Empires of Print

Adventure Fiction in the Magazines, 1899-1919

Patrick Scott Belk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317185048
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria moderna

At the turn of the twentieth century, the publishing industries in Britain and the United States underwent dramatic expansions and reorganization that brought about an increased traffic in books and periodicals around the world. Focusing on adventure fiction published from 1899 to 1919, Patrick Scott Belk looks at authors such as Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, Conan Doyle, and John Buchan to explore how writers of popular fiction engaged with foreign markets and readers through periodical publishing. Belk argues that popular fiction, particularly the adventure genre, developed in ways that directly correlate with authors' experiences, and shows that popular genres of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries emerged as one way of marketing their literary works to expanding audiences of readers worldwide. Despite an over-determined print space altered by the rise of new kinds of consumers and transformations of accepted habits of reading, publishing, and writing, the changes in British and American publishing at the turn of the twentieth century inspired an exciting new period of literary invention and experimentation in the adventure genre, and the greater part of that invention and experimentation was happening in the magazines. ?

1 Empires of Print

An Imperial History of Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Expansion

The rapid expansion of the British and American periodical press during the last three decades of the nineteenth century was, as many critics have noted, not unprecedented. Simon Eliot records the “almost relentless” increase in both new titles and circulations “from 1800 to the mid-1850s” in Britain. It was followed by a period of relative “quiescence” in the 1860s, which was “similar to the one visible in book production figures for the same decade.”¹ Eliot cites at least 1,564 new periodical titles established in England and Wales during the 1850s (a 51 percent increase over the 1840s), and he notes that these figures do not include the “vast quantities of unstamped weekly papers,” which “probably accounted for a significant proportion of total newspaper and magazine production.”² From 1800, the periodical industry had grown intermittently, but at an accelerated pace, in London, Manchester, Liverpool, New York, Chicago, and Edinburgh. It experienced two major “surges in production” in the UK, which were roughly between 1830–55 and 1875–1903.³ In the US, a similar “dynamic of development” occurred, although, as David Reed argues, it was “late but explosive,” and the process “happened earlier in Britain than in America.”⁴ According to Reed:

[T]he dynamic of development within both Britain and the United States proved remarkably consistent whether judged from the point of view of an industrialist, an advertising executive or a magazine publisher. The energies of urbanization were released in the first part of the nineteenth century in Britain and towards its end in America. The rise of the popular magazine was a part of this process in each country.⁵

The nineteenth-century periodical industry developed in tandem with the increasing centrality of the industrialized, metropolitan cities as major hubs of culture, information, and political power. It also radiated outwards, alongside “the evolution of the railway system (1830s on)” in the UK,⁶ and again, “in the 1870s, when … railway managements [in the US] were able to organize efficient long-distance services … [which] also meant regular and faster postal and small package services, important for both business communication and the distribution of magazines.”⁷ Eliot reminds us that:

the history of text involves the history of its dissemination and … as part of the context, we need to know what was happening to the distribution of printed matter in the nineteenth century. This deserves and needs a large-scale study in its own right.⁸

Part I of this chapter focuses on that critical “part of the context … what was happening to the distribution of printed matter” during the period Eliot terms the “second phase” of British book and periodical expansion in the nineteenth century (1875–1903). In the process, I explore the under-documented global expansion of colonial and foreign markets for British periodicals, and British publishers’ attempts to supply those markets, from roughly 1880 to 1914. In Part II of this chapter, I survey some of the many periodicals and periodical forms in which readers first encountered adventure fiction during the nineteenth century, and argue that a close, symbiotic relationship developed between these periodical forms and the evolving genre of late-Victorian adventure fiction. Within the phenomenal expansion of British and American publishing at the turn of the twentieth century, this chapter identifies an important link between adventure fiction, its serialization in magazines, and concerns about the globalization of literary markets that was exploited by authors Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, Conan Doyle, and John Buchan. This chapter’s macroscopic, historical overview then serves to contextualize the following four chapters of this study, which examine key texts by these individual authors more closely, while situating them against this wider material and economic background. I argue that important serializations of their works across a variety of magazines evince a particularly urgent, profoundly generative tension between the texts of modern adventure fiction and the global and material context of their periodical publication, distribution, and circulation throughout the Empire and around the world.⁹

Part I: “The History of Text Involves the History of its Dissemination”

The revolution in distribution and transportation that began in Great Britain in the 1830s culminated in the creation of a national network within 20 years. The completion of the main inter-urban railway system in the 1850s gave publishers rapid and reliable access to nearly all of Britain’s local markets. Improvements in the Royal Mail services in 1830–53 were made possible by the greater speed and reliability of these railways,¹⁰ and, without this combination of speed, reliability, frequency, and affordability, the “first phase” of British periodical expansion during the nineteenth century (1830–55) could scarcely have materialized. The late nineteenth century’s unprecedented global diffusion of trade, technology, and commerce abetted further extensions of print culture networks around the world. This “second phase” of British periodical expansion in the nineteenth century (1875–1903) was, in many ways, an accelerated version of previous “surges in production” that occurred in 1830–55. The access to new markets was again made possible by revolutions in distribution and transportation, but this time the markets were far larger, owing to international and imperial processes of the nineteenth century (see Appendix C).

