Science Fiction by Gaslight: A History and Anthology of Science Fiction in the Popular Magazines, 1891-1911

by Sam Moskowitz (ed. )

  Previous to 1890, in both the United States and England, there were two predominant classes of readership: the educated and well-to-do on the one hand; and the great masses, including the workers and immigrants and the growing youngsters with meager education and limited income on the other. For the educated and well-to-do there were stately magazines: Harper’s, Atlantic, Scribner’s, Lippincott’s, and The Century; they were high-brow, with an excellent balance of both American and foreign material—fiction and nonfiction—copiously illustrated with photographs as well as line drawings and halftones. Generally they sold for 25 cents in a day when a male factory worker with a family considered himself fortunate to earn 7 dollars for a six-day week. The same condition prevailed in England where the periodicals were far inferior to those in America in quality, printing, and illustration and where such titles as Cassell’s, The Cornhill, Belgravia, and Longman’s were selling for a shilling, the equivalent of 25 cents.

  The better magazines were generally sponsored by book publishing firms, which regarded them as a media of continuing promotion for their hardcover titles, both in the direct use of advertisements and in the more subtle employment of excerpts from books and critiques on authors which they published.

  For the great segment of the population of the United States and England that could not afford the 25-cent magazine, there were nickel weeklies (in England as cheap as 1 pence, less than 2 cents) which ran an endless cycle of serials, sometimes three or four an issue. Paper novels for youngsters sold for 5 cents and paperbacks (not unlike those sold today) for adults which ran a complete novel were available at 5 cents to 10 cents. The term “dime novel” was a misnomer; most dime novels sold for a nickel.

  In the low-price field by far the greatest quantity of available reading matter was aimed at the teenage boy and children under twelve years of age. There was no end of variety—westerns, detectives, sports stories, love stories, sea tales, fame-to-fortune wish fulfilment of the Horatio Alger mold, business success stories, and even science fiction.

  With great inventors like Thomas Alva Edison, Alexander Graham Hell, George Eastman, and Simon Lake making newspaper headlines, it was scarcely surprising that science fiction would be included among the literary bill of fare, at least for teenagers. Appropriately, such stories eventually came to be called “invention novels” and in those tales was forecast a continuous and sometimes repetitious parade of aircraft, submarines, tanks, and robots.

  For the rapidly growing educated lower class and middle class—a grammar school education was available to most and high school to many —there was little. The better magazines were too expensive, the others too cheap and juvenile. An indication of the small penetration of periodical reading matter made in the general population was the circulation of such leaders as The Century, which boasted little more than 100,000 monthly sales by 1890.

  The break with the “establishment” that finally introduced a quality low-priced family magazine to the middle classes came in England and not in the United States. The publisher was George Newnes, who had made an outstanding success of gathering “human interest” stories from newspapers throughout England and featuring them in a weekly, launched with the issue of October 22, 1881, titled Tit-Bits (and still published today). The paper was composed of scores of short items ranging from its inspiration—a clipping concerning a runaway train—through oddments on trapped pets, bizarre crimes, monetary windfalls, unusual avocations, military episodes, thrilling rescues, and a potpourri of items that today form the backbone of the tabloids of both the United States and Great Britain.

  Encouraged by the standing he had achieved with Tit-Bits (by 1890 it rated a building at 359 Burleigh Street, London, with an impressive sign on the roof proclaiming the name of the magazine), George Newnes engaged the former editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, W. T. Stead, the leading literary critic of the era, and an entire staff to assist him in the production of a magazine to be titled Review of Reviews which would comb the best from the various publications of the day in the manner of today’s Reader’s Digest. A severance of relations with Stead before publication of the first issue caused him to think the policy of the new magazine through. Newnes discarded Review of Reviews (though Stead went on to publish it himself) and, employing the format of America’s Harper’s and Scribner’s as his guide, came up with the first issue of The Strand Magazine, dated January 1891.

