Strand Magazine Research Articles

Twentieth-Century Victorian: Arthur Conan Doyle and the Strand Magazine, 1891–1930 by Jonathan Cranfield

Reviewed by: Twentieth-Century Victorian: Arthur Conan Doyle and the Strand Magazine, 1891–1930 by Jonathan Cranfield Emma Liggins (bio) Jonathan Cranfield, Twentieth-Century Victorian: Arthur Conan Doyle and the Strand Magazine, 1891–1930 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp. 254, £75/$120 hardcover, £24.99/$39.95 paperback. As the author of the perennially popular Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle has generated a buoyant critical industry lauding him as one of the masters of Victorian crime fiction. What is often missing from this account is the breadth and variety of the material he produced and, perhaps more importantly, the periodical contexts in which his fictions first appeared. Though he wrote for a number of key magazines of the fin de siècle, including the Windsor Magazine, Conan Doyle's story is inextricable from the story of the Strand Magazine (1891–1949), the middlebrow illustrated monthly that established his reputation. As Jonathan Cranfield claims in the introduction to his timely new study, "The interdependence of Conan Doyle and the Strand's reputations was not an arbitrary occurrence, but instead the symptom of a series of shifts in the production and consumption of popular culture," changes which can explain "how author and publication sought to shepherd a determinedly Victorian audience through the turbulence of the early twentieth century" (1). Cranfield's careful consideration of the development of the Strand between the 1890s and Conan Doyle's death in 1930 allows for a nuanced analysis of "slow transformations in literary form, ideology, cultural attitudes and social values" (2). Chapters are structured primarily around specific decades of the magazine's publication, mapping the author's popularity in different eras and relating this to the genres and materials he produced during his forty-year involvement. Cranfield attends to issues of readership and editor-contributor interchanges as he examines Conan Doyle's evolving relationship with prolific publisher George Newnes and editor H. Greenhough Smith. This builds upon Kate Jackson's important work on Newnes and on the 1890s issues of the Strand. Cranfield's study also places Conan Doyle in relation to key debates about science and modernity, the Boer War, imperialism, spiritualism, and the transformation of the periodical after 1914 into "a vehicle for propaganda" (105). One of the strengths of a broader approach is that due consideration is given to the significant twentieth-century life of the periodical. As recent work on Richard Marsh by Minna Vuohelainen and others has shown, the issues published shortly before, during, and after the First World War have been overshadowed by the Holmes years of the 1890s. Cranfield's parameters allow for a sustained critique of the "Victorianisation" of the Strand and the uneven process by which "its Victorian readers became its Edwardian readers" before having to adapt to the cultural upheaval of the war years and their aftermath (5). [End Page 752] Cranfield adeptly captures the contradictions and complexities of writing for a magazine with an agenda of mass entertainment in uncertain times. His engaging, fluent writing style provides its own form of entertainment, making his analysis both accessible and erudite: like the Strand Magazine, the book includes lots of snippets, strange images, and comic moments set alongside serious intellectual endeavour. Reflecting recent interest in the image/text dynamics of the periodical press, Cranfield pays welcome attention to the magazine's illustrations, which were a key element of its appeal. The excellent introduction, "Periodicals, Popular Writing and Modernism," offers an extended meditation on the meanings of the "popular," popular modernism, and the boundaries between periods, which respond to ongoing debates about radicalism and middlebrow print culture. The third chapter begins to examine Conan Doyle's construction of himself as "post-Victorian" after 1903, a period of experimentation as he considered "which admixture of old and new might best fit the twentieth century" (93). The serialisation of historical fiction such as Sir Nigel (1905–6) is then shown to be "out of place" or "leaden and slow" for Edwardian readers when published alongside articles such as "Across America by Motor-Car" and "Boomerangs and Boomerang Throwing" (94). The chapter focused on the uneasy period leading up to and during the First World War argues that many...

