About The Ludgate Monthly

The Ludgate Monthly

The Ludgate Monthly was a London-based monthly magazine that published short fiction and articles of general interest during the last decade of the nineteenth century. It ran to 118 issues between May 1891 and February 1901, changing its title twice during that decade before finally being merged into The Universal Magazine. Its name came from Ludgate, the old City of London gateway district long associated with the publishing and bookselling trades.

The magazine appeared at a moment when the British monthly magazine was being reshaped by cheap, illustrated fiction periodicals. It sold at threepence a copy under its first editor, Philip May, and aimed at readers who wanted entertaining stories and miscellaneous articles at a modest price. Over its ten years it published early work by writers who later became well known, including Rafael Sabatini and C. Ranger Gull.

A magazine of three titles

The Ludgate Monthly's publishing history is divided into three distinct phases by its changes of name. It was published as The Ludgate Monthly from May 1891 to October 1893, a run of 30 issues. From November 1893 to October 1895 it appeared as The Ludgate Illustrated Magazine, for 24 issues, the new title advertising the illustrated character that had become essential to success in the 1890s magazine market.

From November 1895 to February 1901 it was published simply as The Ludgate, for a further 64 issues. The three runs together make the total of 118 issues. In 1901 the magazine was bought and merged into The Universal Magazine, a newer monthly; the combined publication appeared for a time as The Universal and Ludgate Magazine before the Ludgate name disappeared altogether.

Philip May and the first issues

Philip May edited The Ludgate Monthly from its inception in 1891 until 1894, spanning the whole of its first title and the beginning of its second. The first issue, sold for three pence, contained stories by Rudyard Kipling, John Augustus O'Shea and Florence Marryat, a line-up that signalled the magazine's intention to mix established popular names with entertaining general content.

Kipling's presence in the first number is notable: by 1891 he was one of the most talked-about young writers in London, and his appearance helped give the new magazine credibility. Marryat, daughter of the naval novelist Captain Marryat, was herself a prolific and popular novelist and a familiar name to magazine readers of the period.

The Ludgate Weekly

The monthly also produced a short-lived weekly companion. The Ludgate Weekly lasted less than a year, running from 5 March to 1 October 1892. Its first issue contained a story by Arthur Conan Doyle, The Great Brown-Pericord Motor, an example of the proprietors' attempt to extend the Ludgate brand into the weekly market that dominated cheap periodical publishing.

The weekly did not survive, and the experiment was abandoned within the year, leaving the monthly to continue under its successive titles for the rest of the decade. The episode illustrates the commercial pressures on magazine publishers in the 1890s, when successful titles were routinely spun off into related publications in search of new readers.

Editors after May

After Philip May's editorship ended in 1894, the magazine passed through several hands. James Nicol Dunn, a Scottish journalist and editor, served as editor from 1895 to 1897, a period that coincided with the shortening of the title to The Ludgate. He was followed by Henry D. Lowry, who edited the magazine in 1897 and 1898.

The last editor was Charles Hyatt-Woolf, who was in charge from 1899 until the magazine's end in 1901. Under these successive editors the magazine maintained its mixture of short fiction and general articles until its merger with The Universal Magazine brought its independent existence to a close.

Fiction in The Ludgate

The Ludgate is remembered in histories of popular fiction partly for the writers it published before they were famous. It published the Red Mask by Rafael Sabatini, who went on to become one of the best-known historical adventure novelists of the early twentieth century, the author of Scaramouche and Captain Blood. For Sabatini scholars, his appearances in magazines such as The Ludgate form part of the record of his apprenticeship in short fiction.

The magazine also published some of the earliest stories by C. Ranger Gull, a prolific writer of popular fiction who became a familiar name in the story papers and magazines of the Edwardian period. Appearances of this kind make runs of The Ludgate useful to bibliographers tracing the early careers of popular authors whose magazine work was often unrecorded elsewhere.

The Universal Magazine merger

In early 1901 The Ludgate was bought by Alexis Maria de Beck, the proprietor of The Universal Magazine, and merged into that title. The Universal Magazine had been founded in February 1900 and was published at sixpence. From May 1901 the combined magazine appeared as The Universal and Ludgate Magazine, carrying the older title's name for a further seven issues before reverting to The Universal Magazine alone.

The merged venture was not a financial success. The Universal Magazine lost money every month, and in December 1901 de Beck was given a liquidation order. The last issues under the Universal title appeared at the end of 1901 and in January 1902, bringing the combined history of the two magazines to an end less than a year after the merger.

Competitions and readers

Like many magazines of its period, The Ludgate engaged its readers through competitions. A surviving silver medal awarded by the magazine, made by Mappin and Webb, was presented in February 1896 to G. F. M. Hopkins for the best drawing, evidence that the magazine ran prize competitions for art as well as for written contributions. Such competitions were a standard means by which 1890s magazines built loyalty and filled pages with reader-generated material.

Place in the 1890s magazine world

The Ludgate Monthly belonged to the generation of magazines launched in the early 1890s, the decade of The Strand Magazine, The Idler and a host of illustrated monthlies competing for the middle-class reader's sixpence or threepence. It never achieved the fame of the Strand, but its ten-year run, three titles and 118 issues made it a durable presence on the bookstalls, and its pages preserve a cross-section of the short fiction and general journalism of the decade.

Its final absorption into The Universal Magazine, and that magazine's rapid failure, also capture the volatility of the market at the turn of the century, when even established titles could be bought, merged and extinguished within a few years.

Legacy

Today The Ludgate Monthly is chiefly consulted by scholars and collectors of 1890s popular fiction. Its interest lies in its early publication of writers such as Sabatini and Ranger Gull, in the Conan Doyle story that launched its short-lived weekly offshoot, and in its value as a representative example of the mid-priced illustrated monthly. Complete runs survive in major libraries, and its issues are indexed in reference works on nineteenth-century British periodicals.

Indexing and reference record

The Ludgate Monthly's complicated title history makes it a familiar entry in bibliographies of the Victorian press. Reference lists of nineteenth-century British periodicals record it in all three of its forms, with its dates given as 1891 to 1893 under its original name, 1893 to 1895 as the Illustrated Magazine, and 1895 to 1901 as The Ludgate, and its fiction is indexed in the specialist databases that catalogue magazine stories of the period. Those records, together with surviving medals from its competitions and bound runs in libraries, allow its history to be followed with unusual precision for a mid-market monthly. Its story is therefore useful beyond its own contents: it shows how a typical 1890s magazine was launched with a famous name in its first issue, renamed to advertise its illustrations, spun off into a weekly, sold on, merged and finally extinguished, all within a single decade of rapid change in British magazine publishing.