About The Family Herald

The Family Herald

Overview

The Family Herald was a weekly story paper and domestic magazine published in London from 1843 to 1940. Its full title was The Family Herald: A Domestic Magazine of Useful Information and Amusement, and the subtitle stated its programme plainly: fiction and entertainment for the family, combined with practical information for the household. It was launched by George Biggs in 1842 and re-established in May 1843 with the editor James Elishama Smith and mechanised printing. Initially a penny weekly, it later sold at twopence. By 1855 it had reached a circulation of about 300,000 copies — a figure that placed it among the most widely bought periodicals in Victorian Britain. It survived, through changes of editorship, fashion and two changes of century, for nearly a hundred years, and it was still familiar enough in the twentieth century to be mentioned by George Orwell and in a Sherlock Holmes story.

Launch and re-establishment

The Family Herald was first launched by George Biggs in 1842, but its effective beginning came the following year: in May 1843 it was re-established with James Elishama — "Shepherd" — Smith and with mechanised printing. The combination mattered. Mechanised printing made it possible to produce a penny weekly in the quantities a mass readership required, and Smith gave the relaunched paper an editor of unusual energy and range. The date placed the Herald at the opening of a new era in cheap periodical publishing: it appeared a year after the Illustrated London News and in the same year as The Economist and the News of the World, as steam printing, falling costs and growing literacy created a national market for cheap weekly reading. Where some of its contemporaries led with pictures or with news, the Family Herald led with stories, and it kept that identity as a story paper for the whole of its long life.

James Elishama Smith, the founding editor

Smith successfully edited and established the penny magazine, and remained associated with the paper until his death in 1857. Scholarship on Smith — notably the study of the Family Herald by Dr. Jo Parnell, drawing on James Gregory's work — emphasises how much of the early magazine's character was his. Smith's career before the Herald had been, in Parnell's word, bizarre, and his wide range of knowledge on the subjects that interested Victorian readers allowed him to connect easily with them. His personal beliefs, including the spiritual universalism he held and defended against what he saw as the extremes of mysticism, spiritualism and asceticism, came through strongly in the magazine in its early years, especially in his correspondence with readers. He had strong reservations about extremism in causes such as vegetarianism and temperance, objecting to what he called the domestic tyranny of fanatics — views he expressed from experience, having himself lived under the influence of his friend James Pierrepont Greaves. The founding editor was thus no anonymous functionary: the Herald's first fourteen years bore his stamp.

A penny weekly for the family

The Family Herald was initially priced at one penny, and later sold at twopence. Its penny launch price put it within reach of working-class and lower-middle-class households at a time when a serious quarterly review cost many times as much, and its identity as a domestic magazine — reading chosen to be suitable for the family circle — distinguished it from the more sensational cheap papers of the day. A surviving number from its first decade, No. 427 of 12 July 1851, shows the paper in its early maturity, eight years after the re-establishment. The formula implied by its subtitle joined the two things its buyers wanted: amusement, above all fiction, and useful information, the practical and improving matter that justified a story paper's place in a respectable home. That balance of story and usefulness was the Herald's answer to the suspicion with which cheap fiction was still regarded in the 1840s.

Circulation and reach

By 1855 the Family Herald had a circulation of 300,000, according to Howard Cox and Simon Mowatt's history of magazine publishing in Britain, Revolutions from Grub Street. Twelve years after its re-establishment, the penny weekly was therefore selling on a scale that few British periodicals of any kind could match. Figures of that order meant the Herald was not merely bought but passed around: cheap weeklies were read aloud, shared between households and kept, so its actual readership stood well above its sales. Its success demonstrated the size of the market for respectable family fiction at a penny — a market that publishers would exploit for the rest of the century with story papers and domestic magazines modelled, in part, on the Herald's example.

