Happy, Genial, Homely Men: Domestic Masculinity and National Identity in the Strand's Illustrated Interviews

In August 1892 the Strand Magazine published an interview with Arthur Conan Doyle. Harry How, the interviewer, emphasized Doyle's manly qualities, noting his bronzed face and strong handshake and quoting at length his reminiscences of a journey to Antarctica on a whaling ship. However, this picture of adventurous masculinity is contained within a narrative of Doyle's essential domesticity. He is, How avers, "just a happy, genial, homely man" who, for all his love of boxing and cricket, most enjoys riding his tandem tricycle with his wife or daughter.¹ The article is illustrated primarily with photographs of Doyle, his family, and their home. Doyle may recall his journey to Antarctica fondly, but he tells the story from the comfort of his study after giving his interviewer a tour of his home. Doyle's persona, How seems to imply, is at odds with his dashing, adventurous detective; there is "nothing lynx-eyed, nothing 'detective' about him."²

How's surprise notwithstanding, the Strand's readers were prepared for the domestic content of "A Day with Dr. Conan Doyle" by How's own series of "Illustrated Interviews," which combine interviews with the great men (and a few women) of the age with photographs and detailed descriptions of their domestic environments. The celebrity interview was a hallmark of the New Journalism, imported from America and popularized in Britain through W. T. Stead's Pall Mall Gazette.³ Readers were tantalized by the personal insights into the lives of public figures; detractors objected to the genre's intrusiveness and invasion of privacy. The Strand encouraged its readers' interest in the lives of celebrities: from its first issue it published a long-running series of "Portraits of Celebrities," printing illustrations and photographs of prominent figures accompanied by brief biographical sketches. Kate Jackson argues that "Portraits of Celebrities" and "Illustrated Interviews" formed a key part of the magazine's community- and class-building project, in which readers "were encouraged to identify with the circle of Strand contributors and 'celebrities' who were drawn from their ranks."⁴ While Jackson contends that the Strand chiefly reflected the values of its middle-class readers, I argue that the magazine actively worked to shape and shift gender and national identities through this encouraged identification.

The "Illustrated Interviews" series illuminates the Strand's under-examined relationship to the domestic both as a realm of activity and a physical space. Scholarship on the Strand has tended to focus on its relationship to the city, attending to the urban crime stories that have determined the magazine's legacy and the Strand's self-presentation as an urban product.⁵ However, while the magazine may present itself as immersed in the business of modern London, its claimed affinities with the professional, political, and imperial worlds obscure its simultaneous investment in domesticity. I argue that in How's "Illustrated Interviews" domesticity emerges as crucial to the Strand's construction of masculinity and British identity. In this series, domesticity is presented as a desirable aspect of British masculinity, and domestic spaces reveal the essential characters and personal histories of their occupants, comfortably containing both the trappings of professional pursuits and the spoils of empire. Other series in the Strand portray masculinities elaborated through professional pursuit and imperial venture, from Henry Lucy's reminiscences of his career as a parliamentary reporter to the fictional colonial exploits of C. J. Mansford's "Shafts from an Eastern Quiver." In "Illustrated Interviews," the magazine complicates that vision by presenting the domestic as a masculine sphere of activity coextensive with work and empire and portraying the ideal British home as open to the influences of the public world. By yoking them together, the "Illustrated Interviews" revise notions of domesticity and masculinity, adapting them to produce and confirm the Strand's own version of modern British identity.

Masculinity, Domesticity, and Englishness

The Strand's intervention in the relationships between masculinity, domesticity, and British identity occurs at a historical moment when these relationships were in flux. The nineteenth century saw what we might understand as the invention of modern domesticity, which...