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The Provincial Press and the Imperial Traffic in Fiction, 1870s–1930s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2009

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References

1 Classic British statements include Leavis, F. R. and Thompson, Denys, Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness (London, 1933)Google Scholar; Hoggart, Richard, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life, with Special References to Publications and Entertainments (London, 1957)Google Scholar; and, much more ambivalently, Priestley, J. B., English Journey (1934; Harmondsworth, 1977), chap. 12Google Scholar.

2 Price, Richard, “One Big Thing: Britain, Its Empire, and Their Imperial Culture,” Journal of British Studies 45, no. 3 (July 2006): 602–27, 604CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See Stoler, Ann Laura and Cooper, Frederick, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Cooper, Frederick and Stoler, Ann Laura (Berkeley, 1997), 156Google Scholar.

3 Lester, Alan, “British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire,” History Workshop Journal, no. 54 (Autumn 2002): 2448CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ballantyne, Tony, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ballantyne, Tony and Moloughney, Brian, “Asia in Murihiku,” in Disputed Histories: Imagining New Zealand's PastsGoogle Scholar, ed. Ballantyne, Tony and Brian Moloughney (Dunedin, 2006), 6592Google Scholar; McKenzie, Kirsten, Scandal in the Colonies: Sydney and Cape Town, 1820–1850 (Melbourne, 2004), 78, 10Google Scholar.

4 For instance, Burton, Antoinette, “Who Needs the Nation? Interrogating ‘British’ History,” in Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A Reader, ed. Hall, Catherine (New York, 2000), 137–53Google Scholar.

5 Hall, Catherine, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge, 2002)Google Scholar; Wilson, Kathleen, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), pt. 2Google Scholar; Arnold, Rollo, The Farthest Promised Land: English Villagers, New Zealand Immigrants of the 1870s (Wellington, 1981)Google Scholar; Harnetty, Peter, Imperialism and Free Trade: Lancashire and India in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Vancouver, 1972)Google Scholar.

6 Another exception is D. C. Thomson of Dundee, which, in the 1920s and 1930s, was the dominant player in the British market for boys’ papers and successful publishers of weekly papers for women. See McAleer, Joseph, Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain, 1914–1950 (Oxford, 1992), chap. 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Potter, Simon J., “Webs, Networks, and Systems: Globalization and the Mass Media in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Empire,” Journal of British Studies 46, no. 3 (July 2007): 621–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Compare Lester, “British Settler Discourse”; Ballantyne Orientalism and Race; Tony Ballantyne, “Rereading the Archive and Opening up the Nation-State: Colonial Knowledge in South Asia (and Beyond),” in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham, NC, 2003), 102–24, 104. Also see Laidlaw, Zoë, Colonial Connections, 1815–45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester, 2005), 4Google Scholar.

8 Potter, “Webs, Networks, and Systems,” 625–27. These kinds of relationships are exemplified by the Aryanist researchers Ballantyne has studied in Orientalism and Race.

9 These records are held by the Bolton Central Library and the Bodleian Library, Oxford (hereafter Bodleian). Most of the Tillotson material in the Bodleian is on long-term loan from Michael L. Turner and does not have Bodleian classification codes. I have used the same designations as Turner uses in “Tillotson's Fiction Bureau: Agreements with Authors,” in Studies in the Book Trade in Honour of Graham Pollard, ed. Hunt, R. W., Philip, I. G., Roberts, R. J., and Carter, John (Oxford, 1975), 351–78, 352–53, referring, e.g., to the sales ledger for short stories as “Ledger A.”Google Scholar

10 Law, Graham, Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press (Basingstoke, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Johanningsmeier, Charles, Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace: The Role of Newspaper Syndicates, 1860–1900 (Cambridge, 1997)Google Scholar; Turner, Michael, “Reading for the Masses: Aspects of the Syndication of Fiction in Great Britain,” in Book Selling and Book Buying: Aspects of the Nineteenth-Century British and North American Book Trade, ed. Langdon, Richard (Chicago, 1978), 5272Google Scholar; Turner, “Tillotson's Fiction Bureau.” See also Pollard, Graham, Serial Fiction (London, 1938)Google Scholar.

