of endings and beginnings."¹¹ The extent to which Newnes and Smith had their finger on the pulse of the times is suggested by the initial choice of title for the proposed magazine: the New Magazine.¹² While always closer to the New Journalism than the modernist magazine, the Strand nonetheless responded to the conflict between "declining Victorianism and rising Modernism" by assuming a middlebrow position at a time that witnessed an increasing separation of high and popular cultural forms.¹³

The Strand constructed itself as a family paper that sought primarily to appeal to men but also printed material for female and child readers.¹⁴ Its New Journalistic fostering of loyal middlebrow audiences has been a key area of investigation for periodical scholars. In 2001 Kate Jackson's trail-blazing study of Newnes's entrepreneurial strategies attributed the "readability" of the Strand to its "synthesis of continuity and change, consolidating the experiences of a generation caught in flux."¹⁵ Christopher Pittard's work on detective fiction in the Strand and James Mussell's exploration of science, time, and space in the nineteenth-century press have placed the Strand within 1890s periodical communities. Pittard and Mussell take up rather different positions on the magazine's readability, respectively stressing the "reassuring" and the "strange" as the monthly's chief attractions to a readership experiencing significant and rapid social change.¹⁶ For Pittard, the Strand's commitment to providing wholesome reading matter led it to sanitise stories and illustrations of crime.¹⁷ For Mussell, by contrast, the attractions of the "strange" within the context of scientific and technical endeavour had much to do with the Strand's success: "The Strand continually presents its readers with exotic contexts that can be made subject to middle-class reading strategies. It is only by recognizing the strange that buttresses this stubbornly familiar text that we can understand why its readers returned, month after month, in such impressive numbers."¹⁸ More recently, Jonathan Cranfield's meticulous study of Arthur Conan Doyle's forty-year involvement with the Strand pays welcome attention to the magazine after 1900, showing that Victorian readers were "addressed directly as transitional subjects" as they were shepherded into the new media age.¹⁹

Critics have tended to read the Strand as conservative rather than innovative in its contents, reflective rather than formative in its responses to contemporary events, aimed at male rather than female readers, and quintessentially Victorian rather than modern in its values. Pound, for example, remarks that "the middle-classes of England never cast a clearer image of themselves in print than they did in The Strand Magazine. Confirming their preference for mental as well as physical comfort, for more than half a century it faithfully mirrored their tastes, prejudices, and intellectual limitations."²⁰ According to Cranfield, "The Strand was too middlebrow and had too rigorous a sense of decorum to become seriously involved in many of the heated debates which the openness and scale of the periodical form seemed to encourage," and its readership remained "determinedly Victorian."²¹ And for Jackson, "The Strand serves to demonstrate that some periodicals are more representative of 'reflection' than others which, actively engaging with or challenging their readers, are deliberately interactive, radical or creative."²² Cranfield and Jackson both attribute the Strand's success to its reconciliation of the reassuring and the strange, its "harmonious balance between novelty and familiarity, and between luxury and affordability," and its "compromise between artistic quality and journalistic innovation, a combination of commercialism and professionalism."²³

One reader community that the Strand actively cultivated was the commuting Londoner, whose fragmented leisure patterns were well served by the monthly. As Pittard remarks, "To read the Strand itself was also to experience the city."²⁴ The magazine's iconic light blue front cover, designed by George Charles Haité, positioned the reader in the busy London thoroughfare after which the monthly was named and that, significantly, connects London's commercial, entertainment, and professional districts (figure 1). A placard points towards the magazine's offices in a side street, while the pavement is busy with all sorts and conditions of people: a paper boy with a stack of Tit-Bits, gentlemen in top hats, a policeman, and a lone woman carrying an umbrella. A newsboy runs across the street, dodging between cabs and omnibuses. Indeed, in 1911 an article in the magazine proclaimed that "THE STRAND has always evinced a particular interest in London and Londoners, as its very name might imply, and it has always been glad to reflect any new aspect of life and effort in the capital of the British Empire."²⁵ These urban interests are evident in the monthly's investment in detective fiction and its many factual articles on urban issues and infrastructure.

