"He's lost more money on Joseph Conrad than any editor alive!": Conrad and McClure's Magazine

Figure 9.

McClure's Magazine, November 1907. Cover.

Between 1898 and 1910 Conrad had dealings with each of Samuel Sidney McClure's major publishing ventures: his syndication company, the Associated Literary Press; his publishing houses, S. S. McClure Co., Doubleday and McClure, and, later, McClure, Phillips and Co.; and McClure's Magazine (see figure 9). However, after a brief period of involvement with McClure's publishing house, Conrad did little business with McClure, appearing only once in McClure's Magazine with a somewhat slight short story, "The Brute" (1907). As we shall see, throughout the period of their association, their relationship was mutually friendly and cooperative when money and inspiration were in plentiful supply but less cordial, particularly on Conrad's side, when money and the wellspring of imagination dried up. This pattern of relations is indicative of the extent to which Conrad and his publishers were ruled by financial imperatives. The purpose of this essay, then, is to explore, first, the practicalities of Conrad's relations with McClure, and second, how those relationships reflect his own anxieties and ambitions as a man of letters working under the double bind of financial and artistic imperatives.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, improvements in paper production and printing methods in the United States and Britain encouraged ambitious newspapermen to increase production. As a result, print runs increased and many more titles appeared, now distributed nationally in contrast to the localized distribution of mid-century. In 1870 there were over twelve hundred monthly and weekly magazines; in 1880 over twenty-four hundred, and in 1885 there were thirty-three hundred (Lyon 46). In 1880 there were approximately nine hundred dailies, of which a quarter were printed in New York (Lyon 72). By 1884 there were twelve hundred, and this figure increased by about one hundred a year for the next fourteen years (Lyon 72). Thus, in 1884, when there was approximately one newspaper for every twelve thousand readers in Britain, there was one for every ten thousand in the United States (Lyon 73).¹ This increase in volume did not automatically lead to an increased demand for fiction, since these papers were filled easily enough with advertising and local copy. However, the increased demand for copy led McClure to believe that there was a gap in the market for fiction syndication and that he was the man to fill it.

Although other syndicates were already operating in the United States when he launched his venture in 1884, McClure built up an enviable network of clients by making exhaustive visits to newspapers across the States and by regular advertising of his services to editors. To maintain these clients, McClure had to provide not only a wide variety of material but also material of a higher caliber and a broader range, more quickly and in greater quantities than his competitors. On occasion, he was forced to do the writing himself, as when he provided cookery recipes using the pseudonym Patience Winthrop (Lyon 73). Material from Europe was popular, and during his thirty years in publishing McClure made numerous trips across the Atlantic, briefly creating a reciprocal agreement for exchange of material with W. F. Tillotson between 1886 and 1888. By summer 1889 Tillotson had opened offices in New York, and McClure had set up offices in London with his brother Robert as manager and Edmund Gosse as general European editor. Shedding light on the general size of the American market and the popularity of British literature there, as well as the importance of American publication for British authors, Graham Law points out that while a British novel might be syndicated in ten journals in Britain, the figure was more like one hundred in the United States for the same novel (38). The speed with which McClure drew up an agreement with Tillotson and opened his own European office indicates the rapid growth of both his ambition and the market for international material in America.²

McClure's personal...