McClure’s Magazine was patterned after The Strand, and even adapted certain of its features, such as portraits of celebrities at various ages (which it called “Human Documents”). This concept actually made the magazine, for on discovering that a Boston lawyer, Gardiner G. Hubbard, had an unparalleled assemblage of portraits and engravings of Napoleon Bonaparte at various stages of his life, McClure had Ida Tarbell, who was to become one of the editors of his magazine and one of the greatest of all “muckrakers,” write a six-part biography of Napoleon to accompany eighty-two portraits. Beginning in the November 1894 issue, the series pushed the circulation up from 35,000 to 100,000 and placed the magazine among the world’s leaders.
The superb quality of McClure’s fiction and articles has frequently been praised, but what has not been said is that in the early years, on an exchange arrangement, a substantial part of its fiction and many of its best articles were reprinted from The Idler. Much of the good science fiction and fantasy from The Idler ended up in McClure’s Magazine, including Conan Doyle, Bret Harte, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Barr, and the very popular interviews with leading authors.
A particularly notable science fiction prize by McClure’s was first publication of With The Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling, which ran in their November 1905 issue. This was a short story of the future, in which there was regular passenger service by dirigible, and Kipling even invented new slang terms to go with his world of tomorrow. The short story, illustrated in color, was published as a separate book by Doubleday & Page in 1909 and became a bestseller.
At one period, when it seemed that McClure’s was doomed because of an impending note for $5,000, it was saved by a check from Conan Doyle, investing in the magazine as a note of appreciation for what S. S. McClure had done to establish his reputation in the United States.
McClure’s was to drop its price from 15 cents to 10 cents and create in America the popular magazine for the middle classes, just as The Strand had done in England. McClure’s example would soon be followed by Cosmopolitan, Munsey’s, and then a parade of other publications, opening what has rightly been termed “The Golden Age of the Magazines” in America, running from 1893 through to just before World War I.
Science fiction had appeared in The Strand, simply because the off-trail beat to their stories, set by the precedent of the Sherlock Holmes yarns, did not preclude it. These stories were not numerous or frequent, they simply were not categorically barred. Science fiction appeared in The Idler because the editors wrote it and liked it. Because McClure’s reprinted from The Idler, it, too, published science fiction. But in 1895 occurred a literary event that was to alter the attitude toward science fiction in the popular magazines from one of sufferance to planned inclusion. That event was the appearance of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells.
The serialization of The Time Machine in The New Review in five instalments (January to May 1895) brought a running commentary from W. T. Stead in the Review of Reviews in which Wells was called “a man of genius.” Coming from Stead, possibly the most acclaimed journalist of his day, this comment was no wilted bouquet.
Acclaim elsewhere was immediate and widespread. Frank Harris, the notorious editor of the London Evening News, praised The Time Machine highly. Harris had published the young H. G. Wells’ early speculative piece, The Rediscovery of the Unique (Fortnightly Review, July 1891), which contained some of the basic theory he would later use in The Time Machine, and had also set another seminal article, The Universe Rigid, in type, but never printed it. Frank Harris himself, though best known for My Life and Loves, wrote a science fiction novel, Pantopia, published by Panurge Press, New York, in a limited edition of 1250 numbered copies in 1930. The novel of a “utopian” civilization on an unknown island was written many years before publication and contained the expected quota of sex, but it also had a certain amount of technical invention, and was privately published when Harris was seventy-four, only a year before his death.
The views of many critics on Wells reflected those of novelist Ford Madox Ford in 1898: “I do not have to assure you that it did not take us long to recognize that here was Genius. Authentic, real Genius. And delightful at that.”
Since 1893, short stories by H. G. Wells, predominantly science fiction, had appeared in The Pall Mall Gazette and The Pall Mall Budget, but very little attention was paid to them. Included were such stories as The Advent of the Flying Man, dealing with the invention of a parachute by a British soldier to get off a cliff on which he is trapped by natives; The Stolen Bacillus, a chemical that will turn living creatures blue; The Flowering of the Strange Orchid, concerning a plant that overpowers men with its odor and drains their blood; In the Avu Observatory, where an astronomer fights a grim battle with a huge batlike creature; Aepyornis Island, which sees the hatching of an egg of the biggest of all extinct birds; and The Diamond Maker, of a man who can make diamonds artificially. Many of these stories appeared in weekly succession with Wells hacking them out to keep food on the table.