11 See Waller, Philip, Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain, 1870–1918 (Oxford, 2006)Google Scholar; McAleer, Popular Reading and Publishing; Bingham, Adrian, Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press in Inter-war Britain (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar.

12 Porter, Bernard, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar.

13 Nile, Richard and Walker, David, “The ‘Paternoster Row Machine’ and the Australian Book Trade, 1890–1945,” in A History of the Book in Australia: A National Culture in a Colonised Market, ed. Lyons, Martyn and Arnold, John (St. Lucia, Queensland, 2001), 3–18, 7Google Scholar.

14 Singleton, Frank, Tillotsons, 1850–1950: Centenary of a Family Business (Bolton, 1950), chap. 3Google Scholar.

15 Law, Serializing Fiction, 68–69; Turner, “Reading for the Masses,” 55–56.

16 See the correspondence in Bolton Evening News Archive, ZBEN/4/9/1, ZBEN/4/1, Bolton Archives and Local Studies, Bolton Central Library (BCL).

17 Singleton, Tillotsons, 50–52; Arnold Bennett to J. B. Pinker, 17 January 1906, in The Letters of Arnold Bennett: vol. 1, Letters to J. B. Pinker, ed. James Hepburn (London, 1966), 65–66, 66 n.

18 Jackson, Kate, George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain, 1880–1910: Culture and Profit (Aldershot, 2001), chap. 2Google Scholar; Pound, Reginald, Mirror of the Century: The Strand Magazine, 1891–1950 (South Brunswick, NJ, 1966)Google Scholar; Reed, David, “‘Rise and Shine!’ The Birth of the Glossy Magazine,” British Library Journal 24, no. 2 (Autumn 1998): 256–68Google Scholar; Reed, David, The Popular Magazine in Britain and the United States, 1880–1960 (Toronto, 1997), 9698Google Scholar; Keating, Peter, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel, 1875–1914 (London, 1989), 35Google Scholar; Waller, Writers, Readers, and Reputations, 77. One of Tillotson's powerful competitors from the end of the nineteenth century was the Northern Newspaper Syndicate. For gleanings about this company, see G. E. Mitton, ed., The Writers’ and Artists’ Year Book, 1921: A Directory for Writers, Artists and Photographers (London, n.d.), 82; and Bennett to Pinker, 9 November 1906, in Hepburn, Letters of Arnold Bennett, 1:75.

19 Turner, “Reading for the Masses,” 59–61.

20 Frederick L. Tillotson to J. Lever Tillotson, 11 March 1929; Frederick L. Tillotson to W. B. Anderson, 4 February 1932; W. B. Anderson to Frederick L. Tillotson, 2 February 1932; [J. Lever Tillotson?] to Ivor Griffiths, 14 March 1935, ZBEN/4/10, BCL.

21 Johanningsmeier, Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace, 49, 61.

22 For instance, Ledger A (short story sales, 1908–1926), 2 (16 May 1908 and 24 July 1913), 3 (February, April, and September 1916), 4 (16 February 1909), 5 (5 April 1912), 6 (26 January 1912), 7 (26 January 1912), 12 (26 January 1912), Modern Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

23 Johanningsmeier, Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace, 48–50. In 1881 a contributor to the Academy remarked: “Messrs. tillotson & son, of Bolton, appear to be carrying out energetically the plan of publishing Novels as ‘feuilletons’ in Newspapers” (Academy, 9 July 1881, quoted in List of Novels and Short Stories by Eminent Novelists & Other Well-Known Authors Specially Written for Newspaper Publication [Bolton, n.d.], ZBEN/4/5, BCL.

24 Blackbourn, David, Fontana History of Germany: The Long Nineteenth Century (London, 1997), 276–78Google Scholar.

25 William Black to W. F. Tillotson, 20 December 1888, ZBEN/4/6, BCL.

26 Law, Serializing Fiction, 77; John Maxwell to W. F. Tillotson, 16 September 1886, ZBEN/4/3/5, BCL; Ledger A, 2 (February 1909), Bodleian; “Majority of the ‘Evening News,’” Bolton Weekly Journal, 24 March 1888, clipping in ZBEN/9/4, BCL.

