The Strand Magazine has frequently been described as a ‘national institution’, but never did those claims carry as much truth as during the First World War. Before 1914 the phrase simply referred to a kind of successful hegemony where its commercial success had meaningfully fused with the size of its cultural footprint. Perhaps it also implied a specific ability to speak alongside the establishment and to operate with its blessing, a supposition evidenced by its many commissioned articles from prominent political, royal and aristocratic figures from across Europe. During the war, however, the magazine was more or less entirely transformed into a vehicle for propaganda. While it prominently featured work by writers like Conan Doyle and H. G. Wells who were actively employed by the British Propaganda Office at Wellington House in different capacities, these marquee names were supported by hundreds of other voices clamouring in their support across fiction and non-fiction pieces.

While the Strand had never been a place for controversy or genuinely frictive disagreement on major issues (as compared, say, to the Review of Reviews, the Pall Mall Magazine or the English Magazine), never had its pages found so many voices speaking as one. This univocality was produced by a pervasive sense of shared purpose based on moral, ideological and cultural imperatives. It also had the effect of effacing the more turbulent pre-war period in the magazine. Reading the Strand between 1910 and 1914, the period with which this chapter begins, is a more discomfiting, disharmonious experience that at any previous time in its history. In political terms, the Strand 's vision of England was assailed on its own pages by the disparate forces of suffragism, revolutionism, Irish separatism and trade unionism. Accordingly, this chapter is broken into three parts, the first of which examines the unease of 1910–14, the second Conan Doyle's writing within the magazine, and the third the war years.

The Gathering Storm

The reason for this division is to draw particular attention to the strange phenomenon whereby the coming of the war was experienced almost as a soothing balm, alleviating the aggravations of peacetime.