ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Stephen compared the Cornhill with an ‘ancestor’ in the form of the early Edinburgh Review. Such comparisons and evolutionary hypotheses were linked to the expanding range of meanings that came to be associated with the term ‘culture’. The chapter argues that Allen’s popular scientific journalism in the Cornhill was distinctive in the way it promoted an anthropologically materialist sense of culture by means of writing which was playful and at times literary. In the hands of a journalist such as Lewes, the paradoxical findings of evolutionary biology could also be used to estrange readers from their standard perceptions. In praising Allen’s science writing and reflecting on the Cornhill’s superiority over the early Edinburgh, Stephen was shaping an implicit evolutionary narrative about the development of periodical literature which was later articulated in ‘The Evolution of Editors’, published in the National Review in 1896.