27 For instance, in 1919 Tillotson sold the film rights to Lady Troubridge's Love the Locksmith for £75 to Milan's Agenzia Literaria Internazionale (contract dated 11 July 1919, agreement book, 1917–19, 73, Bodleian). These agreement books are bound volumes of contracts that do not have any classification codes assigned by the Bodleian.

28 Ledger A: Johannesburg Illustrated Star 17 (1919), 21 (1916) ; Rangoon Times 31 (1915), 32 (1917), 40 (1919), 41 (1919), 43 (1919); Diamond Fields Advertiser 32 (1917), 38 (1919), 42 (1920); Durban Guardian 61 (1925); Madras Daily Express 36 (1921), 52 (1921), 58 (1928), 60 (1928); Madras Times 40 (1919), 42 (1920), 43 (1920), 46 (1920); Hindustan Review 48 (1921); Colombo Sunday Illustrated 59 (1923), 66 (1926); Lloyd's Weekly 50 (1924), 57 (1922), 59 (1924); Shanghai Shipping Register 56 (1922); “Miscellaneous Short Stories” (a register of sales of individual short stories in the same volume as Ledger A—which details sales of bundles of short stories—but with its own pagination), Karachi Daily Gazette 4e (1923), Bodleian. The number in front of each date is a page number in the ledger.

29 Law, Serializing Fiction, 76–77.

30 Ledger A, 71, Bodleian. Tillotson sold short stories in blocks of thirteen or twenty-six—one story a week for three or six months. The company's serials, too, came in thirteen parts in the twentieth century. Its nineteenth-century serials tended to come in twenty-six installments—the length of a three-volume novel, the publishing norm until 1894. See the passage from the Quarterly Review from 1880 quoted in Turner, “Reading for the Masses,” 53.

31 Morrison, Elizabeth, “Serial Fiction in Australian Colonial Newspapers,” in Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and Reading Practices, ed. Jordan, John O. and Patten, Robert L. (Cambridge, 1995), 306–24, 311–12Google Scholar; Johnson-Woods, Toni, Index to Serials in Australian Periodicals and Newspapers: Nineteenth Century (Canberra, 2001), 41Google Scholar.

32 Johnson-Woods, Toni, “Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Australia: Queen of the Colonies,” in Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context, ed. Aeron HaynieMarlene Tromp, Pamela K. Gilbert Marlene Tromp, Pamela K. Gilbert (Albany, NY, 2000), chap. 8, 112–13Google Scholar; Morrison, “Serial Fiction,” 311; Jennifer Carnell and Graham Law, “‘Our Author’: Braddon in the Provincial Weeklies,” in Tromp et al., Beyond Sensation, chap. 9, 138.

33 John Maxwell to W. F. Tillotson, 9 June 1883, 19 April 1882, 13 October 1885, ZBEN/4/3/5, BCL.

34 Maxwell to Tillotson, 17 March 1882, 11 October 1882, ZBEN/4/3/5; see also 15 December 1883, ZBEN/4/3/5, BCL. The sale to the Argus earned Maxwell £75; he had asked Tillotson for £250.

35 William Black to Tillotson & Son, 2 July 1895, ZBEN/4/9; also Thomas Hardy to Sir, 29 July 1881, ZBEN/4/1, BCL.

36 F. Frankfort Moore to Mr Tillotson, 29 April 1897, ZBEN/4/1, BCL.

37 Briggs, Asa, Victorian Cities (1963; Berkeley, 1993), 278Google Scholar; Sala, George Augustus, The Land of the Golden Fleece: George Augustus Sala in Australia and New Zealand in 1885, ed. Dingley, Robert (Canberra, 1995), chap. 3Google Scholar; Davison, Graeme, The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne (Melbourne, 1978)Google Scholar.

38 Maxwell to Tillotson, 19 April 1882, ZBEN/4/3/5, BCL. Compare Hirst, John, The Sentimental Nation: The Making of the Australian Commonwealth (Melbourne, 2000), 29; Sala, Land of the Golden Fleece, 56Google Scholar.

39 Law, Serializing Fiction, 76.

40 Law, Graham, “Savouring of the Australian Soil? On the Sources and Affiliations of Colonial Newspaper Fiction,” Victorian Periodicals Review 37, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 75–97, 81Google Scholar; Gotch, Gordon, Ltd., Gordon & Gotch London: The Story of the G & G Century, 1853–1953 (London, 1953), 1–31Google Scholar.

