Wikipedia Deep Dive

The Strand Magazine

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The Magazine That Made Readers Queue Around the Block

Picture Victorian London in the 1890s. Crowds of eager readers line up outside a building on Burleigh Street, just off the famous Strand thoroughfare. They're not waiting for tickets to a show or bread during a shortage. They're desperate to find out whether Sherlock Holmes survived his plunge over the Reichenbach Falls.

This was the power of The Strand Magazine.

When George Newnes launched his new publication in January 1891, he probably hoped it would find an audience. He couldn't have imagined it would become a cultural phenomenon that would shape popular fiction for six decades, introducing readers to some of the most beloved characters in literary history and selling half a million copies every single month.

A Revolutionary Approach to Publishing

The Strand wasn't just another Victorian periodical. Newnes understood something that many of his competitors didn't: ordinary people wanted to read too, not just the wealthy and educated classes. His strategy was elegantly simple. Price the magazine at sixpence, roughly half what comparable publications charged, and fill it with content that anyone could enjoy.

The formula worked immediately. The first issue sold nearly 300,000 copies. Within months, circulation climbed to half a million, a staggering number that the magazine maintained well into the 1930s, some forty years later.

What made this success even more remarkable was the magazine's commitment to quality. Newnes didn't cut corners to achieve that lower price point. Each issue featured a careful blend of short fiction and general interest articles, all presented with abundant illustrations. At a time when many periodicals treated images as occasional luxuries, The Strand made them central to the reading experience.

The Detective Who Changed Everything

In July 1891, just six months after the magazine's launch, The Strand published a story called "A Scandal in Bohemia." It was the first of the Sherlock Holmes short stories, written by a young doctor named Arthur Conan Doyle who was trying to supplement his medical income through writing.

The character of Holmes had appeared in two earlier novels, but they hadn't made much of an impression. The Strand changed everything. The magazine format, with its regular publication schedule and easily digestible story length, was perfect for Holmes's episodic adventures. Readers could follow their favorite detective's cases month after month, building a relationship with the character that longer novels couldn't quite achieve.

The illustrations mattered enormously too. Sidney Paget, the artist assigned to illustrate the Holmes stories, created the iconic visual image of the detective that persists to this day. The deerstalker cap, the pipe, the aquiline profile, these all came from Paget's imagination. He illustrated thirty-eight of the Holmes stories for The Strand, including the serialized novel The Hound of the Baskervilles.

That particular story drove the magazine to its absolute peak of popularity. When each new installment arrived at newsstands, readers who couldn't find a copy would queue outside The Strand's offices hoping for extra copies. A fictional detective had become a genuine cultural phenomenon, and the magazine that published his adventures basked in reflected glory.

The Steady Hand at the Helm

Behind this success was an editor whose name is far less famous than Sherlock Holmes but who deserves considerable credit for the magazine's longevity. Herbert Greenhough Smith took over as editor from the very first issue in 1891 and remained in that position until 1930, an extraordinary tenure of nearly four decades.

Greenhough Smith had an exceptional eye for talent and story. He was the one who recognized Conan Doyle's potential and gave Holmes his platform. But he cultivated dozens of other writers too, maintaining the magazine's quality and appeal through the tumultuous decades that included the Boer War, the entirety of World War One, and the beginning of the Great Depression.

His approach was consistent but not rigid. The Strand always blended fiction with factual content, but the specific mix evolved with reader interests. Early issues featured practical articles about London institutions, everything from the Fire Brigade to the River Police to the veterinary college. As the years passed, the non-fiction content shifted to reflect changing times and tastes.

A Literary Who's Who

While Sherlock Holmes may have been the magazine's most famous resident, The Strand published an astonishing roster of writers throughout its existence. The list reads like a syllabus for a course on classic English literature.

Agatha Christie published many of her Hercule Poirot short stories in The Strand, including the twelve tales later collected as The Labours of Hercules. P.G. Wodehouse debuted most of his Jeeves stories there, introducing readers to the unflappable valet and his hapless employer Bertie Wooster. These characters, like Holmes, became cultural touchstones that remain beloved more than a century later.

The list continues: H.G. Wells, the father of science fiction. Rudyard Kipling, whose Jungle Book and Kim had made him one of the most famous writers in the world. Somerset Maugham. Graham Greene. Dorothy L. Sayers with her aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey. Leo Tolstoy, the Russian giant, even contributed.

E.W. Hornung published his Raffles stories in The Strand. Raffles was a gentleman thief, essentially an inverted Sherlock Holmes. This wasn't coincidental. Hornung was Conan Doyle's brother-in-law, and he created Raffles partly as a playful response to his relative's famous detective.

The Puzzles That Bent Minds

Fiction wasn't The Strand's only claim to cultural influence. Starting in 1910, the magazine ran a column called "Perplexities," edited by a mathematician named Henry Dudeney. This wasn't your ordinary puzzle page.

Dudeney was one of the great puzzle innovators of his era. In 1926, he created what appears to be the first crossnumber puzzle ever published, a cousin to the crossword that uses numerical answers and mathematical clues instead of words and definitions. That same year, he wrote an article called "The Psychology of Puzzle Crazes," analyzing why people found such mental challenges so compelling.

