Frequency | Weekly |
---|---|
Publisher | Religious Tract Society |
First issue | January 1, 1852 |
Country | United Kingdom |
Based in | London |
Language | English |
OCLC | 362165421 |
The Leisure Hour was a British general-interest periodical of the Victorian era published weekly from 1852 to 1905. [1] [2] It was the most successful of several popular magazines published by the Religious Tract Society, which produced Christian literature for a wide audience. [1] Each issue mixed multiple genres of fiction and factual stories, historical and topical. [1]
The magazine's title referred to campaigns that had decreased work hours, giving workers extra leisure time. [3] Until 1876, it carried the subtitle A Family Journal of Instruction and Recreation; [4] after that, the subtitle changed to An illustrated magazine for home reading. [5]
Each issue cost one penny and contained 16 pages. [6] The layout typically included approximately six long articles, formatted in two columns per page, and five or six illustrations. The articles were a mix of biographies, poetry, essays, and fiction. Each issue usually started with a piece of serialised fiction. [6]
The creation of the magazine was partly a response to non-religious popular magazines that the Religious Tract Society saw as delivering a "pernicious" morality to the working classes. [1] The ethos of the magazine was guided by Sabbatarianism: the campaign to keep Sunday as a day of rest. [4] It aimed to treat its diverse subjects "in the light of Christian truth". [4] Despite this, The Leisure Hour carried far fewer statements of Christian doctrine than the Society's other publications, [6] and had a greater emphasis on fiction than popular magazines of the time. [7]
Two days before the magazine's launch in 1852, a warehouse fire destroyed the first batch of The Leisure Hour, so replacement copies had to be printed. [3]
The magazine was edited by William Haig Miller until 1858, [5] James Macaulay from 1858 to 1895, [8] and William Stevens from 1895 to 1900. [5] Harold Copping was one of its illustrators. [9] Authors were initially only credited by initials rather than by name, giving the writing a collective rather than individual authority, though naming of authors became more common from the 1870s. [1] In its jubilee issue, published in 1902, the magazine identified 111 authors who had contributed. [1]