The result can scarcely fail to amuse even the most gloomy of war pessimists: The Strand Magazine and the First World War

"It will doubtless be a satisfaction to the Proprietors, Staff, and Readers of 'The Strand' to know that Thomas Atkins, when wounded and in hospital, prefers that excellent publication to any other," an anonymous correspondent "responsible for the distribution of books and magazines in one of our Military hospitals" informed readers of the Strand Magazine in November 1915.¹ "I have developed such a yearning for 'Strands,'" the writer confesses, "that when I see one being read in a train or at a station I can hardly restrain myself from asking for the reversion of it when finished."² The correspondent concludes by "urg[ing] everyone who buys a 'Strand' to pass it on, when read, to a Military hospital."³ The following month, the Strand marked its twenty-fifth birthday with a bumper number of 200 pages that concluded with a sombre yuletide "Reminder" to readers: "Do not forget that 'The Strand' may now be sent free of all charge to British soldiers and sailors at home or abroad. All you need do is to hand your copies, without wrapper or address, over the counter at any post-office in the United Kingdom, and they will be sent by the authorities wherever they will be most welcome."⁴ In December 1916 the magazine even reproduced an image of the cover of a prison camp magazine closely modelled on its own to provide evidence that it was indeed fondly remembered by soldiers (figure 1).⁵

Despite the Strand's appeal to readers to forward used copies to frontline soldiers, a perusal of the magazine's contents suggests that its primary war-time consumers were in fact non-combatants. As the Strand's original target reader, the commuting middle-class office worker, found himself in the trenches, the magazine had to adjust to new home-front reading communities.

Figure 1.

"An Old Friend in a New Guise." Strand Magazine 52 (December 1916): 729.

Chief among these were women with new-found spending power, boys still too young to be sent to the front, and older men who may have been Strand readers ever since the magazine's appearance in 1891. This challengingly diverse home-front readership was not subject to any official propaganda until the establishment of the National War Aims Committee in 1917, the British state instead relying on what Jonathan Cranfield calls a "weaponisation of … writers and publications."⁶ The press and the cultural industries, including the Strand, took on the responsibility of maintaining civilian morale.

After a brief overview of the Strand's war coverage, I examine four strategies that demonstrate how and to what effect the magazine, still under the exceptionally long editorship (1891–1930) of Herbert Greenhough Smith, adjusted to total war: it adapted its tried-and-tested fictional, factual, and human-interest formulas to accommodate military concerns; it used illustration and page layout to reinforce propagandistic messages in ways that did not unnecessarily alarm home-front readers; it ambivalently acknowledged its female readers by publishing female-centred stories that simultaneously gave women a role in the war effort and deplored the necessity of such a step; and it frequently deployed humour, particularly comic sketches satirising the home-front experience, in an attempt to foster communal resilience. Drawing on David Monger's analysis of the multiple "sub-patriotisms"—civic, proprietorial, communal, sacrificial, adversarial, supranational, and aspirational—in the propaganda of the National War Aims Committee in the final months of the war, I argue that the Strand's war-time content represents a range of sustained, cogent, but multivalent middlebrow patriotisms designed to persuade home-front readers of the necessity of the war effort.⁷ Far from representing "a single text" with "many voices speaking as one," as Cranfield argues, the war-time Strand gave voice to a spectrum of patriotisms from the xenophobic to the progressive.⁸

The War-Time Strand

As Ann-Marie Einhaus observes, the angry, proto-modernist trench poetry of combatant authors such as Siegfried...