Restoring the Lost Empire: Egyptian Archaeology and Imperial Nostalgia in H. Rider Haggard’s ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’ (1912)

This article focuses on H. Rider Haggard’s ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’, a long short story published across three consecutive issues of The Strand Magazine (December 1912- February 1913). An occult tale of Egyptian fantasy, it depicts the adventures of James Ebenezer Smith, an archaeologist, as he searches for the long lost remains of an ancient Egyptian queen, a search that culminates in his perilous confrontation, in the Cairo Museum, with the assembled ghosts of the Pharaohs of Egyptian antiquity. The story, it is argued, represented a specific intervention in contemporary debates over the status of Egypt as a colonial protectorate, as a popular tourist destination, and as the object of a new wave of British archaeological endeavour. Drawing on a range of Haggard’s nonfiction, in particular a series of polemical articles he wrote for the Daily Mail in 1904, I argue that ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’ should be understood as both a statement of Haggard’s idiosyncratic views and a commentary upon the popular craze for Egypt at the beginning of the twentieth century. In this largely overlooked short story, he establishes an ideal of authentic interest in ancient Egypt to counter what he saw as the debasement of Egyptian antiquity in popular culture. I conclude by noting that Haggard’s idealised relationship to Egypt, despite being predicated upon Conservative, imperialist, and orientalist attitudes, presents an intriguing parallel to the ideals of an emergent Egyptian nationalist movement.

Preface

Magic squares, chess-like problems, cryptarithmetic puzzles, and similar classes of problems have been extensively used to challenge human reasoning capabilities. Lo Shu magic square can be traced back to 650 B.C., the eight-queens problem was proposed in 1848 by the chess player Max Bazzel TWO × TWO = THREE puzzle appeared in Strand Magazine in 1924. These puzzles are nowadays widely used in constraint programming courses. The first programming language provided with constraint modelling primitives (Sketchpad) has been proposed by the Turing award winner Ivan Sutherland in his PhD thesis (1963). Logemann and Loveland, when implementing the Davis–Putnam procedure (Davis and Putnam 1960) for testing the satisfiability of a propositional formula (SAT), devised an algorithm (Davis–Putnam–Logemann–Loveland (DPLL)) that has become the core of all SAT/and Answer Set Programming solvers (50 years later). It consists in choosing an un-assigned variable, assigning it a value 0 or 1, propagating the chosen value (unit propagation), and proceeding with the alternative value, if the original assignment leads to a contradiction (backtracking). Some years later Waltz (1975) introduced the notion of domain filtering (arc-consistency-based constraint propagation). With this idea the same DPLL scheme can be used for verifying the satisfiability of a constraint satisfaction problem, where the assignment is no longer 0/1 and the unit propagation is replaced by constraint propagation. For a detailed history of these early years achievements, we refer the reader to the works by Loveland et al. (2017), Jaffar and Maher (1994), and Freuder and Mackworth (2006).

"Twentieth-century Victorian: Arthur Conan Doyle and the 'Strand Magazine,' 1891–1930," by Jonathan Cranfield

Review of Jonathan Cranfield, Twentieth-century Victorian: Arthur Conan Doyle and the "Strand Magazine," 1891–1930. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016, hardcover, £75 (256p) ISBN 978-1474406758; e-book, £75, ISBN 978-1474406772.

Looking at the issues: science and fiction as genres in the fin de siècle magazine

ABSTRACTOne of the more profound effects of the digitisation of periodicals is the eclipse of the ‘issue’ as a unit of study. Keyword searching allows us to create bespoke collections of articles from across a wide range of publications, algorithmically determined to cluster around a single author, event, or idea – all well and good, if a single author, event, or idea is the object of study. In this piece, though, I argue that there is sometimes value in apprehending the whole issue, especially if one is interested in discursive formations of genre.Through an examination of one particular issue (June 1898) of the popular monthly Strand Magazine (1891-1950), this article thinks through the ways in which the material proximity of genres in fin de siècle periodicals can result in resonances and formations of meaning which can be both fundamental to genre identity and hard to find with keywords. I focus in particular on multiple possible readings of Cutcliffe Hyne’s short story ‘The Lizard’, which, I argue, carefully uses the polysemic fluidity of magazine genre as an element of its own structure. This aspect of the story is lost completely if one reads it outside of its original publication venue.

