 The first issue of Tit-Bits, dated Oct. 22, 1881 | |
| Frequency | Weekly |
|---|---|
| Founder | George Newnes |
| Founded | 1881 |
| First issue | 22 October 1881 |
| Final issue | 18 July 1984 |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Based in | London |
| Language | English |
Tit-Bits from all the interesting Books and Newspapers of the World, more commonly known as Tit-Bits and from 1973 as Titbits, was a British weekly magazine founded by George Newnes, a founding figure in popular journalism, on 22 October 1881. [1]
In 1886, the magazine's headquarters moved from Manchester to London [2] where it paved the way for popular journalism – most significantly, the Daily Mail was founded by Alfred Harmsworth, a contributor to Tit-Bits, and the Daily Express was launched by Arthur Pearson, who worked at Tit-Bits for five years after winning a competition to get a job on the magazine. [3] Their first offices were at 12 Burleigh Street, off the Strand.
From the outset, the magazine was a mass-circulation commercial publication on cheap newsprint which soon reached sales of between 400,000 and 600,000. By the turn of the century, it became the first periodical in Britain to sell over one million copies per issue. [4] Like a mini-encyclopedia it presented a diverse range of tit-bits of information in an easy-to-read format, with the emphasis on human interest stories concentrating on drama and sensation. [5] It also featured short stories and full-length fiction, including works by authors such as Rider Haggard and Isaac Asimov, plus three very early stories by Christopher Priest.
Virginia Woolf submitted her first article to the paper in 1890, at the age of eight, but it was turned down. [6] The first humorous article by P. G. Wodehouse, "Men Who Missed Their Own Weddings", appeared in Tit-Bits in November 1900. [7] During the First World War Ivor Novello won a Titbits competition to write a song soldiers could sing at the front: he penned Keep the Home Fires Burning . [8]
Pin-ups appeared on the magazine's covers from 1939, and by 1955, circulation peaked at 1,150,000. At the beginning of 1973, Tit-Bits lost the hyphen from its masthead. In 1979 Reveille (a weekly tabloid with a virtually identical demographic) was merged into Titbits, and the magazine was briefly rebranded as Titbits incorporating Reveille. This, however, was dropped in July 1981. Following a wage dispute at owner IPC Magazines, publication ceased on 9 June 1984 and its closure was announced at the end of June. At the time, Titbits was selling only 200,000 copies per issue. [4] A final issue was published on 18 July 1984 [8] under its last editor Paul Hopkins. It was taken over by Associated Newspapers' Weekend. At the time, the Financial Times described Titbits as "the 103-year-old progenitor of Britain's popular press". [8] Weekend itself closed in 1989.
The success of Tit-Bits inspired a number of other inexpensive weeklies to ape its format, some short-lived and others, such as Answers becoming major successes in their own right. Within the first six months of its existence, Tit-Bits had inspired twelve imitators, growing to 26 within a year of its debut. [9] Examples of papers said to be imitators include:
In All Things Considered by G. K. Chesterton, the author contrasts Tit-Bits with the Times, saying: "Let any honest reader... ask himself whether he would really rather be asked in the next two hours to write the front page of The Times, which is full of long leading articles, or the front page of Tit-Bits, which is full of short jokes." Reference to the magazine is also made in James Joyce's Ulysses , [11] George Orwell's Animal Farm , C. P. Snow's The Affair , [12] James Hilton's Lost Horizon , Virginia Woolf's Moments of Being , H. G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon and Kipps , A. J. Cronin's The Stars Look Down and P. G. Wodehouse's Not George Washington . It has been also mentioned in Stanley Houghton's play The Dear Departed . Wells also mentioned it in his book Experiment in Autobiography. The magazine is parodied as "Chit Chat" in George Gissing's New Grub Street . In the closing scene of the film Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), the protagonist Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) is approached by a journalist (Arthur Lowe) from Tit-Bits.
The magazine was mistakenly referenced alongside Playboy and The Sun's Page 3 in Tom Robinson's 1978 song "Glad to Be Gay", as Robinson had misinterpreted the magazine's title and assumed its content to be more salacious. [13] [14]
The magazine name survived as a glossy adult monthly, Titbits International.
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer. She is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors. She pioneered the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1841.
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Sir George Newnes, 1st Baronet was a British publisher and editor and a founding figure in popular journalism. Newnes also served as a Liberal Party Member of Parliament for two decades. His company, George Newnes Ltd, was known for such periodicals as Tit-Bits and The Strand Magazine; it continued publishing consumer magazines such as Nova long after his death.
My Man Jeeves is a collection of short stories by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the United Kingdom in May 1919 by George Newnes. Of the eight stories in the collection, half feature the popular characters Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, while the others concern Reggie Pepper, an early prototype for Bertie Wooster.
The Captain was a magazine featuring stories and articles for "boys and old boys", published monthly in the United Kingdom from 1899 to 1924. Its headquarters were in London. It is perhaps best known for printing many of P. G. Wodehouse's early school stories.
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Events from the year 1881 in the United Kingdom.
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The Grand Magazine was the first British pulp magazine. It was published monthly between February 1905 and April 1940. Published by George Newnes Ltd, it initially emulated Newnes's highly successful Strand Magazine, featuring a mix of fiction and non-fiction. In 1908, it was renamed The Grand Magazine of Fiction.
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Pearson's Weekly was a British weekly periodical founded in London in 1890 by Arthur Pearson, who had previously worked on Tit-Bits for George Newnes.
George Newnes Ltd is a British publisher. The company was founded in 1891 by George Newnes (1851–1910), considered a founding father of popular journalism. Newnes published such magazines and periodicals as Tit-Bits, The Wide World Magazine, The Captain, The Strand Magazine, The Grand Magazine, John O'London's Weekly, Sunny Stories for Little Folk, Woman's Own, and the "Practical" line of magazines overseen by editor Frederick J. Camm. Long after the founder's death, Newnes was known for publishing ground-breaking consumer magazines such as Nova.
Lorraine Janzen Kooistra is a Canadian professor of English and a member of the Yeates School of Graduate Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is the founding co-director of TMU's Centre for Digital Humanities. She was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2018.
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The Novel Magazine was the first British all-fiction pulp magazine. It was Sir Cyril Arthur Pearson's rival to Sir George Newnes's The Grand Magazine.
