Magazines, Travel, and Middlebrow Culture: Canadian Periodicals in English and French, 1925–1960 by Faye Hammill and Michelle Smith (review)

This is a well-researched and serious book, though its primary appeal lies in the magical word ‘glamour’. Its glossy cover, copied from Mayfair magazine (1937), and its beautifully reproduced colour illustrations frame this exploration of Canadian mainstream magazines in English and French from the early to mid-twentieth century, presenting them as records of Canadian middlebrow culture. Filled with travel advertisements and fashion features, these magazines are printed spaces where ‘high and popular culture meet, and where art encounters consumerism’ (p. 10) – one definition of the ‘middlebrow’ which is at the centre of this study. The book and its accompanying website, www.middlebrowcanada.org, are the products of an AHRC-funded collaborative research project on that topic. Taking popular magazines as their object of inquiry, Hammill and Smith examine Canadian Home Journal, Chatelaine, Maclean’s, Mayfair, La Revue Moderne, and La Revue Populaire, investigating the intersection of middlebrow culture with modernism, cosmopolitanism, and nationalism.

The book is organised into four parts: ‘Marketplace’, ‘Pages’, ‘Fashion’, and ‘Consumers’, and there is an interesting tension between academic interest in print culture and periodical history on the one hand and, on the other, the seductiveness of magazine headlines like ‘The Only Paris’ or ‘Fashions Right for Flight’ offering glimpses of the fantasies and aspirations of an earlier generation. The first chapter focuses on circulation figures and readerships of these magazines, describing their different agendas and varying fortunes. It also explores the significance of advertising, particularly travel advertisements, and the connections forged between travel, fashion, and shopping. The emphasis is on anglophone magazines, though the authors note rare examples of bilingual crossovers with advertisements and stories by Gabrielle Roy. The second chapter analyses magazine design, from single-page layouts to whole runs of selected periodicals, paying attention to the relation between text and image, while emphasising the role of magazines as tastemakers addressing different readerships.

The chapters on fashion and travel are enthralling, not only for the way they trace the changing rhetoric of reportage but also for their vivid retailing of some of these reports. Mayfair’s correspondents, with their air of cosmopolitan worldliness, provide the best examples, from the fashion reports by ‘Soiffield of Paris’ to Madge Macbeth’s celebration of foreign travel: ‘In Paris adventure is unavoidable even to the unadventurous … This is the life!’ (p. 149). Such journalism belongs to the 1920s; the war shifted the focus away from Europe towards home, and the reportage of the 1950s has a distinctly nationalist inflection. Modernist notions of chic have shifted from Paris to Montreal and New York, and magazines promote travel within Canada, supported by advertisements for Canadian Pacific hotels and luxury cars, or for budget holidays camping and canoeing in the wilderness. Mainstream magazines faithfully reflected the changing interests of their middlebrow readers, together with the new marketplace values of 1960s Canada. Within that decade several magazines folded; three survived to the present, all owned by the Rogers Media conglomerate.

More analysis and more attention to francophone magazines would have been welcome, but with their first foray into this under-researched area, the authors could not do everything. For anyone interested in this field, here is the place to start.