Suddenly it was different. The more popular and better-paying magazines courted him. Now, not only Wells, but science fiction was “in.” First in line was The Idler. The Red Room, in that publication (March 1896), a well-done story of a castle bedroom where the candles and fireplace mysteriously snuff out, reads as though it might have provided inspiration for William Hope Hodgson’s The House Among the Laurels, a “Carnacki, The Ghost Finder” story, which would run in the March 1910 issue of The Idler. The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham, the tale of a man who discovers the secret of transferring his personality into a younger body as he grows old, appeared in the May 1896 issue of The Idler. It was followed in October of the same year with The Apple, telling of a man who is given “The Fruit of Knowledge” from the scrub apple trees still growing from the seeds in the partially eaten apple that Adam and Eve sampled and discarded. The five stories that made up A Story of the Stone Age, a series about prehistoric man, ran in The Idler for May, June, July, August, and November 1897.
Far more important than The Idler in promoting H. G. Wells and science fiction to the public was a new publication, Pearson’s Magazine, whose first issue, dated January 1896, appeared on the newsstands January 1. Pearson’s Magazine was the most unblushing, forthright imitation of The Strand yet to appear. C. Arthur Pearson, publisher, was noted for his book publishing activities, a monthly titled Short Stories, Pearson’s Weekly, and other periodicals. Unlike The Idler, which waited well into its second year before acknowledging its debt to George Newnes (which it then did in “style” in a fourteen-page illustrated feature), Pearson’s Magazine in its second, February 1896, issue, ran a highly complimentary piece on George Newnes, with not only his picture, but the covers of his magazines, The Strand and Tit-Bits.
Had Pearson’s Magazine and The Strand changed titles any given month, it would have been extremely difficult, on the basis of internal evidence, for the reader to tell them apart. Pearson’s Magazine ran “series” in preference to serials. They had an illustration or two on virtually every page. In fiction they secured the efforts of Conan Doyle, Bret Harte, and Rudyard Kipling (running his novel Captains Courageous starting in the December 1897 number). They had a very popular series on espionage and intrigue titled “Secrets of the Courts of Europe— The Confidence of an Ex-Ambassador” by Allen Upward. They ran a feature called “The Bravest Deeds I Ever Saw” and interviewed celebrities in a department titled “Lions in Their Den.”
While the first story by Wells that Pearson’s ran, The Rajah’s Treasure (July 1896) was not fantasy at all, hinging on a joke, where the legendary “treasure” of a potentate turns out to be a cache of whiskey, the second story, In the Abyss (August 1896), involving the descent of a man in a bathysphere to discover a race of human-like reptilian creatures who have built cities beneath the seas, is one of Wells’ most highly regarded short stories.
Arthur Pearson did not buy science fiction because of the expediency that it happened to be written by Wells. The January
21, 1893, issue of his magazine Pearson’s Weekly had begun the anonymous serialization of a history-making novel titled Angel of the Revolution. This novel dealt with an attack on England by a vast Russian air armada and its repulse with the aid of an aerial fleet financed by a Jewish business tycoon with hypnotic powers. The novel was issued in hard covers under the author’s name, George Griffith, in October of that year and in one month the sixth edition had sold out and the book went on to become one of the top sellers ever published by Pearson, spawning a sequel and many follow-up science fiction novels. It accelerated the trend toward future war novels for which it may have represented a high-water mark for a single book.
