Introduction: Reassessing the Strand Magazine, 1891–1918

"THE STRAND to some extent revolutionized Magazines in this country," the hundredth issue of the Strand Magazine (1891–1950) boldly declared in 1899.¹ Since its inception in January 1891, George Newnes's heavily illustrated sixpenny monthly had offered its readers outstanding value for money. The magazine's satisfying mix of short fiction, serialised novels, illustrated interviews, puzzles, scientific curiosities, travel writing, and articles about celebrities and the royal family ensured its continued popularity well into the twentieth century. In 1966 the Strand's final editor and biographer, Reginald Pound, described the monthly as a British "national institution" that was "as much a symbol of immutable British order as Bank Holidays and the Changing of the Guard."²

Yet this leading British fiction monthly that endured for six decades has received relatively little sustained scholarly attention. This special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review reassesses the significance of the Strand in the British cultural imagination from the 1890s to the end of the First World War. The essays collected here explore the heterogeneity and cultural readability of this key periodical, including its editorial policies; use of illustration; intertextual mixture of fictional, factual, and human-interest material; participation in socio-cultural debates; and construction of reader communities and readerly identities. These essays seek to shed light on some of the forgotten contributors, artists, and personalities who helped to establish the Strand's leading position in the periodical market in the first half of its sixty-year run. Together, they demonstrate the Strand's significant contributions to British middlebrow culture in diverse fields including the short story form, genre fiction, continental fiction in translation, illustration, celebrity culture, science and communications technology, spiritualism, and war journalism.

A somewhat nebulous term, the "middlebrow" carries negative associations with unambitious popular culture aimed at a culturally conservative audience in search of social respectability and inexpensive, unintellectual leisure pursuits.³ Middlebrow culture is usually seen as reflecting rather than shaping contemporary trends and debates, and its consumers are perceived as conservative followers rather than radical modernisers. In an academic culture that valorises novelty, experimentation, transgression, and rupture, the middlebrow is often dismissed as unworthy of serious scholarship. As Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor note, until relatively recently scholars have also neglected the illustrated press, which targeted newly literate and middlebrow readers, as reflective and passive rather than active and innovative.⁴ By reassessing the Strand's contributions to British culture at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, this special issue seeks to extend current critical approaches to middlebrow culture. While the essays identify instances in which the Strand conformed to middlebrow tastes and confirmed existing notions of respectability, they also reveal how the magazine shaped readerly identities, contributed to artistic developments, and influenced or questioned current intellectual, artistic, and social debates.

Readership Communities

Founded in 1891 by the enterprising publisher George Newnes (1855–1910), who had made his fortune from the penny weekly Tit-Bits (1881–1984), the Strand Magazine was launched as a British alternative to the American Scribner's and Harper's.⁵ At sixpence, the Strand offered its readers 112, later 120, heavily illustrated two-columned pages of "cheap, healthful literature" per month, consisting of a varied diet of "stories and articles by the best British writers, and special translations from the first foreign authors … illustrated by eminent artists."⁶ By 1896 its circulation had reached approximately 400,000 and would remain at this level through the early twentieth century and the First World War.⁷

The Strand relied on the commercial acumen of Newnes, who famously claimed to be "the average man" and thus to know his leisure needs.⁸ "Few firms," the Literary Year-Book observed of Newnes's publishing empire in 1897, "can boast the attention of so wide a circle of general readers."⁹ The Strand enjoyed a remarkable degree of editorial continuity with Herbert Greenhough Smith (1855–1935) serving as literary editor from 1891 to 1930. Smith was eminently suited to this role because he was the Cambridge-educated son of an engineer and therefore "both a professional and an...