After Dudeney's death in 1930, G.H. Savage took over the column, soon joined by William Thomas Williams. In 1935, Williams created what remains one of the most famous logic puzzles ever devised. Originally called "The Little Pigley Farm," this puzzle has been republished countless times under various names: "Dog's Mead," "Little Pigsby," "Pilgrims' Plot," and "Dog Days," among others. It's the kind of puzzle that gets passed from person to person, reprinted in books and magazines, and solved anew by each generation of puzzle enthusiasts.

The Iconic Cover

You might not know the name George Charles Haité, but if you've ever seen an image of The Strand Magazine, you've seen his work. Haité designed the magazine's cover illustration: a view looking eastward down London's Strand toward the church of St Mary-le-Strand, with the magazine's title suspended dramatically on telegraph wires above the street.

It was a perfect encapsulation of the magazine's identity, rooted in London, modern in its sensibility, visually striking. The original design included a small plaque in the corner showing "Burleigh Street," the location of the magazine's offices. When publisher George Newnes later moved to the adjacent Southampton Street, the plaque was updated accordingly.

The design proved so successful that when Newnes launched a sister publication called The Strand Musical Magazine, he commissioned a variation of the same cover.

Crossing the Atlantic

The Strand's success wasn't limited to Britain. Starting in February 1891, just one month after the UK launch, an American edition began publication. Initially, the contents were identical, with US readers getting the same stories and articles as their British counterparts, typically with about a month's delay.

As years passed, the two editions diverged somewhat. Some fiction appeared in only one edition or the other, depending on which rights The Strand had secured. The Return of Sherlock Holmes, for instance, had been commissioned by the American magazine Collier's, so it appeared there rather than in the US Strand. Non-fiction also differed, as articles about British parliamentary politics wouldn't interest most American readers.

The American edition found a substantial audience. By 1898, it was selling 150,000 copies per issue, a respectable number even if it couldn't match the British circulation. This transatlantic success continued until 1916, when the logistical difficulties of World War One made maintaining the American edition impractical. It was discontinued, and The Strand became once again an exclusively British publication.

Royal Connections and Famous Contributors

The magazine's prestige attracted contributions from surprising quarters. Queen Victoria herself granted permission for The Strand to publish a sketch she had drawn of one of her children. Winston Churchill, long before he became Prime Minister, wrote articles for the magazine.

These weren't just celebrity cameos for publicity. They reflected the magazine's genuine position at the center of British cultural life. To appear in The Strand was to reach a vast, engaged readership. Half a million copies a month meant millions of actual readers, since each copy was typically read by multiple people and often preserved and reread.

The Long Decline

Nothing lasts forever, not even institutions that seem permanent. The Strand maintained its half-million circulation into the 1930s, but the world was changing in ways that would eventually prove fatal to the magazine.

Radio emerged as a competing entertainment medium. The Depression tightened budgets. World War Two brought paper rationing and disrupted distribution. In October 1941, the magazine shrunk from its traditional size to a smaller "digest" format, a cost-cutting measure that also reflected changing reading habits.

The binding schedule shifted too. For decades, The Strand had been compiled into handsome bound volumes covering January through June and July through December. From the mid-1930s, this schedule became erratic. By the late 1940s, volumes ran from October to March and April to September, a sign of the scrambling that characterized the magazine's final years.

The last editor was Macdonald Hastings, who would later become a distinguished war correspondent and television journalist. He also wrote for the Eagle, a boys' comic that represented the newer forms of popular publishing that were displacing Victorian-era magazines like The Strand.

In March 1950, after fifty-nine years and 711 issues, The Strand Magazine published its final edition. Rising costs and declining circulation had finally overwhelmed a publication that had once seemed invincible.

Brief Resurrections

The Strand's story didn't quite end there. In 1961, a brief revival appeared under the name The New Strand, edited by Noni Jabavu. It didn't last.

More successfully, in 1998, a new version of The Strand launched in the United States, based in Birmingham, Michigan. This revival, published quarterly rather than monthly, focuses on crime and mystery fiction, explicitly connecting to the magazine's legacy as the home of Sherlock Holmes.

The new Strand has published work by John Mortimer, Ruth Rendell, Ray Bradbury, Alexander McCall Smith, Colin Dexter, and Tennessee Williams, among many others. It combines established writers with emerging voices in the mystery and crime genres, carrying forward at least some of the original magazine's spirit of discovering and nurturing talent.

Why The Strand Still Matters

The Strand Magazine might seem like a relic of a vanished age, and in some ways it is. Monthly general-interest magazines with half-million circulations don't really exist anymore. The world that produced queues of readers waiting for the next Sherlock Holmes installment has been transformed beyond recognition by television, the internet, and streaming media.

But The Strand's influence persists in less obvious ways. The magazine essentially invented the modern concept of the recurring fictional character whose adventures readers follow across multiple stories. Before The Strand made Sherlock Holmes a phenomenon, this wasn't really how popular fiction worked. Afterward, it became standard practice.

The magazine also demonstrated that quality and popularity weren't mutually exclusive. Newnes charged half the going rate and still published Tolstoy and Wells. He reached a mass audience without condescending to it. That's a lesson that subsequent publishers, in every medium, have periodically forgotten and rediscovered.

Most importantly, The Strand showed what happens when the right content meets the right format at the right time. Arthur Conan Doyle had written Sherlock Holmes novels that went largely unnoticed. The same character in short story form, published monthly in an illustrated magazine priced for ordinary readers, became one of the most famous fictional creations in history.

The message is clear: how you tell a story matters as much as the story itself. George Newnes and Herbert Greenhough Smith understood this instinctively. For sixty years, their magazine proved them right.