About The Pall Mall Magazine

The Pall Mall Magazine

The Pall Mall Magazine was a monthly British literary magazine published in London between 1893 and 1914. It was founded by the American-born millionaire William Waldorf Astor as a companion to the Pall Mall Gazette, the evening newspaper he also owned, and it set out to give British readers a richly illustrated monthly that could stand comparison with the leading American periodicals of the same class. Poetry, short stories, serialised fiction, general commentary and extensive artwork filled its pages, and for just over two decades it stood among the most handsome and ambitious literary monthlies of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain.

The magazine belonged to a crowded and competitive market. Its most obvious rival was The Strand Magazine, and the two titles were often compared. Writers and illustrators moved freely between them: the illustrator Sidney Paget and the author H. G. Wells, for example, both sold freelance work to the Pall Mall as well as to the Strand. That overlap said much about the magazine's standing. It was not a niche or marginal venture, but a mainstream showcase in which the best-known commercial writers and artists of the day expected to appear.

Foundation by William Waldorf Astor

The Pall Mall Magazine was begun by William Waldorf Astor, a member of the wealthy Astor family who had settled in Britain and invested heavily in British publishing. Astor acquired the Pall Mall Gazette and then launched the magazine in 1893 as an offshoot of the newspaper, giving the Pall Mall name a monthly literary presence alongside its daily journalism. The venture formed part of a wider pattern in which wealthy proprietors used their fortunes to underwrite magazines whose production values, payments to contributors and quantity of illustration exceeded what sales alone might comfortably have supported.

The publishing arrangements reflected that ambition. The magazine was initially published by George Routledge, and its reach extended beyond London: the original arrangement provided for publication in London, Edinburgh, the provinces and New York, matching Astor's own transatlantic background. A London monthly with a New York dimension was well placed to compete for contributors and readers on both sides of the Atlantic, and Astor's money allowed the new title to enter the market at a level of finish that a cautious, purely commercial launch would have struggled to match.

Editors of the magazine

Four editorial regimes covered the magazine's original run. Douglas Straight edited the Pall Mall Magazine from 1893 to 1896, in its earliest years jointly associated with Lord Frederick Hamilton, who then continued as editor until 1900. George Halkett took over in 1901 and remained until 1905, and Charles Morley edited the magazine from 1905 until its original run ended in 1914. Later accounts of the final phase also name Hubert Fitchew in connection with the closing issues of 1914, as ownership passed away from Astor.

That succession gave the magazine continuity across more than twenty years. The editors inherited a settled formula — fiction, poetry, commentary and lavish illustration for a middle- and upper-class readership — and their task was to refresh it without losing the identity Astor had paid to establish. The longevity of the title through several changes of editor suggests the formula was robust, even if, as later histories noted, the magazine struggled toward the end to maintain a secure and distinctive place in an increasingly crowded market.

Illustration and visual character

Illustration was the Pall Mall Magazine's signature strength. It was noted in its own time as the first British magazine to publish illustrations in a number and finish comparable to those of American periodicals of the same class. Much of its artwork was in the late Pre-Raphaelite style, giving its pages a romantic, richly detailed look that set them apart from plainer British contemporaries. For readers, the pictures were not decoration added to the text; they were a central part of what the magazine sold.

The illustrators the magazine published included some of the most significant commercial artists of the day. Sidney Paget, famous for his Sherlock Holmes illustrations for the Strand, worked for the Pall Mall as well, and the magazine also carried work by George Morrow and Edmund Joseph Sullivan. The early volumes featured illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley, whose distinctive black-and-white work became one of the defining visual styles of the 1890s. A roster of that quality confirmed that Astor's investment had bought the magazine a place at the top table of illustrated publishing.

Fiction and serials

Fiction stood at the heart of the magazine. Short stories and serialised novels gave readers a reason to buy month after month, and the Pall Mall published authors who ranged from popular entertainers to figures now central to the literary canon. Joseph Conrad was among them: his novella Typhoon was first serialised in the Pall Mall Magazine, a fact that has kept the magazine's name alive in Conrad scholarship long after its closure. Publishing Conrad placed the title in the serious literary world as well as the commercial one.

The wider fiction list showed the same breadth. The magazine published Jack London, M. R. James, Julian Osgood Field, Bernard Capes and Charlotte O'Conor Eccles, and it carried Israel Zangwill, the author of Children of the Ghetto, both as a contributor and as the writer of a causerie column published under the heading Without Prejudice. A magazine that could print ghost stories, adventure fiction, social commentary and a future classic of maritime literature within the same broad programme was serving several audiences at once — and doing so deliberately, because breadth was what a general literary monthly required to survive.