This focus on the city, empire, and modernity has recently generated more scholarship on the monthly's urban and imperial contexts. Ruth Hoberman's work on consumer culture and "the magic of objects" in the magazine reminds us of the relationship between advertising and the way certain Strand stories "dramatize the anxieties of middle-class shoppers about their class position and agency."²⁶ Yet the Strand's editor also noted that readers "from every quarter of the globe" had sent numerous and varied photographs for inclusion in the magazine's long-running "Curiosities" series.²⁷ Sustained critical attention to the Strand's British, middle-class, male readership has, however, tended to divert attention away from the global reach of the magazine, whose world readership was estimated at three million.²⁸ More work remains to be done, too, on the monthly's female and child readers.

[ Image omitted: See PDF ]

A Short Story Magazine

Initially designed as a short story magazine "organically complete each month," the Strand was instrumental in promoting short fiction in Britain.²⁹ The magazine valued readability in its contributors, whom Pound somewhat dismissively characterised as "gaily proficient providers of serials and short stories … content with the sur[e] profits to be earned by toiling" in the middlebrow ranks of the literary marketplace.³⁰ Jackson, taking her cue from Pound, terms them "some of the most talented, if conventionally respectable, authors and illustrators of the period."³¹ Quickly becoming renowned for its short stories, the Strand is now synonymous with fin de siècle detective fiction, particularly Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, which ran from July 1891 in the pioneering serial short story format with illustrations by Sidney Paget (1860–1908). Suiting the fragmented leisure patterns of urban commuters, the serial format allowed readers to complete each story in one sitting while its recurring characters maintained continuity and encouraged readers to return month after month. Critics such as Pittard and Jackson have read the narrative closure and serial format of detective fiction as indicative of the Strand's conservative agenda "of providing readers with a sense of security."³² But despite the vital appeal of Holmes and Watson's adventures, it is misleading to conceptualise the Strand as solely a vehicle for ideologically conservative detective fiction. As Roger Luckhurst has argued, the fin de siècle period was not only anxious but also profoundly excited about the possibilities of new technologies and discoveries, and the Strand, with its investment in popular science and technology, shared in this excitement.³³ Its revolutionary commitment to the short story form, championed by Smith, meant that it provided space for a wide range of genres, including supernatural stories, imperial adventures, children's fantastic fiction, science fiction, medical fiction, sea stories, war stories, spy fiction, comic fiction, and continental fiction in translation. The critical tendency to read other Strand contributors and contributions in relation to Doyle and late-Victorian criminality has overshadowed important themes, figures, and genres that appeared in the same issues and later in the periodical run.

In his contribution to this special issue, Christopher Pittard examines the Strand's very first detective story, Grant Allen's "Jerry Stokes," which appeared in the third issue (March 1891). Allen's story is exceptional, Pittard argues, because it focuses on the contentious issue of the state's right to carry out capital punishment. The story's protagonist, a Canadian hangman, draws on his understanding of criminal anthropology in refusing to execute a convict whom he believes to be innocent, turning into a detective figure in his search for the real murderer. Although Stokes solves the crime, the story uncomfortably concludes that capital punishment is only a legalised form of murder and the story's detective figure is therefore a mass murderer himself. This early story consequently suggests some of the alternative paths that the Strand's interest in crime and detection might have taken.

The contributions by Mercedes Sheldon and Maria Krivosheina focus on translated continental fiction, an aspect of the Strand's short story repertoire that has been critically neglected despite its importance to the cosmopolitan vision of Newnes and Smith. In her essay, Sheldon examines Smith's initial investment in translated fiction, arguing that the literary editor sought to introduce middle-class readers to continental masters of the short story. Editorial strategies sought both to familiarise and to exoticise these stories. However, it appears that the translated stories failed to capture audience imagination, and the Strand as a commercial vehicle soon moved towards genre fiction by British authors. Krivosheina's essay argues that the Strand's appropriation of Russian literature reveals changes in the British reception of Russian authors between the 1890s and the modernist "Russian craze" of the 1910s. While early volumes of the Strand included fiction by dead authors such as Pushkin and Lermontov, Krivosheina demonstrates how the magazine's British authors later reworked archetypes from those canonical texts into "Russianised" tales. By introducing and integrating Russian storytellers into middlebrow culture during a period of troubled Anglo-Russian relations, the Strand emerges not only as a promoter of the short story form but also an important populariser of foreign fiction.

