About London Society

London Society

Overview

London Society was a Victorian illustrated monthly magazine published in London from 1862 to 1898. Its full title announced its purpose: London Society: An Illustrated Magazine of Light and Amusing Literature for the Hours of Relaxation. It published miscellaneous articles, short fiction — most of it anonymous — and serialised novels, supported by wood-engraved illustrations from some of the outstanding designers of the 1860s. The Victorian Web's account, based on Simon Cooke's study of the illustrated periodicals of the 1860s, describes it as one of the most popular journals of its time. Its publisher and first editor was James Hogg, and its pages were aimed deliberately at the metropolitan middle classes at leisure. By the time it closed in 1898 it had produced seventy-four volumes and a uniquely detailed portrait of wealthy London life in the second half of the nineteenth century.

James Hogg and the founding of 1862

London Society was set up in 1862. Its publisher and first editor was James Hogg (1829–1910), whose brother John was the editor and proprietor of The Churchman's Family Magazine. The contrast between the brothers' magazines was deliberate. John's periodical focused on church and family; James's set its sights on an entirely different territory — not the pious household but fashionable, leisured London. Where his brother's management of The Churchman's Family Magazine was sometimes relatively ill-focused, James Hogg appears to have held a tight rein on his own contributors: his surviving papers, held by the British Library, show how closely he supervised the work of the artists who illustrated London Society. The magazine was later published by W. Clowes and Sons of London, the firm named in the National Library of Australia's catalogue record of the title, and its bound run was issued in London by Clowes from the 1860s onward.

Written for the hours of relaxation

The magazine never pretended to be anything other than entertainment. In the words of its subtitle, it offered light and amusing literature for the hours of relaxation, and the Victorian Web's assessment is that it had no pretensions of being anything more than entertaining ephemera: calculatedly superficial, it could never be described as pious, challenging, intellectual or improving. Its ambitions were narrow and its range strictly limited, and it avoided controversy. Its intended readers, on Cooke's account, were the metropolitan middle classes — specifically the leisured bourgeoisie rather than working professionals or business people. That clarity of purpose was a commercial formula rather than a failure of ambition: London Society addressed and celebrated the lifestyle of its audience, and its definition of "society" was an exclusive one, presenting a vivid portrait of a particular class at play without engaging with society at large.

What filled its pages

The magazine's focus on leisure was embodied in articles on fashion, manners, holidays and other recreational pursuits. Typical examples from its early volumes include "Ladies' Costume at Brighton" (1863), "Housekeeping in Belgravia" (1863) and "Our Pic-Nic" (1863). Around such pieces it arranged reviews of opera and theatre, articles about managing servants, pieces on congestion in Town and on "going to Court", and sentimental poems about love and loss, romance and inheritance. The mix charted how the wealthy lived in the mid and later nineteenth century. A surviving original number gives a sense of the physical object: the issue for May 1865 was a monthly magazine of ninety-six pages with five illustrated plates, measuring about nine by five and a half inches. Month by month for thirty-six years, that package of articles, fiction, poems and plates constituted London Society's running commentary on fashionable life.

Serial fiction and contributors

Fiction was central to the magazine. It serialised novels by Charlotte Riddell, including Above Suspicion in 1874 and The Senior Partner in 1881–82, and carried Florence Marryat's Open Sesame. Its short fiction was mostly anonymous, in the manner of the period, but among its identifiable contributors was a pre-Sherlock Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote for the magazine in his years as a young doctor in Southsea dividing his time between patients and literature. London Society's connection with Doyle was practical as well as literary: an early effort of his, "My Friend the Murderer", brought him a much-needed £10 from James Hogg, the magazine's editor — a sum that, on Daniel Stashower's biographical account, settled the young writer's first quarter's rent. His story "The Man from Archangel" likewise appeared in London Society in January 1885. That the future creator of Sherlock Holmes was earning rent money from the magazine in the early 1880s shows the breadth of the market London Society served: established serial novelists such as Riddell and Marryat alongside beginners who had yet to make their names.

The illustrations

London Society was an illustrated magazine in substance as well as in title. It contained wood-engravings in black and white by some of the outstanding designers of the sixties, and the images were visual equivalents of its written content: the trappings of wealth, fashionable dress, and the moneyed at play. Its illustrators included Mary Ellen Edwards, Randolph Caldecott, Harry Furniss, F. A. Fraser and George Cruikshank. Walter Crane's "Fashionable Promenades" (1862) lavished equal attention on the ladies' silks and laces and the gentlemen's elaborate jackets and watch-chains. Public gatherings recurred throughout the engravings — George Housman Thomas's scene at the Royal Botanic Society's flower show in Regent's Park, gatherings at the opera or theatre, golf and holidays — while crowded streets where the wealthy might rub shoulders with the poor, and the middle classes at urban work, were almost entirely absent. A. W. Cooper's designs showed monumental figures idling in rural landscapes, walking, rowing or picnicking, and J. D. Watson's "A Summer's Eve in a Country Lane", finely engraved by the Dalziels, presented courting lovers in a countryside figured as a garden without toil. Under Hogg's close direction, written and pictorial texts combined to create an overwhelmingly hedonist effect.

The Cornhill comparison

Critics did not always treat the magazine kindly. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction called London Society an inferior imitator of Smith's Cornhill — The Cornhill Magazine, the most prestigious of the new illustrated monthlies of the 1860s. The Victorian Web's rejoinder is that the comparison misses the point: London Society did not pretend or attempt to be a serious literary journal, so to fault it for superficiality is to fault it for succeeding at its stated aim. Its conservatism and narrowness are precisely what make it historically valuable. Simon Cooke's study argues that the magazine provides a running accompaniment to a text such as Anthony Trollope's satirical exploration of middle-class society in The Way We Live Now (1875): Trollope examined the way the wealthy were living, while London Society showed the living itself, with uncomplicated directness and an absence of moral or social uncertainty. For modern critics, its value lies in that very absence of self-reflection, which embodies both the character and the limitations of its readership.

Later years and closure

London Society continued monthly publication until 1898, producing seventy-four volumes across its thirty-six years. The later decades brought the serials for which it is now chiefly indexed — Riddell's The Senior Partner ran in 1881–82, and Doyle's contributions belonged to the 1880s — but the magazine's formula of light literature and fashionable illustration remained the one Hogg had set in 1862. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica's survey of periodicals grouped it with St James's Magazine, Belgravia, St Paul's and Tinsley's among the magazines devoted chiefly to novels and light reading, which is exactly the company it had always kept. No dramatic end is recorded for it: after 1898 its volumes simply stop, and the title passed into the keeping of libraries and the second-hand trade, where its bound annual volumes survive in quantity.

Legacy

London Society's legacy is double. For literary history, it was a durable market for popular fiction: it serialised Charlotte Riddell and Florence Marryat, published much anonymous short fiction, and gave the young Arthur Conan Doyle both pages and rent money before Sherlock Holmes existed; its index of digitised volumes, maintained through the Online Books Page, still serves students of Victorian fiction. For social history, it is something rarer — a month-by-month visual and written record of how leisured metropolitan London dressed, holidayed, courted, kept house and amused itself between 1862 and 1898. Published long before the pictorial glamour magazines of the twentieth century, it perfected a formula of pleasure and display that later magazines would inherit. Its critics called it an inferior Cornhill; its modern students call it a prime source for the life it unselfconsciously displayed. Both judgements rest on the same fact: few magazines have ever known their audience so exactly, or served it so consistently for so long.