Category:The Cornhill Magazine
Title: The Cornhill Magazine
Editor: William Thackeray
Publisher: George Murray Smith
Named after Cornhill Street in London where it was printed, Cornhill Magazine was a Victorian literary magazine established in 1859 by George Murray Smith. He modeled the magazine after the American Harper’s Magazine in order to produce high-quality literature in a monthly magazine.[1] Although Smith originally wanted to hire Thomas Hughes as the editor, he eventually recruited William Makepeace Thackeray for an annual salary of one thousand pounds. Thackeray told Smith that Cornhill “must bear my cachet you see and be a man of the world Magazine,” much in the same way that Dickens’ name was tied to Household Words (Dickens was Thackeray’s literary rival during the time).[2] The first edition was an enormous success and sold more than 11,000 copies.[3] Although circulation dropped after a few years, the magazine continued to publish articles on a variety of subjects, from religion to science to politics. It also published serialized novels, short stories, and poetry from some of the most famous writers of the era, including Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Henry James, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hardy, John Ruskin, Wilkie Collins, Charlotte Brontë, and Sir Arthur Conon Doyle. It even published Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands by Queen Victoria herself. Some of its illustrators included the most famous artists of the time, such as George du Maurier, Frederic Leighton, and John Everett Millais.[4] The journal developed a reputation of polite “entertainment coupled with information of the least disconcerting kind" because of its publication of inoffensive and non-controversial content throughout the late Victorian Era.[5] It continued to enjoy a wide readership and contributions from prestigious authors into the twentieth century. In all, Cornhill Magazine represented “a major development in British periodical history” because of how it “effectively put an end to the separate-part issue of novels, a practice that had been in vogue since the great success of the Pickwick Papers in 1836.”[6]
Notes
Submitted by: Peterson, Shane: section 1, Fall 2013
Articles in category "The Cornhill Magazine"
The following 32 pages are in this category, out of 32 total.
