About The Saturday Magazine

The Saturday Magazine

The Saturday Magazine was a British weekly magazine published from 7 July 1832 to 28 December 1844. It was published by the Committee of General Literature and Education, sponsored by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, and its later issues were published by John William Parker in London. It ran for 801 issues, sold for a penny a week, and was established as an Anglican rival to The Penny Magazine — a cheap, illustrated paper through which, its sponsors hoped, the working man could educate himself.

A typical edition of The Saturday Magazine began with an account of some exotic place, at a time when the expansion of the British Empire was speeding up and readers at home were eager to learn what was happening around the world. Its other articles dealt with nature, science, history and technology. For twelve and a half years it was one of the most visible products of the great 1830s experiment in cheap improving print.

Foundation in 1832

The Saturday Magazine began on 7 July 1832, only a few months after the appearance of The Penny Magazine in March of the same year. Its publisher was not a commercial house acting alone but the Committee of General Literature and Education, a body appointed and sponsored by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), the long-established Anglican publishing society. The magazine was thus, from its first number, an institutional publication with a religious sponsor, produced in London and later issued by John William Parker.

The date is part of the story. The early 1830s saw a rapid contest for the new mass readership created by cheaper printing: secular and commercial publishers on one side, religious societies on the other, each seeking to supply the working-class reader with reading that its backers approved of. The SPCK's committee was its instrument for entering that contest at the lowest possible price.

An Anglican rival to The Penny Magazine

The Saturday Magazine was established explicitly as an Anglican rival to The Penny Magazine, which Charles Knight produced for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. The two papers were alike in price, in weekly Saturday publication, in illustration and in much of their subject matter — places, natural history, science, manufactures, history — but they differed in sponsorship and temper. The Penny Magazine's backers deliberately excluded religion and politics from its pages; the SPCK's magazine existed so that popular instruction would come with an Anglican, church-sponsored framing rather than a secular one.

Histories of popular print cite the pair together for this reason: the rivalry of 1832 showed that cheap knowledge itself had become contested ground. To supply the working man with improving reading was the stated aim of the Saturday Magazine just as it was of its rival; the disagreement was over whose improvement, and under whose auspices, he should receive.

Price, format and monthly parts

The issues of The Saturday Magazine were sold for one penny per weekly issue, or sixpence for monthly parts. Each weekly number was a short paper of four leaves — described in library guides as a four-page issue, with an engraving on the front page and further inset engravings within. Weekly numbers could thus be bought singly for a penny, gathered into monthly parts for sixpence, or bound into the half-yearly and annual volumes in which many surviving sets are now found, each volume provided with an index to its engravings.

The penny price placed the magazine within reach of the readers it was meant for, but it also dictated the economics of the whole enterprise. A penny weekly could only pay its way with a very large sale, and the SPCK's sponsorship underwrote a venture whose purpose was educational and religious as much as commercial. Surviving bound volumes — such as sets of the 1832–1833 volumes published by J. W. Parker — show the intended afterlife of the penny numbers as durable household books.

The typical issue: places first

A typical edition of the Saturday Magazine began with an account of some exotic place, illustrated by the front-page engraving. The example often reproduced is the issue of 12 October 1833, number 82 of the third volume, whose front page carried an engraving of the statue of James II. The pattern, however, was general: the leading article took the reader somewhere — a city, a monument, a distant country — and the remainder of the number mixed shorter pieces around it.

That editorial choice answered a real appetite. In the 1830s the British Empire was expanding quickly, and people at home in England were very interested in finding out what was happening around the world. A penny paper that opened with an illustrated account of a far-off place offered its readers a kind of armchair travel, and it did so under respectable sponsorship that made it welcome in homes and schools where cheaper secular or radical papers might not have been admitted.

Nature, science, history and technology

Beyond the opening article, the magazine's articles covered nature, science, history and technology. Natural history pieces introduced animals, plants and geology; scientific and technical articles explained processes and inventions; historical pieces supplied biography and accounts of past events and buildings. The mixture closely paralleled the contents of its secular rivals, and deliberately so: the SPCK's committee intended that a reader who wanted the popular knowledge of the day should be able to get it from a church-sponsored paper.

Illustration was integral to that offer. Library descriptions of the magazine note one half-page engraving on the front page and further inset engravings in the text, with an index of engravings at the beginning of each volume — an apparatus that turned the bound volumes into a small illustrated encyclopedia of places, creatures, monuments and machines for the self-improving household.

Readers and reach

The magazine was aimed at the self-education of the working man, and its price, its Saturday publication — timed for the end of the working week — and its improving contents were all shaped to that aim. An exhibition account of Victorian popular print records that the Saturday Magazine, the leading religious entry among the penny weeklies, sold 70,000 copies weekly in the 1830s. Even allowing that its secular rival sold far more, a weekly sale on that scale made the SPCK's paper one of the largest-circulation religious publications of its decade.

Its reach also ran through institutions. As an SPCK publication, the magazine belonged to the same world of parish libraries, schools and tract distribution through which the society's other publications travelled, giving it channels to readers that a purely commercial penny paper had to build for itself. Bound volumes in particular suited school and library shelves, where the magazine's mixture of geography, natural history and history served as safe general reading.

John William Parker and the later issues

The latter issues of the magazine were published by John William Parker in London, under the direction of the Committee of General Literature and Education appointed by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, as the title pages of the bound volumes state. Parker's name appears on volumes from the 1830s onwards, including the 1835 volume containing issues 161 to 224 and the 1836 annual volume, and the magazine continued under that imprint to the end of its run.

Continuity of sponsorship did not mean the magazine stood still. Across the 1830s and early 1840s the market for penny weeklies changed around it: the Penny Magazine itself was struggling with the costs of illustration, new competitors multiplied, and the first excitement of the 1832 contest for the working-class reader gave way to a crowded, more commercial popular press. The Saturday Magazine held its course — weekly, illustrated, improving, church-sponsored — for 801 issues.

The end in December 1844

The Saturday Magazine ceased with its issue of 28 December 1844, closing a run that had begun on 7 July 1832 and produced 801 weekly numbers. The final issue appeared in the same season in which its great rival was also approaching the end: The Penny Magazine published its last number the following October, in 1845. The first generation of penny improving weeklies thus ended almost together.

No successor under the same title continued the SPCK's experiment, and the society's educational publishing moved on in other forms. The magazine's twelve years nevertheless mark the point at which a religious society had felt it necessary to compete, penny for penny and engraving for engraving, with secular publishers for the attention of ordinary readers — a recognition of the power of cheap print that shaped British religious publishing for the rest of the century.

Survival and study

The magazine survives extensively. Digitised issues are available through HathiTrust and Google Books, and bound volumes — individual years such as 1833, 1835 and 1836 among them — appear regularly in the antiquarian trade, usually in the half-leather or cloth bindings in which Victorian owners preserved them. Cardiff University's guide to illustrated periodicals catalogues the magazine among the miscellanies through which scholars study early Victorian popular print.

For historians, the Saturday Magazine's interest lies in the combination it embodied: the oldest Anglican publishing society in the country operating one of the newest forms of the 1830s, the penny illustrated weekly. Its pages show what the established Church thought working readers should know — the wider world, nature, science, history and technology, presented as improving knowledge — and its 801 issues stand as the fullest record of that attempt.