41 Ledger A, 2 (ca. 1908), Bodleian.

42 ibid., 1 (8 December 1908), 2 (26 June 1909); Scholefield, Guy H., Newspapers in New Zealand (Wellington, 1958), 49Google Scholar.

43 Agreement books, 1907–8 and 1923–25, Bodleian.

44 Agreement book, 1917–19, 107a, Bodleian.

45 Bedford, Randolph, Naught to Thirty-Three (Sydney, 1944), 133Google Scholar.

46 Cambridge, Ada, Thirty Years in Australia (London, 1903), 86, 186; Morrison, “Serial Fiction,” 314Google Scholar.

47 For a taste of the Australian content of these stories, see Law, “Savouring of the Australian Soil,” 83–86.

48 Johnson-Woods, Index, 14.

49 ibid., 40–44.

50 ibid., 63. The decline was less steep in the Australian Town and Country Journal; Australian serials disappeared entirely from the pages of the Sydney Mail in the 1890s (ibid., 14, 75, 68).

51 For an exception, see Johnson-Woods, Index, 48–60. There is some evidence that “many of the smallest Australian weeklies seem to have relied for their fiction material almost exclusively on supplies from Tillotsons distributed in the colonies by Gordon & Gotch” (Law, “Savouring of the Australian Soil,” 81).

52 At this time a guinea per thousand words was the standard minimum pay rate for self-respecting freelance fiction writers in Britain (Christopher Hilliard, To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain [Cambridge, MA, 2006], 27–28).

53 Holcroft, M. H., The Way of a Writer (Whatamongo Bay, New Zealand, 1984), 111Google Scholar.

54 Donaldson, William, Popular Literature in Victorian Scotland: Language, Fiction, and the Press (Aberdeen, 1986), 96, 148–49Google Scholar.

55 See Hirst, Sentimental Nation, esp. chaps. 1 and 2; White, Richard, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity, 1688–1980 (Sydney, 1981), chap. 6Google Scholar; Graeme Davison, “Sydney and the Bush: An Urban Context for the Australian Legend,” Historical Studies 18, no. 71 (October 1978): 191–209.

56 David Syme of the Melbourne Age enviously told his London reporter in 1896 that the rival Argus's correspondent's “notes are read with interest, and afford topics for talk” (Syme to G. C. Levey, 20 February 1896, David Syme letter book D, MS 9751/546, Syme family papers, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne). See also Potter, “Webs, Networks, and Systems,” 64.

57 For Reuters, see Simon J. Potter, News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, 1876–1922 (Oxford, 2003), chap. 4.

58 Tillotson yearly programs for 1911, 1917, 1921, and 1927, Bodleian. These documents, which describe Tillotson's offerings for the years in question, do not have any Bodleian classification codes.

59 Tillotson programs for 1910 and 1915, Bodleian.

60 Tillotson program for 1922, Bodleian. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the prospectuses made no reference to either the empire or the English-speaking world.

61 Hall, Catherine, “Commentary,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Stoler, Ann Laura (Durham, NC, 2006), 452–68, 452CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Bridge, Carl and Fedorowich, Kent, “Mapping the British World,” in The British World: Diaspora, Culture, and Identity, ed. Bridge, Carl and Fedorowich, Kent (London, 2003), 1–15Google Scholar; and Hall, Catherine and Rose, Sonya O., “Introduction: Being at Home with the Empire,” in At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, ed. Hall, Catherine and Rose, Sonya O. (Cambridge, 2006), 1–31, 15–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 Potter, News and the British World, chap. 3.

63 W. E. Gladstone to [W. F. Tillotson], 10 January 1887, ZBEN/4/9, BCL; “Newspaper Families—V. Bolton's Newspaper Family: The Tillotsons and the Evening News: A Pioneer: Four Generations,” Newspaper World, 14 January 1939, 5; George Harwood to Frederic Tillotson, 16 November 1909 (copy, probably made by Frank Singleton as he prepared his history of the company), ZBEN 7/6, BCL.

64 [Brimelow] to Mr [J. L.] Tillotson, 17 October 1911, ZBEN/14/5, BCL; Clarke, P. F., Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge, 1971), 231CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gibbs, Philip, The Pageant of the Years: An Autobiography (London, 1946), 3132Google Scholar; Anonymous, “Article Three,” undated typescript, ZBEN/9/4, BCL.