The First Cyborg and First World War Bodies as Anti-War Propaganda

This article discusses a play published in The Strand Magazine during the First World War which features a cyborg presenting anti-war and pacifist messages, used by The Strand to create anti-German propaganda. The article draws on theories of disability, cyborgs and the posthuman, and from new research on wartime fiction magazines. The importance of the cyborg character, Soldier 241, for the literary history of science fiction is explored by focusing on the relations between the mechanical and the impaired body, and on the First World War as a nexus for technological, surgical and military development. As a cyborg, this character reflects politicized desires that the wartime authorities did not acknowledge: a longing for the end of war, and refusal to countenance a society that rejected the impaired body.

Masters of Healing: Cocaine and the Ideal of the Victorian Medical Man.

This article offers a new perspective on the relationship between cocaine and medical practitioners in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Cocaine is often understood as one of a number of potentially addictive substances to which Victorian physicians and surgeons were regularly exposed, and tempted to indulge in. However, while cocaine has frequently been associated with discourses of addiction, this article proposes that it was also widely represented as a technological triumph, and that the drug was frequently used as a symbol for the scientific and moral virtues of the medical man. The argument draws on popular journalism, medical publications, and fiction to establish the cultural context of cocaine at the fin de siècle. In 1884, cocaine was revealed to be the first effective local anaesthetic, and this article traces the processes by which cocaine came to be regarded as the iconic achievement of nineteenth-century therapeutic science. This aura of innovative brilliance in turn communicated itself to the medical professionals who employed cocaine in their work, so that many patients and practitioners alike depicted cocaine as a most fitting emblem for the idealized selfhood of the modern medical man. This idea also informs portrayals of the drug in fiction, and I conclude with a detailed analysis of L. T. Meade’s 1895 short story, ‘The Red Bracelet’ (published in the Strand Magazine as part of Meade’s series, ‘Stories from the Diary of a Doctor’), as an example of the way in which cocaine functions as metaphor for the physician’s unassailable moral primacy and technical excellence.

“You see, but you do not observe”: Hidden Infrastructure and Labour in the Strand Magazine and Its Twenty-First-Century Digital Iterations

The Strand Magazine (1891–1950), a key print culture object, was launched six months before its publisher, George Newnes, restructured his business as a limited liability company. The initial share offering was only open to people closely affiliated with Tit-Bits and the Strand: booksellers, newsagents, bookstall clerks, periodical staff, and advertisers. This article examines the community of investors who purchased shares in 1891, revealing some of the invisible and less visible individuals who were affiliated with Newnes’s stable of publications. Exploring the transformations in the firm’s corporate structure during the 1890s invites consideration of the corporate and finance models that are involved in today’s digital marketplace. Currently, digital incarnations of the Strand Magazine, in varying degrees of completeness and quality, are available through both open-access and commercial sources. The corporate and imaginative structures behind these emergent media are opaque. What technological infrastructure is involved in their production? How do corporate and legal systems influence their creation, distribution, and use? We illuminate the Strand ’s history by drawing attention to the significance of some of the under-considered technological, business, legal, and financing structures involved in the creation of today’s digital objects.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Great New Adventure Story”: Journalism in The Lost World

This essay discusses the critical engagements of Arthur Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) with the rise of journalistic professionalism at the turn of the century. With a focus on features from the novel’s serial publication in George Newnes’s illustrated periodical, the Strand Magazine , this essay argues that this popular work of fiction self-consciously positions itself against what had become a fairly mainstream ideological and generic split between literature and journalism. Through its masquerade as a first-person account mediated by a professional network of journalists and editors, The Lost World integrates conventions of literary romance and objective journalism to combat perspectives on the incompatibility of romance and modern reality.

