Body-Building and Empire-Building: George Douglas Brown, The South African War, and Sandow's Magazine of Physical Culture

Sometimes an author writes for the "wrong" magazine, with surprising long-term results. One of the givens for most Victorianists is that the demands of periodical writing engaged an author with his or her audiences in ways that were themselves creative. Research has commonly focused on writings where the contributor and the periodical match well, so that the expansive paratext of periodical publication deepens our understanding of an author's literary voice and of how it was perceived by contemporary readers. The case examined here is different, in that it examines what seems a flagrant mismatch. The relevant sub-group of scholars, specialists in the Scottish novel, would seem simply to have dismissed the whole relationship as a critically embarrassing anomaly, best not looked into too closely lest the reputation of their author be compromised. Nonetheless, once one reads the periodical as a cultural unit, and not just as the individual author's contributions to it, this apparent mismatch casts new light on the writer and his culture in a way that his professionally safer and more ambitious elite periodical short fiction cannot.

The author is George Douglas Brown (1869-1902), still not widely known outside Scotland, but generally recognized as the first major modern Scottish novelist, and the periodical is Sandow's Magazine of Physical Culture, founded in 1898, and generally credited as the first bodybuilding magazine.¹ Brown's landmark novel, The House with the Green Shutters, first published in 1901, has seldom been out of print and is a staple of the Scottish teaching canon at both high school and university level. On its publication, Brown was immediately recognized as the pivotal figure in a new turn in Scottish fiction, against the elegiac sentimentalism of the Kailyard–J. M. Barrie, S. R. Crockett, and Ian Maclaren.² Brown was no home-spun genius: he had been a student of Gilbert Murray at Glasgow and a Snell Exhibitioner at Oxford, and his House with the Green Shutters was variously compared by its first reviewers to Sophocles, Aeschylus, Flaubert, Balzac, and Zola.³ He died soon after publication of this major achievement, aged only thirty-five.

Brown has gone down to history as that interesting phenomenon, a one-book author. His magazine writings from the decade preceding his major novel, like his three other full-length books, have drawn virtually no critical attention.⁴ There is, for instance, still no bibliography of what he wrote and still no published collection of his essays and short stories. Yet for seven years after he left Balliol to seek a writing career Brown made his living as a journalist in London, contributing to daily newspapers and popular weeklies, as well as to such relatively highbrow monthlies as Chapman's or the English Illustrated Magazine.⁵ Much that he is known to have written in these years (one source of income, for instance, was supplying paragraphs to the Illustrated London News) is now untraceable. He wrote under a bewildering variety of pseudonyms, developing at least seven distinct authorial identities, as he negotiated his self-image or self-images in the late Victorian New Grub Street.

It was in this phase of his career, in 1899, that Brown improbably became a staff writer for a new magazine dedicated to a new social phenomenon, bodybuilding or physical culture. The acknowledged founder of both the magazine and modern bodybuilding was the Prussian-born bodybuilder Eugen Sandow (1867-1925) (fig. 1).⁶ As a small boy, Sandow (then Friederich Muller) had been beaten up by playground bullies, but he swung dumbbells in private and at the local gymnasium, and when he reached the age of compulsory military service in 1885 he left Prussia and remade himself as a circus strongman, in Belgium and France, before eventually settling in London. By 1889, he could successfully challenge the leading strong men of his era (who performed under the stage names Samson and Goliath), leading to a spectacular American tour in 1894-1896, when Sandow appeared at the Trocadero and the Chicago World's Fair...