"Not so much art as a financial operation": Conrad and Metropolitan Magazine

Fig. 2.

Metropolitan Magazine, February 1918, cover. Illustration by E. L. Crompton.

Metropolitan Magazine (see figure 2) was launched in 1895 during what Richard Ohmann calls the "inaugural moment" of a "national mass culture" in the United States, purveyed especially through the twenty mass-circulation magazines in print by 1900 (23, 29). Although for its first fifteen years Metropolitan lagged behind circulation giants of the era, such as Cosmopolitan, McClure's, and Munsey's, Alfred A. Knopf, at Doubleday, Page Company, wrote to Joseph Conrad in 1913, "I am fairly convinced that the Metropolitan is going to be pretty soon one of the three or four really important popular magazines that we have."¹ That year, copies sold numbered four hundred thousand, with the editor claiming total readership of 1 million or more, a circulation that had it pulling level with or ahead of its competitors.² Like its peer "mixed function" magazines, Metropolitan treated public affairs, current events, and other topics of general interest, along with fiction (Reed 76). To attract an audience, it chose a title embodying the notion that the city was a wide, encompassing area and offering all readers in a huge country peppered with small towns access to those amenities available to city dwellers—including ideas and culture.³ By the early 1910s, readers were experienced consumers of topical issues, having digested the muckraking journalism of the century's first decade, a time in which "[e]ditors now posited readers bold and urbane enough to look into the social abyss or at its shabby margins" so they were in a position "to see, to know, to judge, to imagine remedies" (Ohmann 285). They also had had for a generation access to literary culture through publications that were more affordable than literary magazines such as Harper's Monthly Magazine (Ohmann 6). Metropolitan's 1 million readers thus experienced Conrad's work mediated through their position as popular readers, their relationship with the magazine, and the packaging of each issue, a form for his work probably more familiar to them than that of the bound book. As they began an issue of Metropolitan, president H. J. (Henry James) Whigham set the tone with his vigorously Progressive editorials. Managing editor Carl Hovey then presented them with six or seven stories in each number, selected according to his and Whigham's definition of the Metropolitan reader. During their decade of leadership at the magazine in the 1910s, they determined to pull ahead of their competition by strengthening both its political voice and its fiction. In doing so, they drew Conrad into a relationship with the magazine—one beneficial to both sides.

The Evolution of Metropolitan Magazine

Starting out as a "naughty picture" magazine selling "sex sensationalism," Metropolitan in its earliest issues depended on photographs of stage actresses, art models, and bloomered and bathing-suited beauties, while giving little attention to politics or fiction (Mott 4: 47; 5: 145). Despite its lack of political thrust through the first decade of the twentieth century, from the beginning the magazine followed the career of Theodore Roosevelt, first featuring him at work as police commissioner of New York in October 1895 (Parker). As it matured, Metropolitan continued to define itself among popular magazines in terms of its public responsibility and its place as a publisher of fiction. At the end of the muckraking era, Metropolitan avowed that it had deliberately avoided such journalism, but asserted an interest in issues of social justice without sensationalizing. At the same time, it declared a dedication to print "[t]he best short-story writers of this country and England," as it included Joseph Conrad in a list of thirty-four writers—most of them not widely recognized today ("Magazine" 556).⁴ However, while Metropolitan signified its commitment to fiction by trading on Conrad's name, it had not yet contracted with him for a story, and it would be two years before his first work would appear in the magazine, when "Prince Roman" was published as "The Aristocrat" in...