Cornhill Magazine

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The Cornhill Magazine was a Victorian literary magazine named after Cornhill Street in London.

Cornhill was founded by George Murray Smith in 1860 and was published until 1975. It was a literary journal with a selection of articles on diverse subjects and serialisations of new novels. Smith hoped to gain some of the same readership enjoyed by All the Year Round, a similar magazine owned by Charles Dickens, and he employed as editor William Thackeray, Dickens' great literary rival at the time.

The magazine was phenomenally successful, selling many more issues than anyone had thought likely, but within a few years circulation dropped rapidly. It also gained a reputation for rather safe, inoffensive content in the late Victorian era. A mark of the high regard in which it was held was its publication of Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands by Queen Victoria. The stories were often illustrated and it contained works from some of the foremost artists of the time including: George du Maurier, Edwin Landseer, Frederic Leighton, and John Everett Millais. Some of its subsequent editors included G. H. Lewes, Leslie Stephen, Ronald Gorell Barnes, James Payn, Peter Quennell and Leonard Huxley.

Important works serialised in the journal include:

• Framley Parsonage by Anthony Trollope
• Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell
• The White Company and J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement by Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Ring and the Book by Robert Browning
• Tithonus by Alfred Tennyson
• Washington Square by Henry James
• Romola by George Eliot
• Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
• Unto This Last by John Ruskin
• Armadale by Wilkie Collins
• Emma (Posthumous Fragment) by Charlotte Bronte

Further readingEdit

• Cornhill Magazine. v.5 (1862); v.8 (1863); v.11 (1865); v.19 (1869); v.35 (1877).
• The Founding of Cornhill Magazine, Spencer L. Eddy, 1970.