About Everyman

Everyman

Everyman was an English literary magazine published in London by the firm of J. M. Dent in two distinct series. The first series ran from 1912 until publication was suspended during the First World War, in 1916. The second series was relaunched on 31 January 1929 and continued until 1935. The magazine was edited first by the Belgian academic Charles Sarolea and, in its second life, principally by the writer and drama critic C. B. Purdom. It covered books, drama, music and travel, and it published work by many of the best-known British authors of its day. It is distinct from Dent's famous book series, Everyman's Library, with which it shared a publisher and a name, and from the Indian scientific journal Everyman's Science, with which it had no connection at all.

Because the two series were separated by more than a decade, Everyman is really the record of two editorial experiments under one title. The first was a cheap weekly literary paper launched in the last years before the First World War. The second was an interwar weekly that tried to sustain serious coverage of books and the theatre for a general reader. Both depended on the Dent firm's belief that good literature could be sold, in quantity and at low prices, to an audience far wider than the traditional literary public.

J. M. Dent and the Everyman idea

The magazine grew out of the publishing programme of Joseph Malaby Dent, the London publisher who had conceived Everyman's Library in 1905 as a library of world literature, planned eventually to reach a thousand volumes, that would be affordable to students, to the working classes and to the cultural elite alike. The Library's pocket-sized volumes sold at first for a shilling apiece, and the venture was an exceptional success: Dent claimed that three million volumes were sold in the first eighteen months after publication began. The name of the series had been suggested by the poet and editor Ernest Rhys, who recalled the words of the character Knowledge in the medieval morality play Everyman, promising to go with Everyman and be his guide in his most need. That promise — knowledge made available to everyone — was the firm's guiding idea.

Drawing on the success of the Library, Dent in 1912 launched Everyman as a penny weekly literary magazine. A study of Dent's publishing in the Journal of Publishing Culture describes the new paper as a penny weekly, and notes that Dent's house was devoted to work of the past rather than to avant-garde writing — a character that shaped, and in the judgement of that study limited, the magazine's first series, whose focus was on the past and the classics instead of on new material.

Charles Sarolea, the first editor

To edit the new magazine Dent recruited Charles Sarolea, a Belgian philologist and publicist who had been born in Tongeren on 24 October 1870 and educated at the University of Liège. Sarolea had moved to Edinburgh in 1894 to take up the newly founded lectureship in French language and literature at the University of Edinburgh; he became the university's first Professor of French in 1918 and held the chair until 1931. He was also Belgian Consul in Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh from 1903, and an avid book collector whose library was said to number some 200,000 works.

From 1909 to 1912 Sarolea had directed the Collection Nelson, a French-language library of classic and modern literature, for the Edinburgh publishers Thomas Nelson and Sons. Dent lured him away from Nelson for two purposes: to edit Everyman, and to create a French-language series for Dent known as the Collection Gallia. Under Sarolea, who edited the magazine from 1912 until the war forced suspension, Everyman was a popular weekly that concentrated on political and literary issues, and it was favourable to the doctrine of distributism, the economic philosophy associated with writers such as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Sarolea himself was by then a prolific author on international affairs, with books including The Anglo-German Problem (1912) and a life of Tolstoy published in the same year.

The wartime magazine

The First World War transformed the magazine's subject matter and then ended its first series. Sarolea, as a Belgian in Britain, was personally caught up in his country's fate. The University of Edinburgh's collections preserve the magazine's special Belgium issue of November 1914, which contained pictures of the war-spoiled country, and the records of an Everyman Belgian Relief Fund that operated from 1914 to 1916. In 1915 the Belgian government sent Sarolea to the United States to support the veracity of the atrocity stories circulating about the German occupation of Belgium; the mission was not a success, because Sarolea publicly attacked the neutrality the United States was then observing.

Publication was suspended in 1916, as the war slowed Dent's publishing generally and wartime inflation raised costs; accounts of Sarolea's editorship sometimes extend his tenure as editor, and later as owner-editor, to 1917, reflecting the untidy end of the wartime paper. Disputes between Sarolea and Dent, noted in the publishing history of the firm, also contributed to the failure of the first Everyman. No issues appeared for more than twelve years.

