Appearances

The Strand Magazine was born from the failed partnership between the editor W. T. Stead and the publisher George Newnes, who jointly founded the Review of Reviews in 1889. Their differences were explicitly cultural, centring on the function of journalism and its role within culture. The fallout from their disagreement fed directly into the creation of the Strand and helped to fashion its particular branding and identity. One of these disagreements was prompted by Stead's desire to serialise Tolstoy's novel The Kreutzer Sonata. Stead was mocked in the popular press as a treacherous Russophile; Pick-Me-Up observed that he ‘supports Russia, and denounces Great Britain … I do not suggest that anyone should nail Mr Stead's ears to a pump, because it is a pity to spoil pumps.’ Stead had not read the Kreutzer Sonata but had discussed it in person with the author on his visit to Russia in 1888. He anticipated it as an assault upon the ‘conventional illusion of romantic love’ and the institution of marriage. In contrast to Newnes, Stead's approach to journalism was famously sensational and confrontational; he cast journalism as the new centre of power at the heart of increasingly literate and democratic states.

Newnes, conversely, saw his proprietorial publications as a way to build and maintain a comfortable consensus with his readers based upon a reverence for their perceived sensitivities. The short partnership with Stead was legendarily lopsided as a consequence. Newnes was exasperated by the constant threat of ‘damages’ resulting from Stead's taste for controversial literature, his veneration of spiritualism and, in particular, his attack on The Times for its false accusations against Charles Stewart Parnell in 1887. Stead wrote in the Review that the newspaper's ‘disastrous campaign of moral assassination’ had left it ‘without prestige’ and mired in ‘catastrophe’. So strident was this opinion piece, even in its altered final draft, that Newnes feared it landing his partner ‘in Holloway with me in the adjoining cell’. Finding himself discomposed by the whole experience, he sought to end the partnership ‘peacefully’. At times in their correspondence Newnes seems unable to decide whether he was bothered more by Stead's blasphemy, his irreverence, his iconoclasm, his slander or his salaciousness.