Thousands of miles separated Wellington or Victoria¹¹ from industrialized metropolitan centers in nineteenth-century Britain, but the increasing range, reliability, and speed of shipping, travel, the electric telegraph, and Imperial Penny Post allowed a degree of physical and imagined immediacy with the cultural comforts of home unavailable to previous generations of emigrants. Janet C. Myers coined the term “portable domesticity” to describe the significant role played by English books and printed text in British emigrants’ establishing of domestic lives in Australia.¹² Citing estimates to suggest that, “between 1821 and 1915, 10 million emigrants left Great Britain for non-European destinations,” Myers argues that, “the imperial project depended not only upon territorial expansion … but also on various kinds of texts and writing” transported by the British mail steamers and transformed by colonial readers into mobile forms of cultural capital.¹³ Bill Bell notes that emigrant-oriented journals¹⁴ relentlessly praised books and periodicals as “a continued flow of valuable and correct information,” and argues that, “the thousands of books, tracts, letters and newspapers that made their way to the colonies in the nineteenth century provided vital connections with familiar social values, serving for many to organize an otherwise unpredictable environment into recognizable patterns.”¹⁵ Travelers’ accounts written in the nineteenth century confirm this. In Australia and New Zealand (1873), Anthony Trollope records:

I have been at very many bush houses,—at over thirty different stations in the different colonies,—but at not one … in which I have not found a fair provision of books. It is universally recognised among squatters that a man who settles down in the bush without books is preparing for himself a miserable future life. … [He] has no other recreation to entice him. He has no club, no billiard table, no public-house which he can frequent. Balls and festivities are very rare. … I think that reading is at least as customary as it is with young men in London. The authors I found most popular were certainly Shakespeare, Dickens, and Macaulay. I would back the chance of finding Macaulay’s Essays at a station against that of any book in the language except Shakespeare. To have a Shakespeare is a point of honour with every man who owns a book … whether he reads it or leaves it unread.¹⁶

As British emigrants settled abroad in increasing numbers throughout the nineteenth century, the colonial settlers established semi-autonomous communities with varying degrees of dependency and levels of cultural and economic ties to Britain. They maintained these ties through expanding networks of trade, transportation, and communication, and the “thousands of books, tracts, letters and newspapers” that circulated in the colonies and wherever the English language was read.

On the most basic material level, the late-Victorian boom in books and printed media was made possible by imperial processes of expansion and centralization. For instance, the massive production of books, magazines, and newspapers required raw materials from around the world, such as copper and gutta-percha for the Empire’s hundreds of thousands of miles of trans-oceanic telegraph cables;¹⁷ steel, rubber, cloth, copper, and iron ore for manufacturing rotary presses;¹⁸ cotton rags, wood pulp, wool, and grass fibers for making paper;¹⁹ and ink, resins, and linseed oil for printing on it. In the 1880s and 1890s, as the expansion of the periodical press “ex ploded into cacophony,”²⁰ newspapers and magazines also spread widely and rapidly along the same colonial trade routes—which also served as the world’s mail delivery routes—developed and maintained by private companies heavily subsidized by the British during the previous four centuries.

According to Robert Lee: “[T]hat the railway age and era of the new imperialism coincided was not accidental, because the railway and imperialism were interdependent.”²¹ Lee explains:

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the horizons of railway engineers widened dramatically. From being conquerors of the relatively tame environment of northern England … they went to bring safe, economical and fast travel … to some of the remotest parts of the globe. … [T]he technological changes of the mid-nineteenth century gave [Britain] the means to develop large territorial empires in previously unhospitable lands. Railways were foremost among these innovations, but not alone. Beside them were quinine … the steamship … and the electric telegraph, which in the 1870s was extended across the world.²²

The interdependence of the popular periodical press and British imperial expansion was a factor in these sweeping transformations in distribution and transportation. This interdependence might be mapped and statistically determined through data tables in annual yearbooks and colonial lists of the period, but it was never on more ostentatious display than at the Imperial Press Conference of 1909. In the following section, I describe how British publishers repositioned themselves with respect to both the politics of Empire and their own expanding foreign and colonial markets. The influence they had as “arbiters of public opinion” helped them broker an informal arrangement to align the concerns of Empire with the operations of colonial publishers. The formation of an Empire Press Union (EPU) was one direct result of this meeting and, in 1909, signaled that more substantive changes were to come, while building on ...