  Newnes’ policies were unusual. He strove to have an illustration on every page of the magazine and featured many picture stories of the type common in today’s periodicals, but infrequent at that time. At first he ran no serials and stressed the fact that every article and work of fiction was complete. He managed to enjoy the best of both worlds by inaugurating “series” stories and articles that were complete in themselves, yet frequently ran on in many related episodes longer than any novel or full-length book. Most important, the magazine, published on high-grade coated paper, sold for only 6 pence, or about 10 cents.

  The title The Strand was derived from the name of London’s oldest street and its history was delineated in an article in the first issue, titled The Story of the Strand. The early issues ran illustrated articles, many with photographs, on such subjects as fire departments, animal hospitals, the police, minting of coins, and street-corner photography. Grant Allen, philosopher, naturalist, and outstanding fiction stylist, had a new railroad story, A Deadly Dilemma, in the first number, but because British authors did not write the short story as commonly as writers of other nations, a very large percentage of the fiction was in translation from the Continent, works by Alphonse Daudet, Michael Lermontoff, Paul Heyse, Leo Lespes, Alexander Pushkin, and Jules Clarelie. Americans Bret Harte and Frank R. Stockton were early represented in The Strand’s pages.

  The magazine had asserted in its initial prospectus that “Special features which have not hitherto found place in Magazine Literature will be introduced from time to time.” These included such regular departments as “Portraits of Celebrities at Various Ages” and reproductions of handwritten notes by famed clergymen, authors, artists, performers, politicians, and others. There was a series of illustrated interviews which would eventually include authors noted for their science fiction and fantasy such as H. Rider Haggard (January 1892), A. Conan Doyle (August 1892), and Jules Verne (February 1895).

  Acceptance of the magazine was instantaneous, and by the time its third issue was mailed imitators were already appearing. Some of them were financially viable, but their efforts to overtake The Strand were to be in vain. Tremendous impetus was to be given The Strand when, beginning with its July 1891 issue, it contracted to run a series of Sherlock Holmes stories by A. Conan Doyle, beginning with A Scandal in Bohemia. Only two other Sherlock Holmes stories had been previously published and they had made little impact: A Study in Scarlet (Beeton’s Christmas Annual, 1887) and The Sign of the Four (Lippincott’s, February 1890).

  Six Sherlock Holmes stories appeared in The Strand consecutively between July and December 1891, and they made Conan Doyle famous. Before the sixth was published his name was a household word, America was crying for reprints, and he was on the threshold of literary immortality. Following A Scandal in Bohemia, The Strand published The Red Headed League, A Case of Identity, The Buscombe Valley Mystery, The Five Orange Pips and The Man with the Twisted Lip. Months before the last was printed it was obvious to The Strand’s editor, Greenough Smith, that the series must continue. Doyle was cool to all his pleas, planning to write a historical novel of the French Canadians titled The Refugees next. Finally, to silence Smith, Doyle dictated that he would only consider carrying on Sherlock Holmes for £50 per story (about $250) irrespective of length (he had received £35 a story for the previous six). His offer was accepted and when he had delivered that batch, he demanded £1,000 ($5,000) for another twelve stories and got it! Finally he closed the first set of Sherlock Holmes stories with The Adventure of the Final Problem (December 1893) where Holmes grapples with his arch-foe, Profess
or Moriarity, near Reichenbach Falls, and presumably falls to his death in the abyss, carrying the master criminal with him.

  Once having published fiction of such general excellence and dramatic appeal as the Sherlock Holmes stories, The Strand was under no obligation to be traditional in its selection. This left the door open for science fiction and fantasy. Even the articles helped pave the way for such fiction, particularly Some Curious Inventions (January 1892), presenting various unusual devices either in use or registered at the patent offices of Great Britain and the United States.

  Jules Verne was still the world master of science fiction, so to have him appear in the pages of The Strand would be to enhance them. Verne’s Dr. Trifulgus—A Fantastic Tale (July 1892) was new to the English. A money-hungry doctor in the town of Luktrop (which cannot be found on any map) refuses to come to the aid of a dying man until a very high fee has been paid in advance. Against a background of rumbling volcanoes, torrents of rain, and a lashing sea, Dr. Trifulgus trudges to attend and watch his own death.

  A few years later The Strand would present the first English translation of a short story more in Verne’s usual tradition, An Express of the Future (January 1895), in which a method of pneumatic travel through undersea tubes from the United States to France is suggested.