65 [Brimelow] to Mr [J. L.] Tillotson, 17 October 1911; Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism, 131.

66 “Tillotson & Son Limited: Employees’ Picnic,” article reprinted from Bolton Evening News, 19 August 1912, ZBEN/7/2, BCL.

67 See, e.g., Porter, Absent-Minded Imperialists, 311.

68 Dane Kennedy, review of The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain by Bernard Porter, H-Albion, June 2005, http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=236811125073532.

69 Hall and Rose, “Being at Home with the Empire,” 30.

70 The ledger books of Tillotson's twentieth-century sales of short stories record sales to British newspapers at the top of each page and sales to the colonies in the bottom quarter or third.

71 Law, Serializing Fiction, 119; Jackson, George Newnes and the New Journalism, chap. 1.

72 Lee, Alan J., The Origins of the Popular Press in England, 1855–1914 (London, 1976), 38Google Scholar; see also Donaldson, Popular Literature in Victorian Scotland, 97.

73 Tillotson program for 1894, Bodleian.

74 Keating, Haunted Study, 261–62.

75 Tillotson program for 1912; also Tillotson program for 1932, Bodleian.

76 Tillotson program for 1917, Bodleian.

77 Tillotson program for 1913, Bodleian.

78 Waller, Writers, Readers, and Reputations, 664.

79 Flint, Kate, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford, 1993), 278Google Scholar.

80 Waller, Writers, Readers, and Reputations, 658; Bell, Lady, At the Works: A Study of a Manufacturing Town (1907; London, 1985), 165–66Google Scholar. See also Leigh, John Garrett, “What Do the Masses Read?Economic Review 14, no. 2 (April 1904): 166–77, 171Google Scholar; and Thompson, Andrew, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow, 2005), 52Google Scholar.

81 Rose, Jonathan, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, CT, 2001), 116Google Scholar.

82 In fact Hall Caine did “try Tillotsons”: Caine to Messrs Tillotson, 12 January 1891, ZBEN/4/1, BCL.

83 Cumberland, Gerald, Written in Friendship: A Book of Reminiscences (London, 1923), 6569Google Scholar. Despite his professed horror, Cumberland wrote another serial for Tillotsons in the same year as this memoir was published (contract dated 4 July 1923, agreement book, 1923–25, Bodleian).

84 It may be worth mentioning that the geographical patterns discussed here are not among those identified by Franco Moretti in his discussions of colonial romances and novels set in Britain in his Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London, 1998), chaps. 1–2.

85 Mitton, Writers’ and Artists’ Year Book, 1921, 82; Agnes Herbert, ed., The Writers’ and Artists’ Year Book, 1928: A Directory for Writers, Artists and Photographers (London, n.d.), 92.

86 McDonald, Peter D., British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880–1914 (Cambridge, 1997), 10Google Scholar.

87 ibid., 81.

88 Law, Graham, “Imagined Local Communities: Three Victorian Newspaper Novelists,” in Printing Places: Locations of Book Production and Distribution since 1500, ed. Hinks, John and Armstrong, Catherine (New Castle, DE, 2005), 185203Google Scholar; Joyce, Patrick, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914 (Cambridge, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

89 Law, Serializing Fiction, 190, 146–47.

90 Tillotson program for 1928, Bodleian (describing Louis Tracy's What Would You Have Done?).

91 Hilliard, To Exercise Our Talents, 52.

92 Tillotson program for 1920 (C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson, The Perfume of Eve; Fred M. White, The House on the River); program for 1912 (Richard Duffy, The Diamond Necklace), Bodleian.

93 Tillotson program for 1927, Bodleian.

94 The argument that follows is in contrast to Graham Law's comment, glancing forward to the period following that covered by his own study, that, at the end of the nineteenth century, the subject matter of syndicated fiction shifted to “imperial subjects” (Law, Serializing Fiction, 187, 191).

95 Tillotson program for 1907, Bodleian.

96 Tillotson program for 1910, Bodleian.

97 Tillotson programs for 1923 and 1932, Bodleian.

98 Tillotson programs for 1914 and 1916, Bodleian.

99 Boyd, Kelly, Manliness and the Boys’ Story Paper in Britain: A Cultural History, 1855–1940 (Basingstoke, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 3, deals chiefly with publishers but in the process provides information on boys as readers.