The correspondence pages

One of the magazine's most distinctive features was its engagement with its readers. The editorials and correspondence pages of the Family Herald carried inquiries and answers on a remarkable range of subjects: philosophy, philanthropy, science, theology, universalism, socialism, astrology, phrenology, medical matters, diet, family, health and hygiene, mental well-being, personal and legal advice, temperance and dietetics, peaceful living, marital matters and vegetarianism. The earlier Family Herald also used many readers' letters, a practice the paper shared with the question-and-answer journalism that later titles would develop nationally. For readers who could not consult a doctor, a lawyer or a clergyman at will, the Herald's columns offered a pennyworth of guidance, and the breadth of the questions it entertained — from phrenology to socialism — makes its correspondence pages a rich record of what ordinary Victorians worried about and wanted to know.

Contributors and fiction

As a story paper, the Family Herald depended on a steady supply of serial and short fiction, and its contributors across its long life included James George Stuart Burges Bohn; Charlotte Mary Brame (1836–84); Bertha Henry Buxton; William Carpenter; James Hain Friswell; Fanny Aikin Kortright (1821–1900); Watts Phillips (1825–74); Frederick William Robinson (1830–1901); Nina Moore Jamieson (1885–1932); Henrietta Stannard (1856–1911); Annie Tinsley (1808–85); and Mary Cecil Hay. Several of these names belonged to the professional popular novelists of the period — writers whose stock-in-trade was exactly the domestic and sensation fiction the Herald's readers wanted. Henrietta Stannard, who wrote as John Strange Winter, contributed stories to the paper until her death in 1911; she was an admired writer whose rendering of the character of the British soldier drew a celebrated compliment from John Ruskin, who corresponded with her and visited her at Sandgate in 1888. The contributor list spans the paper's whole era, from mid-Victorian novelists to Jamieson, whose career belonged to the twentieth century.

The Herald in literature

The Family Herald was so woven into British reading life that it appears in the fiction and essays of writers who expected their readers to recognise it. It is mentioned in Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story "The Problem of Thor Bridge", published in the Strand Magazine in 1922 — a late Holmes case casually invoking a paper that had been appearing since before Holmes's creator was born. George Orwell mentioned it in Down and Out in Paris and London and again in his 1931 essay "The Spike", testimony to the paper's place among the reading matter of the poor and the homeless in the early twentieth century: the Herald that had begun as a penny weekly for Victorian families was, ninety years on, still part of the common stock of cheap reading in Britain. Few periodicals earn references from both Conan Doyle and Orwell; the Herald's everyday ubiquity is precisely what those references record.

Closure in 1940

The Family Herald ceased publication in 1940. The reasons are not now known, as the modern scholarly study of the paper frankly records: after nearly a century of successful publication, the paper simply ended. The same study suggests it was likely that, with the advent of war and changing times and conditions, people's attitudes altered and new opportunities became realisable, and that a periodical established in the early Victorian era ceased to exist in a market now flooded with domestic magazines and reading matter of every kind. The dating supports the plausibility of that reading — 1940 was the first full year of the Second World War — but the honest verdict of the scholarship is that the immediate cause of the closure is unrecorded. A title that had outlived almost every competitor founded in the 1840s disappeared without a chronicler.

Legacy

The Family Herald's legacy is the demonstration, sustained over ninety-seven years, that a cheap story paper could be both respectable and enormously successful. It helped create the template of the domestic magazine of useful information and amusement: serial fiction to hold the family, practical matter to justify the purchase, and correspondence columns that turned readers into participants. Its circulation of 300,000 by 1855 stands as one of the landmark figures of Victorian publishing, and its early editorials and letters pages preserve the questions — about health, diet, faith, money and marriage — of the first mass readership for weekly fiction. That a paper founded in the age of the penny post and the new steam presses was still being name-checked by Orwell in the 1930s shows how deeply it had settled into British life. It began in 1843 as an experiment in mechanised penny publishing; it ended in 1940 as an institution whose passing nobody thought to explain.