A Selected Bibliography of Writings by Bernard Shaw Concerning Health, the Medical Profession, and Related Topics

This selected bibliography gathers Bernard Shaw’s pronouncements on health and related topics. References in brackets are to Dan H. Laurence’s Bernard Shaw: A Bibliography, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983). References to items reprinted in The Works of Bernard Shaw: Collected Edition (London: Constable, 1930–38) are marked “Repr. in A198.” Items reprinted in Ronald Ford, ed., The Letters of Bernard Shaw to The Times, 1898–1950 (Sallins: Irish Academic Press, 2007) are marked “Repr. in Ford.”

Sherlock's slums: the periodical as an environmental form

This article uses recent developments in environmental criticism to analyse the role of the ‘The Strand Magazine’ and the late-Victorian periodical in general within late-century and early Edwardian London. It examines ‘The Strand’'s connection with the development of intra-city rail services, the simultaneous growth of the commuter belt and inner-city slums, and, finally, the ways in which the corporeal afterlife of periodical texts should alter traditional ways of interpreting them. It argues that, outside of periodical studies itself, the periodical has been neglected and not subjected to newer kinds of theoretical analysis. Contrary to popular prejudices against them, I argue that the periodical is a quintessentially environmental form in that it necessarily maintains a close, symbiotic relationship with the world around it.

Conan Doyle's Gothic Materialism

In a diary entry from December 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle recorded a terse summary of the story that would be published in that month's issue of Strand Magazine: ‘Killed Holmes’. ‘The Final Problem’ ...

Dangerous work: diary of an Arctic adventure

Facsimile of the diary Transcription of the diary with full notes ACD's two letters home to his mother from the voyage Glamour of the Arctic, The Idler, 1894 (non-fiction) Life on a Greenland Whaler, Strand Magazine, 1897 (non-fiction) Captain of the Pole-Star, Temple Bar, 1883 (short story) Adventure of Black Peter, Strand Magazine, 1904 (short story)

Arthur Conan Doyle's Use of Restoration History in The Musgrave Ritual

In The Musgrave Ritual, which first appeared in Strand Magazine in May 1893, Sherlock Holmes is asked by Reginald Musgrave, a former schoolmate, to investigate the disappearance of two of his serva...

The Return of Mata Hari: A Woman Redeemed (Sinclair Hill, 1927)

Frederick Britten Austin explicitly referred to reports of Mata Hari's execution in his June 1924 Strand magazine short story, ‘The Fining Pot is for Silver,’ adapted by Mary Murillo and directed by Sinclair Hill for Stoll's 1927 release, A Woman Redeemed. Both scenarios feature a dark, heartless woman, Marta Rugini, a trusted member of an organisation of foreign agents intent on power and destruction. In the following article, I shall examine the film's selective re-working of the legend for a contemporary audience and contextualise its themes with reference back to memories and memoirs of the First World War (more or less fictionalised) and forwards to fears that the Treaty of Versailles would not for long guarantee peace in Europe. In addition to the film's reliance on literary and historical sources for its plot, I am concerned here with settings, costuming and locations as indicators of the character whom the 1917 prosecution lawyer dubbed ‘perhaps the greatest woman spy of the century.' The day after Mata Hari's death, the Paris correspondent for the Daily Express announced her the ‘World's most sinister adventuress,’ adding that the story of her career ‘outrivals any novel in point of dramatic interest and romance.’

