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| "Then I picked up a magazine from the table and attempted to while away the time with it, while my companion munched silently at his toast." |
Watson only uses the word "magazine" once in the Canon, when, over breakfast, he famously declared an article to be "ineffable twaddle" before he knew the thing had in fact been written by Sherlock Holmes. In my own head canon, the magazine became an issue of the Strand, of course, because when the lines blur between reality and fiction, the only magazine of any importance in the world of Holmes and Watson is the Strand. Even now, when I know better--the Strand did not appear until January 1891--I still imagine Watson holding one of those blue covers not long after his arrival at Baker Street.
Although I've read information about the Strand from different sources over the years, very little of the information stuck with me other than very limited basics, and, of course, Greenhough Smith's often repeated quote about Doyle's first Holmes short stories being "...a godsend in the shape of a story that brought a gleam of happiness into the despairing life of this weary editor."
This week, however, I read an interesting essay that allowed me to better understand the Strand's place in British society. The generous Sherlockian book man and artist Jeff Decker sent two lovely volumes to me from the London Folio Society (1992): Short Stories from the 'Strand' and Crime Stories from the 'Strand.' The introduction to the short story collection by Frank Delaney presented in a clear and distinct way how the evolution of the Strand shaped the reading habits of a populace.
Delaney surprised me with:
If this suggestion of wide influence on British life seems unrigorous, consider the circulation. Just before the first world war, an estimated two million readers saw each copy, with no competition as yet from radio or television. Hardly an adult of measurable literacy could have been unalert to the magazine's existence. Therefore, in its pages we may at least glimpse, as in a museum, what Britain liked popularly to think and talk about in the first half of this [the twentieth] century.Two million readers for each copy is not a shabby circulation number even by today's standards. And no wonder Greenhough Smith was weary. Delaney notes that in just the first ten years of Greenhough Smith's long tenure, he received forty thousand manuscripts of which he printed eighteen thousand from six thousand authors. I've realized how limited my thinking has been about the Strand, believing it to be, mostly in an abstract way, comprised of Arthur Conan Doyle and whatever few others.
My thinking had allocated Doyle's numbers (according to the always indispensable Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia, the Strand published "...no less than 121 short stories, 70 articles, 9 novels, 2 interview and 1 poem by Arthur Conan Doyle.") as being the driver of the publication. Delaney's statistics have me thinking more clearly about Arthur Conan Doyle's place within those pages. While he certainly was extremely important to the magazine's success, it was not all about him and Holmes.
A look at some of the other names that graced those pages makes it clear that although many of the popular writers of the period are now ignored and often forgotten, there are those that most certainly are not. In addition to Doyle, we can get to name dropping: P. G. Wodehouse, Graham Greene, John Steinbeck, D. H. Lawrence, Jerome K. Jerome, O. Henry, Dorothy Parker, Pearl S. Buck, Rudyard Kipling, etc, etc. Delaney explains that the Strand's policy of paying well and illustrating nicely attracted some of the best. While it hardly intended to publish great literature, more than one Nobel Prize winner is represented the Strand.
The Strand's philosophy, as set by founder George Newnes, was to have "content to plod on, year after year, giving wholesome and harmless entertainment to crowds of hard-working people craving for a little fun and amusement." As a Sherlockian, I can get behind that idea. Isn't it at least partially the reason we stay so enamored with Watson's words? Well, except maybe for the wholesome bit. Have you seen what the Guttersnipes are doing with that yellow back novel prompt?
