Macmillan's Magazine, 1859–1907

No Flippancy or Abuse Allowed

George J. Worth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351921077
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Macmillan's Magazine has long been recognized as one of the most significant of the many British literary/intellectual periodicals that flourished in the second half of the nineteenth century. Yet the first volume of the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals (1966) pointed out that 'There is no study of Macmillan's Magazine' - and that lack has been only partially remedied in all the decades since. In this work, George Worth addresses five principal questions. Where did Macmillan's come from, and why in 1859? Who or what was the guiding spirit behind the Magazine, especially in its early, formative years? What cluster of ideas gave it such coherence as it manifested during that period? How did it and its parent firm deal with authors and juggle their periodical work and the books they produced for Macmillan and Co.? And what, finally, accounted for the palpable decline in the quality and fiscal health of Macmillan's during the last 25 years of its life and, ultimately, for its death? Worth includes a treasure trove of original material about the Magazine much of it drawn from unpublished manuscripts and other previously untapped primary sources. Macmillan's Magazine, 1859-1907 contributes to the understanding not only of one significant Victorian periodical but also, more generally, of the literary and cultural milieu in which it originated, flourished, declined, and expired.

CHAPTER ONE
The Beginning

1859, before and beyond

The first number of Macmillan’s Magazine appeared at the end of October 1859. Its 80 closely printed double-columned pages, unrelieved by illustrations, contained eight pieces: a sober account of ‘Politics of the Present, Foreign and Domestic’; the first installment of a new novel by Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown’s School Days, a bestseller of two years earlier; two meditative essays – ‘Paper, Pen, and Ink: An Excursus in Technology’ and ‘Cheap Art’; a poem based on Cobbett’s Rural Rides, preceded by a prose introduction; an article about the ongoing Italian struggle against Louis Napoleon; and a half-serious, half-convivial ‘Colloquy of the Round Table’, in which a varied group of men discuss matters of current and perennial concern, drink, smoke and listen to one of their number sing a song about the bibulous ‘Old Sir Simon the King’, ‘son to Old King Cole’.¹

There is nothing here, surely, to set our pulses racing today. Yet Macmillan’s immediately achieved the solid if unspectacular success for which its backers had been hoping,² going on to become what one scholar has called ‘the most respectable and respected magazine of “serious” literature and comment of its time’.³ We shall never understand fully why the early Macmillan’s prospered as it did, but it is possible to point to certain features of the mid-nineteenth-century scene that will help us to reach an explanation. As we attempt to do so, we should not be excessively beguiled by the well-known textbook fact that 1859, the year of the Magazine’s birth, was an annus mirabilis in the history of English literature – the year of George Eliot’s first novel (Adam Bede) and George Meredith’s first successful one (The Ordeal of Richard Feverel), Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities and Thackeray’s The Virginians, FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayám and Tennyson’s first four Idylls of the King, Darwin’s The Origin of Species and Mill’s On Liberty.⁴ More directly to the point of this discussion is the related fact that 1859 was a landmark year in the history of periodical journalism, as the founding of Macmillan’s, generally regarded as the first shilling monthly magazine,⁵ was both an outgrowth of the same potent trends that had brought about this spate of memorable imaginative and intellectual writing and an important factor in the continuing extension and definition of an audience for such work.

The nineteenth century in England was not only an age of rapidly increasing population but also one during which the rate of literacy and the demand for suitable reading increased strikingly.⁶ Helping to create and feed that demand were significant changes in government policy, such as the piecemeal abolition of the ‘taxes on knowledge’ and the gradual provision of support for education, as well as dramatic changes in technology: new methods of production and distribution resulted in the placement of more printed materials into the hands of more people more cheaply and more rapidly, and new domestic conveniences permitted more leisure time for reading in more comfort. The ascent of the bourgeoisie, the primary beneficiaries of such changes, was accelerating. So was their need to define their place, and that of their class, in the world – a need that was met largely by the new books and periodicals that were becoming so abundantly available to them. The publishers of many of these books and periodicals were themselves emerging as a much more visible component of the professional middle class, while their trade continued to evolve from a small-time offshoot of bookselling into something approaching modern big business; authors too were achieving a measurably heightened sense of their own professionalism.⁷

Richard Altick has singled out the 1850s as the first decade in which there was ‘a mass [reading] public in anything like modern terms’ in the British Isles.⁸ Yet a growing portion of that public, which Q.D. Leavis was one of the earliest to label ‘middlebrow’,⁹ was not being served adequately by most of the periodicals, old and new, that were rolling off the presses in rapidly increasing numbers – certainly not by the august and relatively expensive quarterlies or by the modest penny weeklies addressed to a working-class audience as eager for instruction as for diversion. Clearly, there was a widening breach between those whom Leavis called ‘the minority’ and ‘the people’:¹⁰ those who perused the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review, established early in the century, and those who devoured such recently founded periodicals as Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper, the London Journal, Reynolds’ Miscellany, the Home Magazine, the Family Herald and the Welcome Guest.¹¹ It was probably a sign of the times rather than a coincidence that attention was being insistently called to the existence of this gap just before Macmillan’s came on the market.¹²

In August 1858, both Margaret Oliphant in Blackwood’s and Wilkie Collins in Household Words described these newer penny weeklies and their readership in fascinated detail – apprehensively in her case, hopefully in his. A writer in the British Quarterly Review for April 1859 took much the same line, although he or she sounded more like Oliphant than Collins in making dismayed reference to

that flood of Cheap Literature which, like the modern Babylon itself, no living man has ever been able to traverse, which has sprung up, and continues to spring up, with the mysterious fecundity of certain fungi, and which cannot be accounted for in its volume, variety, and universality by any ordinary laws of production.¹³

All three of these writers insisted that quantity and availability were no substitutes for quality and solidity, indirectly pointing to a need that was very soon to be met by Macmillan’s and its successors.