Pearson brought George Griffith to his new magazine with War in the Water (February 1896), theorizing a battle between two fleets of ironclads, something which had not taken place up to that time. Many pieces by Griffith were reprinted from early issues of Pearson’s Weekly where they had appeared anonymously. In the same issue it ran Cutcliffe Hyne’s London’s Danger, in which all of London’s hydrants freeze during one cold winter, and a fire starts that rages unchecked, kills 500,000, and sends the remnants out plundering the countryside. England never recovers, her colonies are taken from her, and she is forced to sign humiliating treaties. An author’s wish-fulfilment was expressed in A Genius for a Year by Levin Carnese (June 1896), where a series of pills invests a man with literary brilliance for a limited period. The Man Child by W. Bert Foster (December 1896) was a lost-race story of white Indians and their strange civilization.
The publication of In the Abyss by Wells (July 1896) also underscored a special associational phenomenon that has existed concomitant with science fiction through the years: the artist specializing in such work. The first of these specialists was Fred T. Jane, whose illustrations accompanied The Angel of the Revolution. Jane went on to illustrate many science fiction books, including a number that he wrote himself. The second was Warwick Goble, who was to illustrate the lion’s share of science fiction for Pearson’s, as well as the frequent speculative and scientific features they ran. His illustrations for In the Abyss showed great imagination, delineated with just enough reticence of detail to sustain the mystery but not so much as to show a lack of imagination. He was equally adept at machines and monsters and, unlike many artists specializing in science fiction, had apparently mastered the basics of human anatomy.
When Pearson’s Magazine scored its mightiest coup, the first publication of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (April to December 1897), Goble outdid himself with as many as a dozen splendidly atmospheric illustrations each installment, fifteen of which were reprinted in the first American hardcover edition (Harper & Bros., New York, 1898). Wells’ The Invisible Man had run in Pearson’s Weekly during the months of June and July and had been placed into hard covers by Pearson’s the same year.
There is little question that Wells’ masterpiece of the invasion of the earth by the Martians did more to establish that author with the general public than any single work before or after that time. It gripped the imagination as few stories had ever done, fitting into the context of the future war craze typified by George Griffith’s best sellers. When the book appeared it was highly praised. The War of the Worlds made Wells a major figure in the United States where it was also a best seller. Cosmopolitan, one of the leading popular magazines in America, had a circulation of 400,000 in May 1897 when it began serialization of War of the Worlds. It also reproduced the illustrations of Warwick Goble.
The War of the Worlds was syndicated in American papers in late 1897 and early 1898 and the locale may very well have been changed for each individual city in which it ran. Robert H. Goddard, the great American rocket experimenter, said in his autobiography that “In January, 1898, there appeared daily for several months in the Boston Post the story, Fighters from Mars, or the War of the Worlds, in and near Boston. This, as well as the story which followed it, Edison’s Conquest of Mars, by Garrett P. Serviss, gripped my imagination tremendously.”
The indication was that Edison’s Conquest of Mars by Garrett P. Serviss was also syndicated. It had evidently been commissioned to follow immediately The War of the Worlds and was intended to be a sequel. Garrett P. Serviss was an astronomer and popular science writer who was familiar with Pearson’s Magazine, his article Climbing Mont Blanc in a Blizzard having appeared in the September 1896 issue.
This was Serviss’s first attempt at science fiction and his deadline must have been tight, since The War of the Worlds concluded in the December 1897 Cosmopolitan. Conceivably he wrote the installments as the serial ran, for the first chapter of Edison’s Conquest of Mars appeared in the New York Journal January 12, 1898, and ran each day except for Sundays in twenty-six installments through to February 10, 1898. The story told of the assemblage of the great minds of the world, under the aegis of Thomas Alva Edison, to build a space fleet, armed with disintegrator rays, to destroy the Martians before they could mount a second attack on earth.
The more than fifty illustrations, most of them by P. Gray, are historically important, showing massed space fleets, men outside their ships floating weightless in space suits, and close-ups of the moon, the asteroids, Mars, and the Martians.
Not as well known, but obviously similarly inspired was At War With Mars, or the Boys Who Won by Weldon J. Cobb, serialized in the boys’ weekly, Golden Hours, September 25, 1897, to November 27, 1897. This story was begun after only a few installments of War of the Worlds had appeared in Cosmopolitan and it had a similar plot, the landing of a spaceship from Mars and a battle with a bizarre group of strange creatures that emerge from it.
