ABSTRACT
William Tinsley’s thoughts began to turn seriously to the idea of owning a magazine soon after Edward Thomas’s death. As far as Edmund Yates was concerned Tinsleys’ Magazine had by then been long forgotten, and the editor’s chair assumed by Tinsley himself. In 1981 a somewhat erratic account of the progress of the magazine, and indeed of the progress of the firm of Tinsley Brothers, was published by Sue Thomas in her Introduction to ‘Tinsleys’ Magazine, a Victorian Fiction Research Guide’. Thomas also wrote that when Hardy approached Tinsley with the news that ‘Leslie Stephen had offered him £300 for his fourth novel, Tinsley was unwilling to better the offer’. Mirth was on sale at sixpence a month, and after seven issues Byron’s health had declined so much that he wrote to Tinsley regretting that he ‘felt he had to withdraw from any further risk in the publication’ and asked for Tinsley to make up the account.
