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  • Revolutions from Grub Street: A History of Magazine Publishing in Britain by Howard Cox, Simon Mowatt
  • Robert Laurie (bio)
Revolutions from Grub Street: A History of Magazine Publishing in Britain. By Howard Cox and Simon Mowatt. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2014. xii + 263 pp. £35. ISBN 978 0 19 960163 9.

‘A History of the business of British magazine publishing from its beginnings in Grub Street at the time of the Glorious Revolution to the digital age’ is how the preface at one point optimistically describes this book. Spending less than three pages on more than a third of the promised chronological coverage clearly undermines such an ambitious claim. However, the original claim is speedily qualified in subsequent paragraphs and in the concluding ‘Note on the Scope of the Study’, [End Page 98] which offers a more restricted view of the book’s purpose. As a monograph on the business-history of some of the leading British popular-magazine producing companies in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book is much more successful than the briefly promised general history.

Perhaps unfamiliar to readers of The Library, both authors are established business-historians who have already published on the tobacco industry, the ready-made meals industry, as well as the magazine industry. Theirs is the world of Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, The Strand Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Vogue, Woman’s Own, and Personal Computer World. Long-running and well known titles such as The Lady, the New Statesman, and Punch, not part of great conglomerates, receive only passing mention. The focus is firmly on the companies, particularly the larger ones, their business structures, technology, and profitability rather than individual titles. The disreputable pornographic end of the market is largely ignored while coverage of the market for children’s periodicals appears only in the context of the chosen company histories. Anyone hoping for colourful tales of long liquid lunches and tantrums over last-minute changes to covers will have to look elsewhere. However, it is not an austere volume—for better or worse there are no tables charting the rise and fall of profitability or circulation figures.

Labour relations are a continuing thread of the book. Often seen simply as brakes on the technological development of the newspaper industry, the complex history of trade unions active in the printing industry from the early-nineteenth-century local typographical societies to the end of the closed shop in the 1980s is recounted here in an even-handed manner. Women’s magazines from the Lady’s Magazine of 1770 through Women at Home of 1893 to lavish titles such as Vogue and more down-market titles such as Hello! naturally play a large part in the story. Foreign influences and competition are particularly pronounced in the feminine segment of the market.

The first two chapters cover the entire period up to the end of the nineteenth century and are based largely on secondary sources. Even summarizing the century old article by G. F. Barwick on ‘Some Magazines of the Eighteenth Century’, Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 10, 1 (1909) would have enhanced the already mentioned brusque dismissal of the entire eighteenth-century magazine scene in less than three pages.

The nineteenth century, particularly the last two decades, receives better treatment. Earlier in the century we become acquainted with Charles Knight and his collaboration with the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, his more enduring rivals William and Robert Chambers, Mrs Beeton, G. W. M. Reynolds, John Cassell and others, generally based on recent scholarship. The description of an illustration in Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine of the 1860s is a direct quotation from a 2005 biography of Isabella Beeton (p. 12). It would not have done any harm to examine a few actual magazines. Had Aileen Fyfe’s Steam-Powered Knowledge: William Chambers and the Business of Publishing 1820–1860 (2012) been published earlier, W. and R. Chambers would doubtless have played a larger role in this narrative. Not mentioned in the bibliography is John C. North’s Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals 1800–1900 (2003) and its companion volumes for Scotland and Ireland. This massive work offers scope for...

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