An Illustrated Miscellany

The Strand also published a wide range of non-fiction, including educational and investigative articles on subjects such as popular science, criminality, travel, and art.³⁴ As a major proponent of New Journalism, the Strand printed human-interest features such as illustrated interviews of celebrities, pages of "Curiosities," and brain teasers, puzzles, and competitions designed to encourage reader engagement. Its pages were profusely illustrated, with Newnes's initial ambition of placing an image on every page soon giving way to a rule of a picture per opening.³⁵ The magazine kept twenty artists constantly engaged for black-and-white drawings, and as Jackson notes, these "graphic artists were prominent members of the Strand circle, their work remarkably innovative, their field increasingly professionalised, and their contributions crucial to the success of the illustrated magazine."³⁶ The artists often signed their work, and many had their own by-line. In some cases, most notably with Paget's Holmes illustrations, the artist's name would become "synonymous with the series" he or she illustrated.³⁷ Half-tone photographs became a regular feature from 1893, and colour, sparingly used, was introduced just before the First World War.³⁸

As Cranfield states, "The phenomenon of the illustrated monthly magazine had … been in full swing for some years" before the 1890s, as indicated by publications such as the bestselling English Illustrated Magazine (1883–1913).³⁹ With its sophisticated and cutting-edge reproductions of photographs and images, plentiful advertisements, and decorated covers, the illustrated monthly was the visual embodiment of a technologically advanced age. Catering to new audiences that were receptive to the visual allure of New Journalism, middlebrow illustrated monthlies of the 1890s were published simultaneously with avant-garde aestheticist and decadent publications such as Henry Harland's Yellow Book (1894–97), the shortlived Savoy (1896), and the Studio (1893–1964), a specialist art journal linked to the Arts and Crafts Movement. Where these elite little magazines labelled their contents "Literature" and "Art," the Strand and its sixpenny rivals targeted a middle-class readership in search of entertaining stories, articles, and illustrations.

The Strand was merely the most successful and longest lived of the mainstream sixpenny illustrated monthlies to emerge in the final decade of the century. Jerome K. Jerome's Idler Magazine (1892–1911), a "mixture of irreverence, facetiousness, and knowledge," sought to appeal through its lively appearance, plentiful illustration, and promotion of short, often humorous fiction by well-known and entertaining authors.⁴⁰ The Windsor Magazine (1895–1939), an "Illustrated Monthly for Men and Women" published by Ward Lock to compete with the Strand, was a firmly middle-class "family magazine designed to entertain."⁴¹ With a circulation in excess of 100,000 monthly copies, the royalist Windsor presented its readers with "a judicious blend of fiction and informative articles" by "many of the best-known names of the day" and prided itself on "its illustrations and its clear type."⁴² C. Arthur Pearson's Pearson's Magazine (1896–1925) was aimed at a patriotic and royalist lower-middle-class family readership and carried extensively illustrated romantic and adventure fiction.⁴³ Alfred Harmsworth's Harmsworth Magazine, later London Magazine (1898–1915), advertised a print run of one million monthly copies.⁴⁴ The market for illustrated monthlies was crowded, and the magazines often shared contributors. The long-running Windsor Magazine, for example, printed stories by E. Nesbit, L. T. Meade, Richard Marsh, and Arthur Morrison, all of whom also contributed to the Strand.

The essays in this special issue by Alyssa Mackenzie and Caroline Dakers engage with the Strand's human-interest features. Mackenzie's essay focuses on the Strand's depiction of domestic masculinity in the era of the New Imperialism and moral panic over decadence and homosexuality. In her analysis of masculinity in the Strand's series of "Illustrated Interviews," Mackenzie observes that while the Strand appeared immersed in modern professional, urban, and imperial spheres, it simultaneously prioritised middle-class, aspirational notions of domesticity. By presenting domesticity as central to British constructions of masculinity, Mackenzie argues, the "Illustrated Interviews" reconceptualised notions of the public and private. Dakers's essay explores the publicity afforded to late-Victorian artists, particularly the professional, London-based, predominantly male artists featured in "Portraits of Celebrities" and "Illustrated Interviews" in the first dozen years of the Strand's existence. While readers were assumed to have some prior knowledge of the art world, Dakers argues that these series also provided entertaining and instructive middlebrow "peeps" into the studios, homes, and private lives of respectable and established artists, with the few female artists who appeared in the series positioned carefully within the family.