  The “monster” theme was introduced in Part Nine of a series of stories titled “Shafts from an Eastern Quiver,” The Keeper of the Great Burman, written by Charles J. Mansford, B.A. (March 1893), where a tree spider, large enough to carry off a man, is killed in that very attempt.

  M. P. Shiel, who in the new century would make his reputation with The Purple Cloud, was represented in The Strand with two nonfantasies, Guy Harkaway’s Substitute (October 1893) and The Eagle’s Crag (September 1894). The Purple Cloud, with its gloomy adumbrations of all mankind destroyed except one explorer returning from the poles, would be serialized in The Royal Magazine (A companion to Pearson’s Magazine) from January to June 1900. Stylistically a prototype of Thomas Wolfe’s work, this story, with its eloquent soliloquizing, evoked mixed reactions in readers who followed a protagonist who burns cities in a neurotic frenzy and almost eats a young girl he meets who has survived the catastrophe.

  If there was any question that Sherlock Holmes had sparked a new wave of detective heroes and that The Strand was the publication carrying on the tradition, it was settled by the appearance of the “Martin Hewitt, Investigator” series, of which the first, The Lenton Craft Robberies by Arthur Morrison, began in the March 1894 issue. This was obviously an effort to compensate for the demise of Sherlock Holmes only three months earlier, for even the famed Holmes illustrator, Sidney Paget, was recruited to illustrate the series.

  Doyle, still continently refraining from relaxing his ban on new Sherlock Holmes stories, did appear with The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard, a series on the Napoleonic Wars beginning in the April 1895 issue and later Rodney Stone, a prize-fight novel commencing in November 1895.

  The first story in a new adventure group, “Gleams from the Dark Continent,” was by Charles J. Mansford, author of “Shafts from an Eastern Quiver.” It was a good lost-race story concerning the discovery of the remnants of an ancient Egyptian order in Africa. Its title, The Veiled Idol of Kor (July 1895), is indicative of its nature, the story concluding with the dethroning of the evil white queen who has held the natives in superstitious bondage.

  The Strand had an American edition edited by James Walter Smith which sold for 10 cents. In a real sense George Newnes had reached across the Atlantic to offer to the American middle class the same fare that had proved so phenomenally satisfying to the British. Basically the American edition was similar to the British, with the exception that it was dated one month later, and that there was a substitution of articles of American interest for those too peculiarly British.

  To offer a precise example, the March 1899 issue of The Strand was dated April in the United States. A six-page commentary on the British Parliament, “From the Speaker’s Chair” by Henry Lucy, was deleted from the American edition and in its place was a six-page short story by the popular Naval expert and sea-story writer Walter Wood, The Loading of the Convoy. A nine-page feature, Baron Brampton of Brampton by “E,” was eliminated in favor of A Single-Line Railway by William Shortis, an article on a British road, and Making a Life Madly, a short story by Harry Hems.

  What of the new competition spawned by the appearance of The Strand?

  One of the first imitators, most blatant and most eager, was The Ludgate Monthly, launched in April 1891, almost instantly after the appearance of the first issue of The Strand. Like The Strand, it had a near identical stock cover, showing the street on Ludgate Hill from which it derived its name. It sold for half the price, 3 pence instead of 6 pence, and it topped The Strand by actually getting at least one illustration on every page of the magazine and two or more on some. The only difference in editorial approach of The Ludgate Monthly was that it would carry words and music of a song as one of its features.

  Destined to become better known was Pall Mall Magazine, which was a rather genteel adaptation of The Strand, more like an illustrated book than a magazine. Among its contributors were such noted names as Rudyard Kipling, Israel Zangwill, C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne, Frank R. Stockton, George Meredith, George Chesney, and Mrs. Beatrice Kipling.

  Of very special interest, and by far the best of the early group of imitators, was The Idler. Basically it employed the same format as The Strand, but with this difference. It was the “smart aleck” of the field, with just a touch of irreverence, a hint of iconoclasm, and a great deal of sophistication. This was scarcely to be wondered at, for its joint owners and editors, Jerome K. Jerome and Robert Barr, were men with a reputation for wit and candor as well as considerable literary competence. Jerome, humorist and playwright, had scored his biggest hit in 1889 with the play Three Men in a Boat. Scottish-born Barr received his training on a Detroit newspaper and had an early reputation for hair-raising escapades in connection with his work.

