The rise of periodical literature for a distinct, and previously underserved, middle-class audience defined literary production in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The weekly periodical format discussed in the previous chapter represents one way publishers met the needs of middle-class readers; the shilling monthly represents another. The shilling monthly of the 1860s came to life under the auspices of two publishing houses: Macmillan & Co. and Smith, Elder. Following in the footsteps of the popular American periodical Harper's Magazine (which was launched in the US in 1850 by the publisher Harper & Brothers), both Alexander Macmillan and George Smith (the heads of their respective publishing houses) planned to publish house journals featuring the authors of the day. Macmillan's decision to publish his new monthly for a shilling inaugurated a new trend in publishing, leading to the birth of the shilling monthly as a genre. While the middle-class weeklies of Dickens and Bradbury and Evans built on and refined the model offered by the popular penny dreadfuls, transforming the weekly into a respectable genre for the middle-class family, the monthlies drew inspiration from the venerable quarterlies of the early nineteenth century. Macmillan's Magazine (hereafter Macmillan's), for example, retained the book reviews, literary essays and political prose that were mainstays in publications like the Edinburgh Review, and the Cornhill's cover visually linked Smith's new endeavour to the quarterlies of an earlier generation. The appropriation of the cultural capital associated with the quarterlies identified the monthlies as a higher class of publication, a status the material construction of the shilling monthlies affirmed. Unlike the cheaper weeklies, the monthlies ‘were of a higher quality, often including lavish illustrations and full-page text layouts rather than the newspaper-style columns and lack of illustrations that characterized Dickens's magazines’ (Phegley 2004: 14). The upscale design of the shilling monthlies combined with their respectable contents positioned them as the perfect literary object for the middle-class family aspiring to demonstrate and hone their literary taste.

Despite their centrality to the periodical culture of the 1860s, the shilling monthlies were not without their critics.