Visualising the Unseen: Supernatural Stories and Illustration in the Strand

Abstract

Visualising the Unseen:Supernatural Stories and Illustration in the Strand Emma Liggins "The Strand has always made a point of taking good stories," claimed a retrospective editorial in 1911 celebrating twenty-one years of a successful magazine.1 As Kate Jackson suggests in her important work on the Strand Magazine's publisher and first editor George Newnes, the ambitious project of "revolutionis[ing] the market for magazines" owed much to Newnes's enthusiastic promotion of the art of short story writing.2 By cramming the new magazine with illustrated short fiction, which opened most issues and dominated the contents pages, Newnes catered for a mass audience who could hardly wait for the next instalment of Sherlock Holmes's detective prowess or another thrilling tale of imperial adventure. Quickly becoming renowned for its short stories, the Strand Magazine has now become synonymous with the popularity of fin de siécle detective fiction. Some critical attention has also been paid to its generous inclusion of children's stories by regular contributors such as E. Nesbit, which helped to consolidate its mass appeal. Yet its embracing of other subgenres of the short story has been neglected. Ghost stories and other supernatural tales featuring fantastic creatures such as vampires, fairies, and monsters remained popular from the 1890s into the twentieth century. The Strand's juxtaposition of these stories with non-fictional articles on spiritualism, science, and technology as well as the illustrations created by the magazine's expert team of artists are worthy of more critical interest. In this article I argue that paying attention to the illustrations and captions printed alongside ghostly and uncanny stories in the Strand between 1891 and 1917 can transform our interpretations of how the supernatural was represented during this period. The complex interaction between supernatural story and illustration in the fin de siécle periodical press reveals cultural anxieties and curiosities about new technologies, the afterlife, and the medical profession. Art editors, whose roles were enhanced by [End Page 365] the end of the century, actively shaped the layout of illustrated magazines that experimented with new forms of visuality. In his excellent reading of Sidney Paget's illustrations for the Holmes stories, Christopher Pittard has claimed that "the role of illustration is crucial to an understanding of how the Strand policed its reading community."3 Pittard considers how images of the detective helped frame potentially progressive ideologies within a conservative aesthetic, but how was the reading community positioned in relation to its consumption of illustrations of the ghostly and the uncanny? If, according to Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, "the image/text/reader dialogue will always … be a product of its cultural milieu," then fin de siécle readers of illustrated monthlies decoded images of the supernatural in relation to what they knew about science and scepticism.4 Drawing on debates about illustration in periodical studies, I consider what is left in or out of the frame in illustrations of the supernatural and what this might tell us about editorial policy on ghosts and the sceptical reader. Pittard argues that Paget's images obscured detail because Newnes "didn't want his readers to be peering too closely at corpses" for fear of compromising the "cheap, healthful literature" he intended to promote, but this claim does not adequately account for ghost stories and their images.5 The phantoms, spirits, and terrified witnesses featured in illustrations of ghostly encounters must be interpreted in relation to the climate of uncertainty about spiritualism and the supernatural. Illustration and the Borders of Acceptability The illustrated monthly became one of the bestselling magazine formats of the 1890s. The successful formula of short fiction, serialised novels or novellas, illustrations, interviews, and glossy photographs catered to new audiences who were receptive to the visual allure of New Journalism. In an early editorial in the Idler Magazine, editor Robert Barr considers the need for an illustrated monthly in an age of mass literacy: "Time had come when a new monthly magazine ought really to be published. Here is a great reading population crying out for printed matter, and yet nobody seems to pay much attention to the appeal."6 When Newnes was interviewed for the "Lions in their Dens...