In her analysis of communications in the September 1896 issue, Alison Hedley argues that the Strand's discussion and representation of print and new media shaped readers' understanding of modernity. By closely examining a single issue's range of texts—including fiction, factual investigation, illustrated "Curiosities" on new technologies and knowledge exchange, and innovative data visualisation techniques—Hedley demonstrates how the Strand positioned itself in a rapidly changing media landscape by foregrounding the importance of communication to the lives of its readers. Hedley's essay therefore cautions against reading the magazine selectively and emphasises the intertextual nature of its verbal and visual contents.

The Post-Victorian Strand

As Cranfield notes, the Strand is often viewed as quintessentially Victorian, belonging forever to the 1890s when Sherlock Holmes appeared in its pages and providing "a kind of shorthand for 'Victorian' taste, attitudes and habits of mind."⁴⁵ Paradoxically, Cranfield observes, "It is seldom seen as belonging to the twentieth century in any meaningful way despite spending only a single decade of its sixty years under the reign of Victoria."⁴⁶ Whilst the Strand of the 1890s fits neatly into discussions of the New Journalism, privileging its Victorian credentials has resulted in an incomplete picture of the magazine's identity within the marketplace and its relationship to competitors. Indeed, the monthly continued until 1950, outlasting the other British illustrated sixpenny monthlies that had flourished at the turn of the century. In order to assess more fully the scope and dimensions of the Strand within periodical culture, we must look beyond the death of Queen Victoria and reconsider the magazine's political and cultural significance in the build-up to the First World War and beyond.

The essays by Emma Liggins and Minna Vuohelainen explore how text and image interacted in the pages of the Strand and how the magazine engaged with topical debates and events up to the end of the First World War. Focusing on representations of the supernatural, Liggins analyses a range of ghost stories by authors such as H. G. Wells, E. Nesbit, and L. G. Moberly in the context of an uneasy scepticism about spiritualism and spectrality from the 1890s to 1917. Drawing on debates about illustration in periodical studies, Liggins explores the difficulties of representing the unseen and unknown in an age of scientific enquiry and considers the disturbing images of the uncanny that accompanied supernatural fiction. Far from reassuring middle-class readers, she argues, such images contributed to the magazine's coverage of the "strange" and the "inexplicable," which became increasingly uncanny after 1900. Women writers and illustrators, whose contributions to the magazine have sometimes been downplayed, were integral to this coverage.

Vuohelainen's essay examines how the Strand responded to and adapted during the First World War, when it claimed to be soldiers' favourite reading.⁴⁷ She argues that while the Strand did not react to the war with the irony and anger characteristic of modernist war poetry, its war-time contents nonetheless represent a significant response to a situation that challenged its generally upbeat view of the modern world. Vuohelainen identifies four instances of substantial adjustment in the war-time Strand: the generic mutation of the magazine's contents to acknowledge the war, the use of illustration for propagandistic purposes, a lukewarm willingness to afford women a greater role in the war effort, and a turn to humour to maintain a sense of home-front community. These adjustments, she argues, provide an alternative view of the British war experience that includes a range of middlebrow home-front patriotisms.

Overall, the essays in this special issue offer a nuanced reassessment of the Strand's middlebrow rhetoric and aesthetic. Over its first three decades, the Strand fostered the careers of many talented writers and artists and influenced the values and perceptions of millions of readers. The Strand also responded to changing circumstances, from the anxieties and excitements of the 1890s to the turmoil of a world war, and demonstrated "the durability and adaptability of the British middlebrow sensibility."⁴⁸ It safeguarded one of the most recognisable literary brands of all time in Sherlock Holmes, but it also printed snippets of curious, ephemeral information. It promoted the short story at a time of the rapid rise of genre fiction while also introducing many foreign masters of the form to British readers. It contributed to the rise of celebrity culture but also attempted to educate and instruct its readers. It employed many now-canonical writers and artists as well as a much larger number of forgotten contributors. And though it valued a lively appearance, it also used illustration in remarkably innovative ways. Therefore, while there is certainly a recognisable Strand brand, the chief mark of that brand should perhaps be the magazine's heterogeneity and rich variety rather than its perceived sameness and safety.

