Time, please.

   I mentioned in a previous post that Confessions of a Young Man first appeared across five serial instalments within the magazine Time from July to November of 1887. So, recently, I've trying to find out more about this.
   To begin with, this Time was not the famous American publication to the cover of which American presidents aspire. (That was not established until 1923.) Time was a British publication, started in 1879 and published by the firm of Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey and Co. COVID conditions mean that I haven't been able to consult a physical copy of the magazine, but it has been digitised, so I have been able to get some idea of the contents. The covers describe it as 'A Monthly Magazine of Current Topics, Literature, & Art' and issues included articles, reviews and fiction. 

   Looking through these, it seems to have functioned as an in-house magazine for Sonnenschein authors: Moore signed up with the firm at the start of 1887 and when the first instalment came out in July 1887, Confessions shared space in Time, amongst other items, with chapters and excerpts from Doctor and Doctors by Graham Everitt (an anecdotal history of medicine and ‘quackery’) and Love’s Tyrant - a novel by Annie Thomas (Mrs Pender Cadlip). 

   As you can see from the advertisement in the Pall Mall Gazette (below), Sonnenschein then published the work of all three writers in book form the next year. 




   This was common practice. As Peter Keating notes in The Haunted Study (1989), in-house magazines and reviews from publishing houses such as Longman, Macmillan and Tinsley contributed to the late nineteenth-century boom in periodical publication. It offered these firms a means of advertising their authors and generating an audience before their work was issued in book form.


   But Doctor and Doctors and Love's Tyrant may seem curious works to set alongside Moore's account of avant-garde French art and literature. This may reflect the curious nature of his chosen publishers.  

Headed by William Swan Sonnenschein, this firm had a relatively liberal reputation. It was known, Andrew Nash records, as a ‘publisher of educational, religious and social science books’ as well as ‘a supporter of radical literature’.* In addition to works by Moore, Swan Sonnenschein would publish the first English translation of Karl Marx’s Capital as well as writings by the radical sexual campaigner Edward Carpenter. And you can see a reference to Carpenter's work in the advertisement above - he edited Chants of Labour: A Song Book for the People. This makes the firm sound progressive - exactly the sort of place that a budding Decadent writer like Moore might be at home.


A Portrait of Walter Sichel
from his memoir, The Sands of Time
   But Moore’s biographer, Adrian Frazier also points to some important tensions within the company. Sonnenschein’s other partners were less progressive in their views. The majority of Moore’s surviving correspondence with the firm is addressed to Hubert Wigram, who seems to have managed the day-to-day task of editing his prose. According to Frazier, Wigram’s interest was in ‘High Church books of devotion’ and a third partner, Walter Sichel was ‘a Tory, educated and Harrow and Balliol [College, Oxford]’. In 1889 in he would stand unsuccessfully as a Conservative candidate for the London County Council.

   The combination seems odd, even unlikely one. It might reflect the curious mixture of writers that the firm published. As I find out more about Sonnenschein from Frazier and others I'm starting to understand that this may have had an important impact upon Moore's relationship with the firm. But this post is getting quite long now, so I'll pick this up next week in my next post.




[As before - I've switched off comments on here, but you can find me on twitter as @keatsandchapman if you have comments, questions, corrections etc.]


* Andrew Nash, 'Better Dead: J. M. Barrie’s First Book and the Shilling Fiction Market', Association for Scottish Literary Studies 7:1 (2015), 19.
** Adrian Frazier, George Moore (2000), p. 154.

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