The Leisure Hour

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The Leisure Hour
Leisure Hour 1032 front.jpg
The cover of issue 1032, with an illustration accompanying a story about a shipwreck.
FrequencyWeekly
Publisher Religious Tract Society
First issueJanuary 1, 1852;173 years ago (1852-01-01)
Final issue1905;120 years ago (1905)
CountryUnited Kingdom
Based inLondon
LanguageEnglish
OCLC 362165421

The Leisure Hour was a British general-interest periodical of the Victorian era published weekly from 1852 to 1905. [1] [2] It was the most successful of several popular magazines published by the Religious Tract Society, which produced Christian literature for a wide audience. [1] Each issue mixed multiple genres of fiction and factual stories, historical and topical. [1]

Contents

The magazine's title referred to campaigns that had decreased work hours, giving workers extra leisure time. [3] Until 1876, it carried the subtitle A Family Journal of Instruction and Recreation; [4] after that, the subtitle changed to An illustrated magazine for home reading. [5]

Each issue cost one penny and contained 16 pages. [6] The layout typically included approximately six long articles, formatted in two columns per page, and five or six illustrations. The articles were a mix of biographies, poetry, essays, and fiction. Each issue usually started with a piece of serialised fiction. [6]

The creation of the magazine was partly a response to non-religious popular magazines that the Religious Tract Society saw as delivering a "pernicious" morality to the working classes. [1] The ethos of the magazine was guided by Sabbatarianism: the campaign to keep Sunday as a day of rest. [4] It aimed to treat its diverse subjects "in the light of Christian truth". [4] Despite this, The Leisure Hour carried far fewer statements of Christian doctrine than the Society's other publications, [6] and had a greater emphasis on fiction than popular magazines of the time. [7]

Two days before the magazine's launch in 1852, a warehouse fire destroyed the first batch of The Leisure Hour, so replacement copies had to be printed. [3]

The magazine was edited by William Haig Miller until 1858, [5] James Macaulay from 1858 to 1895, [8] and William Stevens from 1895 to 1900. [5] Harold Copping was one of its illustrators. [9] Authors were initially only credited by initials rather than by name, giving the writing a collective rather than individual authority, though naming of authors became more common from the 1870s. [1] In its jubilee issue, published in 1902, the magazine identified 111 authors who had contributed. [1]

Notable contributors

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Lechner, Doris (2013). "Serializing the Past in and out of the Leisure Hour: Historical Culture and the Negotiation of Media Boundaries". Mémoires du livre. 4 (2). doi: 10.7202/1016740ar .
  2. ↑ Dozier, Graham (25 September 2014). A Gunner in Lee's Army: The Civil War Letters of Thomas Henry Carter. University of North Carolina Press. p. 290. ISBN   978-1-4696-1875-3.
  3. 1 2 Louise Henson (2004). Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-century Media. Ashgate. pp. 75–77. ISBN   978-0-7546-3574-1.
  4. 1 2 3 Stephanie Olsen (16 January 2014). Juvenile Nation: Youth, Emotions and the Making of the Modern British Citizen, 1880-1914. A&C Black. p. 23. ISBN   978-1-4725-1009-9.
  5. 1 2 3 "The leisure hour | WorldCat.org". search.worldcat.org. Retrieved 6 December 2024.
  6. 1 2 3 "Noakes, Richard (2004). "The Boy's Own Paper and late-Victorian juvenile magazines". In Geoffrey Cantor (ed.). Science in the nineteenth-century periodical: reading the magazine of nature (1. publ. ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN   9780521836371. via Open Research Exeter http://hdl.handle.net/10036/31895
  7. ↑ Maidment, Brian E. (1984). "Magazines of Popular Progress & the Artisans". Victorian Periodicals Review. 17 (3): 83–94. ISSN   0709-4698.
  8. ↑ Lee, Sidney, ed. (1912). "Macaulay, James"  . Dictionary of National Biography (2nd supplement). Vol. 2. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
  9. ↑ "Harold Copping". Spartacus Educational. Retrieved 14 November 2015.

Further reading

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