  The Idler, which commenced publication with its February 1891 issue, was book-size, ran as liberal a quantity of illustrations as The Strand, and set its type single-column across the page.

  The fiction was, if anything, more distinguished than The Strand’s, including in its early issues important works by Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Israel Zangwill, A. Conan Doyle, Eden Phillpotts, Barry Pain, Bret Harte, Jerome K. Jerome, and Robert Barr. Its literary tone was further enhanced with a department titled My First Book in which authors as renowned as Rudyard Kipling, Grant Allen, W. Clark Russell, Hall Caine, A. Conan Doyle, H. Rider Haggard, Israel Zangwill, and R. M. Ballantyne elaborated, with photographs, the conditions surrounding their first sanctification in hard covers. Every issue carried a full-page literary cartoon by Scott Rankin, People I Have Never Met, which included caricatures of Robert Louis Stevenson, Andrew Lang, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Israel Zangwill, and other figures of similar stature.

  The same literary character was sustained in The Idler’s Club, a lengthy department in which most of the well-known contributors to The Idler expounded on a topic-of-the-month, whether it be an anecdote, the best place to loaf, smoking, or ghosts. All in all, it was a thoroughly delightful magazine, the mecca of all the smart set, though still basically aimed at and within the means of the middle-class audience.

  Both Jerome K. Jerome and Robert Barr delighted in science fiction, fantasy, the ghost-story, and the off-trail yarn. Both wrote such stories themselves and for their own publication. Barr was prolific enough to be considered an important fantasy writer of his period, making his most notable impression with The Doom of London (November 1892), in which England’s largest metropolis is wiped out by the smog. Jerome K. Jerome contributed, in the context of Novel Notes (August 1893), a truly remarkable story of an electrical robot of masculine appearance, built to serve as a dancing partner, easily regulated by the girl, and capable of speaking a recorded patter. The robot has many virtues, the in
ventor assures the women assembled at a ball: “He never gets tired; he won’t kick you or tread on your dress; he will hold you as firmly as you like and go as quickly or as slowly as you please; he never gets giddy; and he is full of conversation.” The invention also has certain serious faults. The story was anthologized as The Dancing Partner in The Omnibus of Crime, edited by Dorothy L. Sayers in 1929.

  The predilection of the editors for an unusual story was displayed throughout the life of the magazine. Mark Twain’s serial novel The American Claimant (February to December 1892) had all the atmosphere of science fiction, when an erratic scientist believes he has materialized from the ashes of the past the heir to a British title. It turns out to have been a misconception, but there are other tricks up the scientist’s sleeve, such as a swearing phonograph to cut down the number of mates needed on ships at sea and a sure-fire method of creating climates-to-order, to please inhabitants of various parts of the globe.

  Vested with much of the same flip character of Twain’s tongue-in-cheek novel was Conan Doyle’s The Los Amigos Fiasco (December 1892), in which an attempt to execute a criminal in the electric chair results in the creation of a superman, impossible to electrocute, hang, or kill with bullets, and apparently infused with the energy to outlive the brick jail that confines him. Edward Lester Arnold, who gained a reputation for The Wonderful Adventures of Phra the Phoenician (Harper’s, 1890), the story of a man who is killed or dies and returns to life three times, centuries apart, in a series of absorbing sagas, played the same theme in a shorter scope in Rutherford the Twiceborne for The Idler (May 1892).

  For a brief time it appeared that The Idler would enjoy an American edition, as Jerome K. Jerome and Robert Barr were friendly with S. S. McClure, the American who had organized the first syndicate distributing fiction to newspapers. McClure was frequently in Europe seeking stories for his syndicate and it was predominantly due to his efforts that Sherlock Holmes was popularized in the United States. He seriously planned to issue The Idler in the United States, and then discarded the notion, starting his own publication, McClure’s Magazine, whose first issue was dated June 1893.