The Provincial Press and the Imperial Traffic in Fiction, 1870s–1930s

Abstract

Long before British newspapers included weekend magazine sections, they carried fiction and other diversions in their Saturday supplements. In the 1870s and 1880s, newspapers outside London commonly bought their fiction from syndicates that had grown out of two other provincial news papers, the Sheffield Daily Telegraph and the Bolt on Evening News. The Bolton firm of Tillotson also dealt extensively with the empire. A chapter of a serialized melodrama, cast in stereotype or printed on strips of paper and ready to be slotted into newspapers in towns and countries the author had never seen, is as good a metaphor of cultural standardization as any. While historians of modern Britain are familiar with the tradition of cultural pessimism that decried the evils of stan dardization, we know rather less about the kinds of decisions involved in assembling and promoting a list of fiction that could be offered to readers throughout?and beyond?Britain.1 What kind of fiction served that purpose at a time when the newspaper and periodical market was becoming more specialized, targeted at par ticular demographics? To what extent did judgments made on the basis of British audiences apply to their colonial counterparts? What impact did international syn dication have on local literary cultures? This article is an attempt to answer these questions, which are, among other things, questions about the relationship between center and periphery in the culture industry. At least in the early decades of fiction syndication, the centers