100 Melman, Billie, Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappers and Nymphs (Basingstoke, 1988), 136CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

101 ibid., 139.

102 Leavis, Q. D., Fiction and the Reading Public (London, 1932), 138Google Scholar.

103 Thompson, Empire Strikes Back, 102–3.

104 For another New Zealand client of Tillotson, see Paul Hunt, “Serial Fiction in the Otago Witness, 1851–1906,” Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin 27, nos. 3–4 (2003): 94–103, 101–2.

105 Scholefield, Newspapers in New Zealand, 22, 86–87. On colonial weeklies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Morrison, “Serial Fiction,” 309–10; Chris Tiffin, “Just a Weekly Compendium? The Independence of the Queenslander,” in Books and Empire: Textual Production, Distribution and Consumption in Colonial and Postcolonial Countries, ed. Paul Eggert and Elizabeth Webby, special issue of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin 28, nos. 1–2 (2004): 172–83; Johnson-Woods, “Braddon in Australia,” 112; Holcroft, Way of a Writer, 105–10.

106 Ledger A, 52 (1922), 53 (1922), 58 (1923), 59 (1924), 61 (1924), 62 (1924), 63 (1924), 64 (1924), 65 (1925), 66 (1926), 71 (1926), Bodleian.

107 Tillotson program for 1907, Bodleian.

108 Tillotson program for 1913, Bodleian.

109 Ledger A, 25 (1915) (Phillpotts), 50 (1924) (Phillpotts), 10 (1911) (Marchmont), Bodleian. The Auckland Weekly News of 20 March 1913 carried an installment of Phillpotts's The Lovers; the issue of 15 January 1914 carried three chapters of Marchmont's The Heir to the Throne.

110 F. Frankfort Moore, “A Simple Sum,” Auckland Weekly News, 25 January 1923.

111 Contracts dated 27 July 1917 and 29 June 1918, agreement book, 1917–19, Bodleian. Between 1890 and 1939, according to the British Library's catalogue, Binns published at least ninety-three novels in volume form. Still more may have remained confined to newspaper columns. Binns wrote sometimes under his own name and sometimes as Ben Bolt.

112 Binns undertook to write four serials for Tillotson between July 1917 and July 1919. Contracts dated 27 July 1917, 29 June 1918, and 16 July 1919, agreement book, 1917–1919, Bodleian.

113 Tillotson programs for 1914 and 1916, Bodleian.

114 Bolt, Ben, Diana of the Islands (London, 1931)Google Scholar.

115 Waller, Writers, Readers, and Reputations, 340. See also Thompson, Bonar, Hyde Park Orator (London, 1936), 23Google Scholar.

116 See Gange, David, “Religion and Science in Late Nineteenth-Century British Egyptology,” Historical Journal 49, no. 4 (December 2006): 1083–1103, 1085 n. 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

117 Melman, Women and the Popular Imagination, chap. 8.

118 Mary Fraser, Threads in the Loom, chaps. 1–2, Auckland Weekly News, 8 February 1923.

119 Melman, Women and the Popular Imagination, 121, 123–24.

120 Fairburn, Miles, “The Farmers Take Over (1912–1930),” in The Oxford Illustrated History of New Zealand, ed. Sinclair, Keith (Auckland, 1990), 185–209Google Scholar, is the most penetrating treatment of this episode in New Zealand political history, despite being a chapter of a generalist illustrated history.

121 Nile and Walker, “‘Paternoster Row Machine,’” 8; Johanson, Graeme, A Study of Colonial Editions in Australia, 1843–1972 (Wellington, 2000)Google Scholar.

122 Thompson, Empire Strikes Back, is a notable recent exception. See, e.g., 102–3, 200–201.

123 For instance, MacKenzie, John M., “The Popular Culture of Empire in Britain,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, gen. ed. Louis, Wm. Roger, vol. 4: The Twentieth Century, ed. Brown, Judith M. and Louis, Wm. Roger (Oxford, 1999), 212Google Scholar.

124 On Ruritania, see Melman, Women and the Popular Imagination, 118.