Several years later, obviously derived in this case from Serviss’s serial, To Mars With Tesla, or The Mystery of Hidden Worlds by Weldon J. Cobb was serialized in Golden Hours, March 30, 1901, to May 18, 1901. The hero was a youthful scientific genius, Frank Edison, “nephew of a noted scientific savant,” who works with the great scientist Nikola Tesla to communicate with Mars.
From his fellow authors H. G. Wells received a salute in the form of the satire, The War of the Weneses by C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas, issued in hard covers by J. Arrowsmith, Bristol, England, in 1898. In this farce the earth is invaded by a bevy of beauties from Venus intent on taking the earthmen back with them. The dedication page reads: “To H. G. Wells this outrage on a fascinating and convincing romance.”
Wells was so big now that he simply could not be ignored. Furthermore, Pearson’s Magazine had become a dramatically effective publication, unquestionably just behind The Strand in circulation in two short years and growing quickly. Its December 1897 issue was startling for the period, with at least sixty of its editorial pages printed in a variety of colors, with portfolios of illustrations in three colors.
The Strand, which previously had always led, was now following. H. G. Wells turned up in its October 1898 issue with Mr. Ledbetter’s Vacation, a story of a schoolmaster intimidated by a house entering and forced to make a prolonged escapade with an embezzler. This was followed in November 1898 with The Stolen Body, dealing with a man who is successful in leaving his body and is able to project himself distances by the power of his will. (He returns to find his body in the possession of another and is involved in a struggle for its return.)
Previous to that, The Strand had secured from scientist and literary stylist Grant Allen an outstanding story, The Thames Valley Catastrophe (December 1897), in which London is wiped out by a lava flow from a fault in the earth. And in 1898, The Strand also came up with several good pieces of science fiction, including The Purple Terror (September 1898), a superior man-eating plant story by Fred M. White; and Where the Air Quivered by L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace, one of the earliest uses of a gas gun as a weapon (December 1898). Despite this, there was some indication that The Strand was having trouble getting science fiction of the standards it demanded. This was evidenced not so much by the paucity of science fiction run during 1899, but by the Erckmann-Chatrian short story The Spider of Guyana
, translated from the French for its January 1899 issue. This tale of a giant spider, living in a cave near a warm springs health resort in France, and its deadly search for food, had been translated into English by Julia de Kay for the American fiction magazine Romance (October 1893) as The Crab Spider. It may have been old even then, and its revival by a magazine economically capable of bidding for the newest works of the world’s best writers seems to indicate stress.
Pearson’s was holding its own in science fiction. Their regular contributor George Griffith offered A Corner in Lightning (March 1898), showing the growing reliance of civilization upon electricity and the effects if it were cut off. This preoccupation with electrical power was reflected in Master of the Octopus by Edward Olin Weeks (October 1899), constructed around the invention of a magnificent ball of light, requiring no power source at all. An extraordinarily advanced concept in science fiction had appeared a month earlier, where the brain of a man is surgically transferred into the body of a giant prehistoric reptile in The Monster of Lake LaMetrie by Wardon Allan Curtis (September 1899).
The really “big” story for Pearson’s Magazine during 1899 was J. Cutcliffe Hyne’s The Lost Continent (July to December) telling of the last days before the sinking of the continent of Atlantis and the survival of a man and a woman in an ingeniously constructed “ark,” stocked with provisions and basic supplies to see them through for many years. To the science fiction collector, The Lost Continent was the high point of J. Cutcliffe Hyne’s career, and the book edition issued in 1900 by Harper’s has become a highly desirable item. Fortunately, it sold well enough to make copies far from rare and some of the illustrations of strange species of creatures and Atlantean pageantry by Ernest Prater, which accompanied the serialization of the story, were included in hard covers.
Science Fiction by Gaslight: A History and Anthology of Science Fiction in the Popular Magazines, 1891-1911 Page 3