ABSTRACT
the New Quarterly Magazine was a bold experiment. It was the first general periodical written for educated readers which was both a magazine and a quarterly; or, to speak more exactly, a magazine which appeared at quarterly intervals, since all other magazines of this kind were weeklies or monthlies. This meant that it could not publish a novel, as Oswald Crawfurd, the founder and editor, not only realized but, curiously enough, emphasized in his prospectus: “The Magazine will contain … Two or more Tales of considerable length by Eminent Writers. The Tales will invariably be completed in the Numbers in which they appear,” 1 Obviously, this was a reassurance to the reader that he would not have to wait three months to continue a story, but the italics suggest that the single-issue tale was a virtue, a selling-point. One wonders if some readers of the ubiquitous serialized fiction were not finding a month’s delay between chapters I-IV and V-VIII, etc. sufficiently annoying to welcome Crawfurd’s innovation. 2