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Text as it happens – literary geography

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Text as it happens – literary geography

"Write a little bit every day": L.T. Meade, Self-Representation, and the Professional Woman Writer

"Write a little bit every day":L.T. Meade, Self-Representation, and the Professional Woman Writer Janis Dawson (bio) In the autumn of 1898, the readers of the Girl's Realm (1898-1915), a new middle-class girls' magazine, were given an opportunity to win a "£20 Lady's 'Swift' Bicycle" by submitting a list of "the six most popular living writers of stories for girls, given in the order of their popularity" ("Grand Prizes," Girl's Realm 1: 89). As Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig observe, "The bicycle was a happy choice for this prize, suggesting modernity and liberating athleticism to girls on the threshold of the new century" (55). L.T. Meade, the competition's favourite, was herself a happy choice for similar reasons. Arguably, no writer of her day made a greater contribution to the development of girls' culture and the idea of the "New Girl" than Meade, the author of close to three hundred books and countless short stories and essays, and editor (1887-93) of the highly regarded middle-class girls' literary magazine Atalanta. In the same year as this contest, Meade was ranked by the Strand Magazine as a literary "celebrity" along with H.G. Wells; she was described as one of the magazine's most popular contributors and "one of the most industrious modern writers of fiction" ("Portraits" 674). Eight years later, Meade was still ranked among the top five authors in a survey of girls aged fifteen to eighteen (Low 278-87). By 1929, however, Meade's name appeared on the "not to be circulated" lists of public libraries, and her books, once given as school prizes in Britain and North America, were removed from the shelves because they were believed to lack literary value (Mitchell 14). Despite Meade's considerable literary presence in her own time, the subsequent devaluation of her work has contributed to a lack of interest in her life and career. Although Sally Mitchell's New Girl has done much to rehabilitate Meade's reputation, critics have, with a few exceptions,1 disparaged Meade's work, citing her "feminist shortcomings" (including her tendency to give more attention in her school stories to cocoa parties and dormitory furnishings than to academic studies), and even her commercialism (she produced as many as eleven books a year) as her offences.2 Nor have critics explored the other genres that Meade exploited so successfully.3 Despite her remarkable versatility as a writer and editor, Meade is now primarily remembered for her girls' fiction. To date, there is no full-length biography, no published collection [End Page 132] of letters, no documented collection of papers, and no comprehensive bibliography of her work. Significantly, almost everything known about Meade is derived from her writings and from information she provided about herself to numerous interviewers. I argue in this essay that Meade, as one of the nineteenth century's most popular authors, carefully constructed and controlled her public image as a professional woman writer. By focusing on the ways in which Meade represented herself in the literary marketplace, I argue that Meade was a savvy professional who legitimized her claim to professional authority by drawing on earlier models of Victorian authorship like those of Harriet Martineau and Anthony Trollope. She also took advantage of sensational incidents and current debates in the periodical press—such as baby farming and infanticide—to frame her work for a popular audience.4 Meade also exploited popular genres, from the New Journalism to science fiction and detective fiction. Indeed, my analysis of Meade's career not only reveals her professionalism and canny market sense but also suggests how fin-de-siècle women writers exploited current debates and popular literary genres to build professional careers. Presenting the Literary Woman Although Meade left no memoirs, she offered autobiographical "tit-bits" in her interviews and writing. Notably, much of the information she provided centred on her methods of work and her views on writing, editing, and professionalism; what information she revealed was shaped to enhance her public persona. In this respect, Meade's carefully constructed autobiographical revelations reflect the professionalization of women's writing in the nineteenth century. As the expansion of...

Noel Norman, trans-national magazinist from Lindisfarne, Tasmania

Noel Norman's novels have attracted some critical attention, but little is known about his much longer career as a story writer for popular magazines in England and the United States of America. Writing as ‘Louis Kaye’, Norman's stories appeared in some of the most popular magazines of the 1930s and 1940s, including Strand Magazine, Blue Book, Collier's Weekly and the Saturday Evening Post. This article reconsiders Norman's career as a ‘magazinist’ by tracing the movement of his stories from Lindisfarne to London and New York before their return to Australia as syndicated fiction or on the pages of imported magazines. The trans-national networks of print culture that emerge suggest the need to look beyond the national boundaries of Australian literary history in order to better understand how Australian writers and readers saw themselves as individuals, members of nations and citizens of the world.