Poetry in the magazine

Poetry had a regular and prominent place in the Pall Mall Magazine, and its verse contributors formed a remarkable cross-section of the period's poetry. Algernon Charles Swinburne and Rudyard Kipling appeared in its pages, alongside George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, Paul Verlaine, Katherine Tynan, Henry Newbolt, John Davidson, W. B. Yeats, Walter de la Mare and John Masefield. Few monthlies could claim a poetry list that stretched from established Victorian figures to writers who would define twentieth-century verse.

That range mattered commercially as well as culturally. In the 1890s and 1900s, poetry was still a selling feature of a general magazine rather than a specialist taste, and a famous poet's name on a contents page helped sell an issue to readers who might have come primarily for the fiction or the pictures. By printing poets of this standing alongside its serials and artwork, the Pall Mall reinforced its claim to be a complete literary entertainment — a single monthly purchase that covered the whole landscape of contemporary writing.

Commentary and the causerie

Alongside fiction and verse, the magazine carried general commentaries and a tradition of the causerie — the informal, conversational essay in which a well-known writer ranged over books and contemporary life. Contributors to this side of the magazine included A. T. Quiller-Couch, who wrote From a Cornish Window, W. E. Henley, whose column appeared as Ex Libris, and, in time, G. S. Street, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Names of that kind gave the magazine a voice in the literary arguments of the day, not merely a stock of stories.

The commentary pages also explain how the magazine held its middle- and upper-class readership. Readers were offered opinions and conversation from writers they already respected, in a format designed to be browsed as well as read straight through. In a market where the Strand had shown how powerful a mixture of fiction, features and illustration could be, the Pall Mall's blend of serials, poems, art and causerie was its own version of the same winning formula, executed with particular extravagance under Astor's subsidy.

Sale, merger and the First World War

The magazine's Astor era ended in the years immediately before the First World War. In October 1912 the New York Times reported that Waldorf Astor had sold the magazine, and was said to have obtained very little for it — a striking outcome for a title that had consumed so much of his money. Publication arrangements changed as well: after the Routledge years, the magazine was published by Iliffe and Sons from January 1913. Whatever the precise finances, the reports of the sale marked the end of the Pall Mall as a rich man's personal literary project.

In 1914 the original run came to a close. As romantic ideas faded with the onset of the First World War, the magazine merged with Nash's Magazine, which had been controlled by the Hearst Corporation since 1910, to become Nash's Pall Mall Magazine. The September 1914 issue was the last under the old arrangement before the merger took effect, and the Pall Mall name survived thereafter only as part of the combined title. The war that transformed British publishing economics had ended the magazine in its independent form after 257 issues.

The revival and final end

The story did not quite finish in 1914. From May 1927 the Pall Mall Magazine and Nash's were again published separately, and the revived Pall Mall, edited by Ivor Nicholson, ran for a further 29 issues. The revival was short-lived: after the September 1929 issue the two magazines were re-merged, and the combined publication finally ceased altogether following the issue of September 1937. Some accounts describe the title in its last phase as being subsumed into Good Housekeeping, closing a publishing lineage that had begun forty-four years earlier.

The revival demonstrated the residual value of the Pall Mall name, which a publisher in the 1920s still thought worth putting back on a cover. But the market of 1927 was not the market of 1893: the great age of the lavishly illustrated literary monthly had passed, competition had multiplied, and the revived title could not re-establish itself independently. Its second merger, and the final closure in 1937, confirmed that the magazine belonged essentially to the pre-1914 world that had created it.

Legacy and survival

The Pall Mall Magazine's legacy rests on three things. First, its illustration: its claim to have matched American standards of pictorial finish in a British monthly marked a step in the visual development of British magazines. Second, its contributors: Conrad, Kipling, Hardy, Yeats, Wells, Jack London and M. R. James in its pages make bound volumes of the magazine a compact anthology of the period's writing. Third, its serialisation of Conrad's Typhoon gave it a permanent place in literary history that outlived the title itself.

The magazine also survives physically and digitally in a way many of its contemporaries do not. Bound volumes are held by major libraries — a volume from 1894, for example, survives in the library of Princeton University — and digitised volumes have been made available through the Internet Archive, while scholars have compiled indexes to the fiction the magazine published as part of the Victorian Fiction Research Guide. For historians of the 1890s magazine boom, of illustrated publishing and of Conrad's career, the Pall Mall Magazine remains an essential and accessible source — a London monthly that, for twenty-one years, tried to be the most beautiful literary magazine in Britain.