Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells and The Strand Magazine's Long 1901: From Baskerville to the Moon

This article provides a close reading of the Strand between November 1900 and February 1902 (the "long" 1901). Given the loaded historical significance of these dates (including, as they do, the final days of the Exposition Universelle in Paris, the death of Queen Victoria, the "official" beginning of the twentieth century, and the escalation of the Second Boer War) this task would be valuable in itself, even if the magazine did not serialize two of the period's most significant works of popular fiction: H. G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles.¹ These are two novels about which it might be fairly said that there is little left to write. Their centrality to critical discourses on popular fiction, science fiction, the fin de siècle, the late gothic, English detective fiction, and the scientific romance amongst numerous other fields and genres can make them appear critically overdetermined, saturated with different styles of meaning. Yet the novels' periodical origins are seldom alluded to; neither is the possibility entertained that the unwieldy, massively distributed text of the Strand itself might have some bearing upon how the texts were first read.

Reinsert The First Men in the Moon and The Hound of the Baskervilles into this original text and certain interpretive possibilities open up. First, we can observe that the magazine itself went through a profound transition during this period, a process in which the novels were deeply implicated. The Strand, that avatar of late-Victorian analepsis, reordered its traditional ideological foundations to embrace futurity in the light of developing historical, political and cultural trends. Second, we can address the question of how adept literary studies has been at assessing the delicately balanced, mereological implications of serialization as a publishing context after the great age of Dickens, Gaskell and Gissing in the mid-century.² Third, it allows for a critique of literary studies' resistance to incorporating the practices of periodical studies into its consideration of canonical texts. Serialisation contorts these texts so that they become increasingly resistant to common kinds of interpretive strategy. Canonical texts that we think we know well can seem uncomfortably elongated, surrounded by increasingly porous external boundaries and sharing intimate space with a morass of unfamiliar material. These problems are symptomatic of the production and presentation of periodical texts but there are also implications for the reader's contemporary experience of them. Serials were tied to the changing patterns of the world both through their association with all sorts of nonfiction writing, but also in terms of the changing experience of the readers themselves. The reader who took in The First Men in the Moon in its original form began the novel as a nineteenth-century Victorian and ended it as a twentieth-century Edwardian. Quite how the novel encodes these notions of passing time and change is something that can only be retrieved through a careful, critical reinsertion into its original context.

It is therefore the contention of this article that understandings derived from work on explicitly Victorian notions of "seriality" could and should be applied to later periods. These theories include radically different approaches by James Mussel, Louise Henson, Cathy Waters and Gowan Dawson. Dawson, for example, focuses on the "historically specific reading practices of particular individuals and groups." Based on a comparative analysis of Richard Owen's reading habits alongside his scientific models of "inductive reasoning" he argues that serialised fictions encouraged readers toward more adventurous and involved epistemological and heuristic practices.³ More generally, these arguments suggest that periodical texts are impure seams, written through with extraneous, nonfictional matter that subsumes and incubates them, inserting it into long-running continuous narratives with which the author may be entirely unfamiliar and unsympathetic. This thinking, if broadened to work beyond the extreme edges of the nineteenth century should, in time, address the enormous and damaging disparity between research, analysis and digital resources available for students of the nineteenth-century periodical (copious) and those of the twentieth-century (minimal). Each...