The Age of the Storytellers: British Popular Fiction Magazines, 1880-1950 (review)

Briefly stated, The Age of the Storytellers is a book everyone interested in the history of late nineteenth-century British periodicals will want to read.

The first page of the introduction to this important study of Victorian magazines emphasizes the subject in its subtitle: "popular," as opposed to "literary," fiction magazines published in England from 1880 to 1950. The authors covered, whose work is discussed and detailed bibliographically, are the "storytellers" of the title, perfectly honorable writers whose object was more to thrill and entertain than to take a place alongside the likes of Dickens and George Eliot in the literary firmament. But the magazines themselves are the focus.

Although Ashley says The Strand Magazine eventually set the pattern when it began appearing in January 1891, his chronology begins with The Boy's Own Paper in 1879 and concludes in 1950, when The Strand merged with Men Only and ceased to exist in its own right. Actually though, as Ashley admits, the type of magazine studied here was a casualty of World War II, and so the concluding date might well have been 1945. Furthermore, most of the magazines detailed in this study have not been covered by other reference books. Most of them are monthlies, although some eventually became fortnightlies. A few weeklies appear as well.

In their sixteen-page introduction, David Pringle and Mike Ashley set out interestingly, and in a detailed manner that might well be a model for the rest of us, the publishing context of these magazines. In fact there is much about the design of the coverage that is reminiscent of a plan RSVP developed in its early days to provide accurate bibliographical information on serial fiction. (This "Committee on Serial Fiction" developed a coverage plan that would have provided bibliographical information on serial fiction produced earlier in the age than the period covered by Pringle and Ashley.)

Following Pringle and Ashley's introduction is a chronology that identifies the most significant stories and the dates of their appearance in the magazines covered. The chronology also identifies the date of the first appearance of each magazine studied, as well as the date of its last appearance and the death dates of important contributors. Then appear 72 handsome color plates featuring magazine covers; black and white illustrations occur throughout the text. The main section of the book is divided into two not-quite-equal parts: "Section One: Primary Magazines" details 70 titles; "Section Two: Other Magazines" gives slightly less coverage to 74 titles. In all, 144 titles receive consideration.

For those titles covered in the first section, Ashley provides publishing information: number of issues produced, dates of production, title changes (if any), frequency of appearance, publisher, editor, format and size, price, a list of references, and—very helpfully—a list of holdings and collecting points. At the end of the volume is a "summary of editors and publishers," a list of those editors and publishers covered in the two main sections of the book.

The Strand has a particular importance in the context of Ashley's study, for it was the magazine, according to him, that introduced British readers to the genre of the modern short story. Before 1890, the short story was largely an American and Continental form, but The Strand introduced the "series short story" to Britain in 1891, when Arthur Conan Doyle began publishing his Sherlock Holmes tales.

My own research into Elizabeth Gaskell's publication of her short fiction earlier in the period suggests there is much of interest to be learned by examining fiction published in its magazine context and then later republished in another format. For instance, Gaskell began what became Cranford by publishing a portion of it in the United States in Sartain's Union Magazine of Literature and Art. There it was a type of ethnological essay dealing with the peculiar manners of a...