NOTES

1. Newnes, "One Hundredth Number," 363.

2. Pound, Strand Magazine, 9.

3. See Macdonald, "Identifying the Middlebrow," and Macdonald and Singer, Transitions in Middlebrow Writing.

4. Brake and Demoor, "Introduction," 8.

5. Parry, "George Newnes Limited," 228.

6. [Newnes], "Introduction," 3.

7. Jackson, George Newnes, 95. Savory and Pound estimate the circulation at half a million ("Strand Magazine," 399; Strand Magazine, 53) and Altick at 392,000 (English Common Reader, 396).

8. Pound, Strand Magazine, 25.

9. "Directory of Publishers," 238.

10. Jackson, George Newnes, 103.

11. Ledger and Luckhurst, "Introduction," xx, xiii.

12. Jackson, George Newnes, 90.

13. Ibid., 90, 92.

14. Savory, "Strand Magazine," 399.

15. Jackson, George Newnes, 87, 90.

16. Pittard, Purity and Contamination, 95; Mussell, Science, Time and Space, 62.

17. Pittard, Purity and Contamination, 88–89.

18. Mussell, Science, Time and Space, 62.

19. Cranfield, Twentieth-Century Victorian, 43.

20. Pound, Strand Magazine, 7.

21. Cranfield, Twentieth-Century Victorian, 5, 1.

22. Jackson, George Newnes, 88–89.

23. Cranfield, Twentieth-Century Victorian, 19; Jackson, George Newnes, 117.

24. Pittard, '"Cheap, healthful literature,"' 3.

25. [Newnes], "Twenty-First Birthday," 620.

26. Hoberman, "Constructing the Turn-of-the-Century Shopper," 4.

27. [Newnes], "Twenty-First Birthday," 619.

28. McDonald, British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 156.

29. Pound, Strand Magazine, 30.

30. Ibid., 105.

31. Jackson, George Newnes, 87.

32. Ibid., 91.

33. Luckhurst, Invention of Telepathy, 5.

34. Cranfield, Twentieth-Century Victorian, 20.

35. Pound, Strand Magazine, 30.

36. Ibid., 36; Jackson, George Newnes, 108.

37. Jackson, George Newnes, 111.

38. Pound, Strand Magazine, 34, 113.

39. Cranfield, Twentieth-Century Victorian, 18.

40. Dunlap, "Idler," 178. See also North and Nelson, Waterloo Directory, 6:6–7.

41. Schmidt, "Windsor Magazine," 452–53; Living, Adventure in Publishing, 71. See also North and Nelson, Waterloo Directory, 12:240–42.

42. Living, Adventure in Publishing, 73. Altick estimates the Windsor's circulation at 200,000–400,000 copies in 1898 (English Common Reader, 396). According to Living, the monthly sales were 110,000–115,000 copies, with Christmas numbers selling 150,000 copies (Adventure in Publishing, 74).

43. Pearson's Magazine reached a circulation of 200,000–400,000 monthly copies in 1898 (Altick, English Common Reader, 396). See also North and Nelson, Waterloo Directory, 9:96–97; Schmidt, "Pearson's Magazine," 310–12.

44. Altick, English Common Reader, 396. See also North and Nelson, Waterloo Directory, 5:559–60.

45. Cranfield, Twentieth-Century Victorian, 4.

46. Ibid., 5.

47. "Tommy's Taste in Literature," 481.

48. Cranfield, Twentieth-Century Victorian, 7.

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———. "'Cheap, healthful literature': The Strand Magazine, Fictions of Crime, and Purified Reading Communities." Victorian Periodicals Review 40, no. 1 (2007): 1–23.

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