English Marital Violence in Litigation, Literature, and the Press

English Marital Violence in Litigation, Literature, and the Press Joanne Bailey (bio) Elizabeth Foyster . Marital Violence: An English Family History, 1660-1857. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xiii + 282 pp. ISBN 0-521-83451-1 (cl); 0-521-61912-2 (pb). Lisa Surridge . Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005. xiv + 271 pp. ISBN 0-8214-1642-1 (cl); 0-8214-1643-X (pb). Scholars use marital violence as a tool to understand patriarchy, women's position within the institution of marriage and society, the nature of gendered relationships, and, increasingly, notions of femininity and masculinity. Elizabeth Foyster and Lisa Surridge have contributed further insights into these issues with two fine studies of marital violence in England, together covering the period 1660 to 1900. Both books also push forward our understandings in several key areas. These include the role that class played in marital violence, the permeability of the marital home to outside view, and the relationship between masculinity and wife beating. The similarities of their focus are yet more striking when we realize that Foyster and Surridge have a different chronological focus and work in different disciplines and therefore utilize different methodologies and sources. Foyster is a historian who analyzes a range of legal cases from 1660 to 1800, including matrimonial litigation that was heard before the London Consistory Court, the Court of Arches, the Peculiars of the Archbishopric of Canterbury, the High Court of Delegates, and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. She supplements these with printed Law Reports and cases of child or spouse custody that came before King's Bench. Finally, she draws on records of wife beating from the London Police Courts reported in The Times in the first half of the nineteenth century. Covering nearly two hundred years, Foyster sets out to explain broad patterns in attitudes and experience. Surridge, on the other hand, is a literary scholar who analyzes fictionalized accounts of marital violence and adopts a more pointillist approach by constructing each chapter around a key novel or serial from a different decade covering roughly seventy to eighty years from the 1830s to the turn of the century. These are Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (1839) and [End Page 144] Dombey and Son (1846–48), Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), George Eliot's "Janet's Repentance" (serialized in 1857), Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1859–60), Anthony Trollope's He Knew He was Right (1869), Mona Caird's The Wing of Azrael (1889), and Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories published in The Strand Magazine in the 1890s and early 1900s. Surridge explores the relationship between them and newspaper reporting of wife beating, which she contends increased around or after the major legal landmarks of the 1828 Offences Against the Person Act, the 1853 Act for the Better Prevention and Punishment of Aggravated Assaults on Women and Children, the 1857 and 1878 Matrimonial Causes Acts, and the married women's property acts of 1870 and 1882. Bleak Houses and Marital Violence have somewhat different objectives. While Foyster overlaps with Surridge in her use of statutes relating to beaten wives and newspaper reports of wife beating, she treats them as empirical resources for an understanding of how marital violence was experienced, dealt with, and interpreted. In doing so she identifies and attempts to explain the emergence of two major misconceptions about marital violence in the period 1660–1800: that wife beating was a working-class phenomenon and that it increasingly became a "private" matter. In contrast, Surridge examines the numerous intersections between the law, debates about marriage, the press, and fiction. Thus, for example, she shows how realist fiction of the 1840s anticipated and helped frame debates on wife assault that surrounded the 1853 Act for the Better Prevention and Punishment of Aggravated Assaults on Women and Children. Novels also entered such existing debates as feminist concerns about married women's legal status. Thus women's position under coverture was central to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Surridge also shows the impact of newspaper reporting upon fiction. The structure of Collins's The Woman in White for example closely followed...

The Healing Art of Detection: Sherlock Holmes and the Disease of Crime in the <i>Strand Magazine</i>

The Healing Art of Detection: Sherlock Holmes and the Disease of Crime in the <i>Strand Magazine</i>