Cornhill Magazine

Cornhill Magazine

Issue for January 1862
Editor	George Murray Smith
Categories	Literary magazine
First issue	1859
Final issue	1975
Company	John Murray
Country	United Kingdom
Based in	London
Language	English

File:EFFIE.jpg

John Everett Millais's wife Effie Gray holding a copy of the Cornhill Magazine.

William James Linton's design of the front of The Cornhill Magazine, this copy from December 1945.

The Cornhill Magazine (1860–1975) was a Victorian magazine and literary journal named after the publisher's address at 65 Cornhill in London.

History and profile

Cornhill was founded by George Murray Smith in 1859, the first issue carrying the cover date of January 1860. It continued until 1975. It was a literary journal with a selection of articles on diverse subjects and serialisations of new novels. Smith hoped to gain some of the same readership enjoyed by All the Year Round, a similar magazine owned by Charles Dickens, and he employed as editor William Thackeray, Dickens' great literary rival at the time.

The magazine was phenomenally successful, selling many more issues than anyone had thought likely, but within a few years circulation dropped rapidly as it failed to keep pace with changes in popular taste. It also gained a reputation for rather safe, inoffensive content in the late Victorian era. A mark of the high regard in which it was held was its publication of Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands by Queen Victoria. The stories were often illustrated and it contained works from some of the foremost artists of the time including: George du Maurier, Edwin Landseer, Frederic Leighton, and John Everett Millais. Some of its subsequent editors included G. H. Lewes, Leslie Stephen, Ronald Gorell Barnes, James Payn, Peter Quennell and Leonard Huxley.

Contributors to The Cornhill in the 1930s and 1940s included Elizabeth Bowen, Rose Macaulay, Mary Webb, D. K. Broster, and Nugent Barker. From 1917 the magazine was published by John Murray of Albermarle Street, London.

Notable works published

Important works serialised in the journal include the following:

• Framley Parsonage by Anthony Trollope
• Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell
• The White Company and J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement by Arthur Conan Doyle
• Tithonus by Alfred Tennyson
• Washington Square by Henry James
• Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold
• Romola by George Eliot
• The Lagoon by Joseph Conrad
• Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
• Unto This Last by John Ruskin
• Armadale by Wilkie Collins
• Emma (Posthumous Fragment) by Charlotte Brontë
• Daisy Miller by Henry James

See also

• Smith, Elder, and Co.

Further reading

• Cornhill Magazine. v.5 (1862); v.8 (1863); v.11 (1865); v.19 (1869); v.25 (1872); v.35 (1877).
• The Founding of Cornhill Magazine, Spencer L. Eddy, 1970.
• Cooke, Simon. Illustrated Periodicals of the 1860s. Pinner, Middlesex: Private Libraries Association, 2010 ISBN 978-1-58456-275-7.
• Schmidt, Barbara Quinn (1985). "In the Shadow of Thackeray: Leslie Stephen as the Editor of the Cornhill Magazine." In: Innovators and Preachers: The Role of the Editor in Victorian England. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.

External links

• Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, Dictionary of nineteenth-century journalism in Great Britain and Ireland. Gent: Academia Press; London: British Library, 2009. ISBN 071235039X (p. 145).
• Jack Adrian, "Introduction" to The Ash-Tree Press Annual Macabre 2003: Ghosts at 'The Cornhill' 1931–1939 Ash-Tree Press, 2003, ISBN 978-1-55310-060-7.
• John Murray archive, now in Scotland, http://digital.nls.uk/jma/topics/publishing/cornhill.html