The 1929 relaunch under C. B. Purdom

The magazine was revived by Hugh Dent, Joseph Dent's son and successor. The first issue of the new series came out on 31 January 1929, numbered as volume 1, number 1 of a new release, under the management and editorship of C. B. Purdom. The British Library's catalogue describes the 1929 series by its coverage: books, drama, music and travel. Where Sarolea's paper had leaned towards politics and the classics, Purdom's Everyman presented itself as a general cultural weekly for the interwar reader.

Charles Benjamin Purdom (1883–1965) was a British author, drama critic, town planner and economist. He had been a pioneer of the garden city movement, serving as finance director of Welwyn Garden City from 1919 to 1928, and he founded the theatre society from which the Welwyn Drama Club descends. He wrote books on Shakespeare, on Bernard Shaw and on Harley Granville-Barker, and on the producing of plays, and he later served as general secretary of British Equity in 1939–1940. His editorship gave the relaunched magazine a particular strength in drama, and his interests explain the prominence of the theatre in its pages.

Contributors and the interviewing of authors

The relaunched magazine featured articles by renowned authors, among them Ivor Brown, Arthur Machen, G. K. Chesterton, A. E. Coppard and Bertrand Russell. That list is itself a map of the magazine's range: journalism and essay writing from Brown, fiction and supernatural writing from Machen and Coppard, polemical and philosophical writing from Chesterton and Russell. Few cheap weeklies of the period could regularly offer names of that standing.

One feature of Purdom's Everyman has attracted dedicated scholarly attention. Rebecca Roach's article in the journal Textual Practice, published in 2015, examined the interviewing of authors in the magazine under the heading “How Writers Work”, treating its author interviews as evidence of how literary work itself was presented to the reading public in the interwar years. The study is a reminder that the magazine was not only a vehicle for finished writing but also a place where the profession of authorship was discussed and displayed.

The Yeats-Brown episode of 1933

The second series had one brief and notorious change of editor. In 1933 Francis Yeats-Brown became editor, but he was forced to resign after only seven weeks, when his advocacy of Fascism was not supported by the magazine's directors. The episode, recorded in John Evelyn Wrench's 1948 biography of Yeats-Brown, shows the limits the Dent directors set on the paper's politics: whatever the personal views of an editor, Everyman was not to become a Fascist organ. The British Library catalogue also records a change in the magazine's presentation in this period, cataloguing a 1933 London Everyman under the description “The world news weekly”, a sign that in its last years the paper was reaching beyond its original literary brief towards general news.

The end of the magazine

Everyman ceased publication in 1935. No single dramatic cause is recorded for the closure of the second series; the paper simply ended, six years after its relaunch, in a decade when serious general weeklies faced intense competition for readers and advertising. Purdom's connection with the Everyman name continued in book form: he had edited Everyman at War, an anthology of sixty personal narratives of the First World War, in which contributors such as Frederick Alan Hyder, whose account “A Nightmare” appeared in the volume, recorded their own war service. The anthology carried the magazine's brand of personal, literary testimony into a durable format.

With the closure, the title disappeared from British publishing. Dent itself continued, and Everyman's Library continued with it — the book series long outlived the magazine that had borrowed its name — but no third series of the magazine followed.

Survival, catalogues and scholarship

The magazine survives in library holdings and in bound volumes. The first series was collected as Everyman: His Life, Work, and Books, of which two volumes covering 1912 to 1916 are recorded, with Charles Sarolea associated as editor; the British Library holds entries for both the 1929 series, described as covering books, drama, music and travel, and the 1933 series, described as a world news weekly. The University of Edinburgh's Sarolea Collection preserves material relating to Sarolea's editorship, including the file on the Everyman Belgian Relief Fund of 1914–1916 and the special Belgium issue of November 1914.

Modern scholarship has approached the magazine from two directions. Publishing historians have used the first series to explain the limits of the Dent firm's classic-centred programme, pointing to its backward-looking focus, to disputes between its editor and its publisher, and to the war, as the causes of its failure. Literary scholars, through Roach's study of its author interviews, have used the second series to examine how interwar magazines represented the work of writing. Between those two readings, Everyman stands as a small but revealing part of the history of the British literary weekly: an attempt, twice made, to give a mass readership a serious paper about books.