Others perceived, or rather misperceived, that same need. The publisher Richard Bentley, whose monthly Bentley’s Miscellany had anticipated some of the features of Macmillan’s two decades earlier, launched Bentley’s Quarterly Review in April 1859, but his usually shrewd appraisal of the public taste failed him on this occasion. Although Bentley had given much thought to the question of what sort of new periodical would sell, the magazine turned out to be a financial disaster and lasted for only four numbers. As the historian of the House of Bentley has written, ‘1859 was the time not for a six-shilling review but a one-shilling magazine: that much is clear from the brilliant success of the Cornhill Magazine [whose first number appeared in January 1860] and Macmillan’s Magazine.’¹⁴

The publisher of the Cornhill, George Smith, saw things differently from Richard Bentley. Reminiscing about the origin of that monthly more than four decades later, he wrote: ‘Early in 1859 I conceived the idea of founding a new magazine. … The existing magazines were few, and when not high-priced were narrow in literary range.’ Smith believed ‘that a shilling magazine’ containing, ‘in addition to other first-class literary matter’, a serial by an established novelist ‘must command a large sale’.¹⁵ Smith was right and Bentley wrong. That the age was ready and waiting for periodicals like Macmillan’s and the Cornhill was proved by the creation of numerous others within the next few years in what Walter Houghton called a veritable ‘outburst of shilling magazines’:¹⁶ Good Words and Temple Bar later in 1860, the St James in 1861, the Victoria in 1863, the Argosy in 1865, Belgravia in 1866 and Tinsleys’, Saint Pauls and Broadway in 1867.

None of these new arrivals, however, was able to seize and hold a lion’s share of the market; even the circulation of the Cornhill, whose first number had sold the ‘astounding total … of 120,000 copies’,¹⁷ soon declined after its novelty had worn off. There were simply too many shilling monthlies in competition with one another – ‘more magazines in the wretched field than there were blades of grass to support them’, as yet another publisher, William Tinsley, complained. He wrote in his memoirs that ‘there was a rage amongst publishers for shilling magazines’ when he started Tinsleys’, and he ruefully styled himself ‘one of the foolish sheep who rushed into the next field, and did not find the food so plentiful as it was in the field I had left’.¹⁸ He estimated his loss on the first 12 numbers of Tinsleys’ at £3000.

Financial ledgers by no means told the whole story, however. Edmund Downey, who worked for Tinsley at his Catherine Street establishment, remarked that, although Tinsleys’ may have cost its proprietor some money (never more, according to Downey, than £25 a month, ‘and this was recouped by profits from his Christmas and Summer Annuals’), the magazine brought his firm less tangible but nevertheless real benefits. Downey quotes Tinsley as often saying to him: ‘What cheaper advertisement can I have for twenty-five pounds a month? It advertises my name and publications and it keeps my authors together.’¹⁹

The point here is not whether we ought to believe Tinsley or Downey, whose figures disagree; it is, in any case, prudent not to place too much trust in the circumstantial recollections of garrulous late-Victorian autobiographers. Rather, the remark Downey attributed to Tinsley serves as a useful reminder that firms like Tinsley Brothers, Macmillan and Co. and Smith, Elder used their magazines to attract and nurture authors and to promote their much more lucrative trade in books, especially novels. John Sutherland has put it as follows:

These journals after the initial and considerable expense of founding them, earned revenue for the publisher, displayed his wares and enabled him to test the market to see how a novel ‘pulled’ with the public. The advantages even went so far as to outweigh the occasional unprofitability of the venture from a purely book-keeping point of view.²⁰

In making his case that the ‘development … of periodical literature’ was arguably the most ‘distinctive and characteristic … single feature of the English literary history of the nineteenth century’, George Saintsbury went beyond its effect on prose fiction and the market for it:

Very large numbers of the best as well as of the worst novels … have originally appeared in periodicals; not a very small proportion of the most noteworthy nineteenth century poetry has had the same origin; it may almost be said that all the best work in essay, whether critical, meditative, or miscellaneous, has thus been ushered into the world. Even the severer and more academic muses – history, philosophy, theology, and their sisters, have condescended to avail themselves of this means of obtaining a public audience; and though there is still a certain conventional decency in apologising for reprints from periodicals, it is quite certain that, had such reprints not taken place, more than half of the most valuable books of the age in some departments, and a considerable minority of the most valuable in others, would never have appeared as books at all.²¹

To say about the post-1859 era, as Michael Wolff did, that ‘Everybody wrote for the magazines’,²² may be an exaggeration, but not by very much. Certainly the multiplication of magazines did not go unremarked by intelligent readers. ‘Do you see how the pub...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• The Nineteenth Century Series General Editors' Preface
• Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Beginning
• 2 The Role of Alexander Macmillan
• 3 The Role of Frederick Denison Maurice
• 4 Margaret Oliphant
• 5 John Morley and Mowbray Morris
• Index