Readers and the Steamship Press: Home News for India, China, and the Colonies and the Serialization of Arthur Griffiths’s Fast and Loose, 1883–84

Concentrating on a lesser-known quarter of the Victorian print media, this paper seeks to recover the experiences of British expatriate readers of steamship press newspapers. The periodical codes that shaped readers’ encounters with one such newspaper, Home News, will be charted and its historical readership delineated. The market share of these publications diminished in the late nineteenth century in a climate of increasing telegraphic hegemony; however, not all were quiescent in the face of this competition. The serial novel, Fast and Loose (1883–84), which featured in Home News during the initial years of Arthur Griffiths’s editorship, was a notable example of such innovation that also underscored the distinctive set of contemporary circumstances that characterized the newspaper.