"Vibrating through all its breadth": Musical Fiction and Materialist Aesthetics in the Strand Musical Magazine

The aims of the Strand Musical Magazine were largely practical in nature: articles and advertisements provided information about concerts, festivals, and other events on the Victorian music calendar. Yet, as this essay argues, it also (perhaps unwittingly) participated in key nineteenth-century aesthetic and scientific debates about music's ties to the human body. In several of the short stories published in the Strand Musical Magazine, characters cry, throb, convulse, quiver, and sweat while playing or hearing music. These corporeal events correspond with emerging acoustical and physiological science that understood music in terms of sound waves and bodily vibrations. The Strand Musical Magazine conceived of music not as an intangible, transcendent phenomenon but as a material force rooted in the science of sound.