The London Journal

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For Boswell's London Journal, see London Journal.

The London Journal; and Weekly Record of Literature, Science and Art (published from 1845 to 1906) was a British penny fiction weekly, one of the best-selling magazines of the nineteenth century.

The magazine was established by George Stiff, published by George Vickers and initially written and edited by George W. M. Reynolds. After Reynolds left to found his own Reynolds's Miscellany in 1846, John Wilson Ross became editor.

In the mid-1850s the circulation was over 500,000.

In 1857 Herbert Ingram, in secret partnership with Punch's owners Bradbury and Evans, bought the newspaper: Punch's editor Mark Lemon was placed in editorial charge. Lemon's attempt to rebrand the newspaper, serializing novels by Walter Scott, were a commercial failure.[1] In 1859 Stiff bought the paper back (combining it with a title The Guide which he had started in the interim). Stiff installed Percy B. St. John and then Pierce Egan as editor. After Stiff's bankruptcy in 1862 W. S. Johnson became proprietor.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ King (2004), p. 113

[edit] References

  • Anderson, Patricia, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture, 1790-1860. New York: Clarendon Press. 1992. ISBN 9780198112365
  • Andrew King, 'A Paradigm of Reading the Victorian Penny Weekly: Education of the Gaze and The London Journal'. In Brake et al., eds, Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities, 2000, pp. 77-92.
  • Andrew King, The London Journal, 1845-83: Periodicals, Production and Gender. Ashgate. ISBN 0754633438