Mounting the (Century Guild) Hobby Horse

This chapter is entirely dedicated to a pioneering little magazine that elaborated on the example of The Germ and the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (see Chapter 1), the Century Guild Hobby Horse (1884/86–92), which started as the periodical organ of the early Arts & Crafts organisation the Century Guild. To this magazine, the production and design of the material text was as much an opportunity for experiments as its actual contents, a notable aesthetic innovation that was motivated by a notion of artistic artisanship, and that made it a milestone in Victorian print culture. Each issue of the magazine—in which Victorian sages such as Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin made guest appearances— commands for the applied art workers producing it the respect usually reserved for authors and artists working within the category of ‘Fine Art’. So doing, the magazine helped to create a wider appreciation for Fine Printing. After the discontinuation of the Century Guild in 1893, this periodical was temporarily revived by the enterprising publishers at the Bodley Head to boost that firm’s Print-Revivalist credentials. The Hobby Horse is thereby also an early example of how supposedly avant-garde principles are sometimes difficult to distinguish from commercial strategies.

The Germs of a Genre: The Germ and the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine

This chapter offers a working definition for the little magazine genre, explained as dependent on the peculiar position these publications occupied in the wider periodical marketplace. It then looks at two titles that have been suggested as the starting point for this genre: the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s journal The Germ (1850—e.g. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, William Holman Hunt), and the closely linked Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (1856—e.g. William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones) that anticipates the message of the Arts & Crafts Movement, in which several contributors would be involved. Finally, the early tendencies in these journals towards a conceptual integration of their contents and the formal / material aspects of the printed text is related to the mid- to late-Victorian ‘Revival of Fine Printing’, which is argued to develop alongside the little magazine genre.

Introduction

In the late Victorian era, as in every period, the realm of the aesthetic was affirmed and kept within bounds by bordering non-artistic phenomena (moral, political, commercial) considered as setting off its limits, and on which it must not encroach. What unites the diverse artists and authors currently grouped under the heading of ‘Aestheticism’ is that they sought to integrate these surroundings into their aesthetic project as well. This led to the development of expansive art projects that are commonly known as ‘Total Works of Art’, influencing even seemingly ephemeral print media such as little magazines. Late-Victorian little magazines in different ways strove towards an integration of form and content and thereby to become periodical Total Works of Art that would not be contaminated by the worldly interests that they purported to defy. However, the dichotomy between art and commerce on which it relies is ultimately untenable.

Inconclusions

This chapter provides a summary of the argument of the book and of the history developed therein of the little magazine genre in Britain from 1850 (the Germ) to 1901 (the folding of the Page). A glance ahead at the coming Edwardian interlude and the later modernist period indicates that early-twentieth-century titles such as Rhythm (1911–13), BLAST (1914–15) and the Little Review (1914–29) were faced by the same challenges as their Victorian predecessors. As is shown, some of the most famous modernist detractors of the Victorian age were actually aware that their journals were part of the legacy of the Fin-de-Siècle periodicals treated in this book, even though they often disowned this connection.

Politicised Aestheticism outside London: the Quest and the Evergreen

Most late-Victorian little magazines were published from London, but elsewhere in Britain relevant journals were also produced, often functioning as the periodical organs of localised organisations that wanted to engage with the local communities in which they operated. The Arts & Crafts journal the Quest (1894–96), issued by the Birmingham Guild of Handicraft, ‘resisted any structural differentiation between the worlds of production and consumption, preferring the unified ideal of a community of producers meeting common needs through mutual cooperation’. Outside of England, writers of the budding Celtic Revival wrote for several little magazines, but few notable little magazines were set up before the early twentieth century. One notable exception was the Edinburgh-based Evergreen (1895–96), perhaps the late Victorian era’s best example of a conceptually integrated periodical, this time not only inspired by a local variant of the collaborative spirit characterising the Arts and Crafts journals, but also meant to exemplify an advocated ‘organic’ unity for the city where its producers lived and worked, and from there for Scotland and ‘North Britain’ at large.

Selling the Yellow Nineties: the Yellow Book and the Savoy

This chapter discusses at length two of the best-publicised periodicals the 1890s, whose relationship reveals much about the reception in wider late-Victorian print culture of the conceptual integration of form and content that increasingly became associated with the little magazine genre. The slyly marketed Yellow Book (1894–97) is arguably the most notorious yet also the most ingeniously commercialist little magazine of all time, and it styled itself a ‘book’ for good reason. By emulating the appearance of a book, its editors and publisher John Lane at the Bodley Head hoped to safeguard their publication against the ephemerality and relative lack of prestige of periodical texts. The magazine drew a number of large advertisers and sold remarkably well until it was implicated in the Wilde trial in 1895. Its characteristic appearance had at that point become so recognisable that the magazine, as well as its rivals at the Savoy (1896) founded by the Yellow Book’s ousted alleged ‘Decadent’ ringleaders Arthur Symons and Aubrey Beardsley, felt that they needed to rethink their design aesthetic. Some material characteristics associated with the little magazine had become iconic and associated with transgressive content.

Little Excursions Outside the Avant-Garde: the Pageant, the Parade and the Dome

Publicity for the British Fin-de-Siècle avant-garde peaked around the middle of the 1890s with the appearance of the Yellow Book and the Savoy (see Chapter 4), but even afterwards its integrated design aesthetic continued to exert an explicit influence. Significantly, it can be discerned in a number of periodicals that feature similar content and many of the same contributors as less compromising little magazines, but that had given up on the avant-garde position that these little magazines had so insistently claimed. Chapter 6 shows how the coterie responsible for the small-scale Dial (see Chapter 3) moved on to broadly marketed publications such as the Pageant (1896–97) and the children’s gift book Parade (1897) that both imported into the Aestheticist format aspects of the decidedly mainstream gift book genre, or the Dome (1897–1900) that presented itself as an insider’s alternative to the most commercially successful art magazines of its period. All three publications relativised the former vanguardist strategy of their producers through their contents as well as through their presentation, and even questioned the validity of the purist doctrines that only a few years before were deemed essential, including that of the Total Work of Art.

The Little Magazine as a Periodical Portfolio: the Dial, the Pagan Review and the Page

This chapter proves that even some the smallest little magazines can be read as portfolios for the artists and authors who produced them. The critical success of the Hobby Horse (see Chapter 2) encouraged the foundation of the coterie publication the Dial (1889–97) by Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, struggling artists who used this periodical to obtain publicity for themselves and a select set of participating friends (incl. ‘Michael Field’, John Gray, Thomas Sturge Moore, Lucien Pissarro). Intriguingly theorized along the lines of the Mallarméan Livre, the Dial also functioned as a means of promoting the artistic crafts of engraving and typography. The single issue of the Pagan Review (1892) was written entirely by William Sharp under various pseudonyms, corresponding to different personae that presented different facets of the magazine’s titular ‘paganism’ and allowed the author to test out different styles and themes for possible future writing projects. The whimsical Page (1898–1901) of Edward Gordon Craig, who would become a leading designer for the modernist stage, was another (nearly) single-authored publication. Craig primarily used it to advertise his services as a designer of bookplates, dinner menus and other forms of artistic printing.