This passage from George Saintsbury’s 1896 History of Nineteenth-Century Literature highlights one of the most remarkable publishing phenomena of the period 1830-1914, the proliferation and predominance of the periodical press. As he notes, many novels were first published in magazines and then issued in volume format. Individual poems first appeared in reviews and magazines. Many influential prose works were published serially, along with scholarly work in emerging academic disciplines.

Saintsbury was well qualified to comment. Until his recent appointment to the Regius Chair of English at the University of Edinburgh in 1895 he had spent nearly a quarter of a century as a journalist, writing and reviewing with frenetic energy for Macmillan’s Magazine, and the Fortnightly, the Academy and the Saturday reviews among others, covering contemporary English and French literature as well as current politics. He once claimed he could earn on average £3 10s for an evening’s reading and a morning’s writing.