Body-Building and Empire-Building: George Douglas Brown, The South African War, and Sandow's Magazine of Physical Culture

Abstract

Sometimes an author writes for the wrong magazine, with surprising long-term results. One of the givens for most Victorianists is that the demands of periodical writing engaged an author with his or her audiences in ways that were themselves creative. Research has commonly focused on writings where the contributor and the periodical match well, so that the expansive paratext of periodical publication deepens our understanding of an author's literary voice and of how it was perceived by contemporary readers. The case examined here is different, in that it examines what seems a flagrant mismatch. The relevant sub-group of scholars, specialists in the Scottish novel, would seem simply to have dismissed the whole relationship as a critically embarrassing anomaly, best not looked into too closely lest the reputation of their author be compromised. Nonetheless, once one reads the periodical as a cultural unit, and not just as the individual author's contributions to it, this apparent mismatch casts new light on the writer and his culture in a way that his professionally safer and more ambitious elite periodical short fiction cannot. The author is George Douglas Brown (1869-1902), still not widely known outside Scotland, but generally recognized as the first major modern Scottish novelist, and the periodical is Sandow's Magazine of Physical Culture, founded in 1898, and generally credited as the first bodybuilding magazine.1 Brown's landmark novel, The House with the Green Shutters, first published in 1901, has seldom been out of print and is a staple of the Scottish teaching canon at both high school and university level. On its publication, Brown was immediately recognized as the pivotal figure in a new turn in Scottish fiction, against the elegiac sentimentalism of the Kailyard-J. M. Barrie, S. R. Crockett,