In May 1900 the American author and journalist Stephen Crane published the short story ‘Manacled’ in the London magazine The Argosy. In several senses Crane was the archetype for expatriate American authors of the later modernist era; writing, publishing and settling in England at a time when he was facing increasing hostility in the US press for the bohemian character of his work and his decadent, nonconformist lifestyle. Crane's circle of friends and associates in fin-de-siècle Great Britain reads like a checklist of some of the most successful and important writers of the age. Henry James and Joseph Conrad were frequent visitors to his home at Brede in East Sussex, Rudyard Kipling was approached to complete his final, unfinished novel The O’Ruddy, H. G. Wells wrote a glowing obituary of Crane in the August 1900 issue of The North American Review and Arnold Bennett and Ford Madox Ford were emphatic in their praise. Whereas his US critical notices after The Red Badge of Courage (1895) had been increasingly disparaging, British critics had been generally more favourable across the whole of his career. For this reason the decision to publish ‘Manacled’ first in the London Argosy rather than with the New York syndicates that had previously carried his short fiction was in keeping with the broad trajectory of Crane's career in the final years of the 1890s. Indeed, Crane did not settle in his home country and they would not readily claim him for their own, at least not until after his death. By 1895 cosmopolitan mobility became Crane's personal and artistic raison d’être. After leaving Asbury Park, New Jersey as a teenager Crane lived in New York, Florida, Greece, Cuba and Britain, seldom settling for long before a new journalistic commission moved him on to pastures new.

At one time The Argosy had been a leading light of the Victorian periodical scene and had appealed to the middle classes through a careful pairing of the lush, Pre-Raphaelite-inspired illustrations of William Small with fictional content that shuttled between popular categories of the sensational and sentimental. By 1900, though, The Argosy had begun to face financial difficulties and a declining readership.