ABSTRACT
The London Journal, when it was successful as a mass-market magazine, refused to ally itself with any income group and reached out beyond specific geographical areas. Its complex relation to gender changed as perceived demography and the political landscape mutated. A periodical is most obviously concerned with communication between writers and readers. By the early 1870s, the London Journal, like other major British penny weeklies, was on sale all over the British Empire and North America. Even though the London Journal survived until 1928, it still continued the kind of fiction – and indeed often repeated the very same novels – that had been new in the 1850s, 60s and 70s. Ellegard’s magisterial description of the London Journal in his much-cited monograph, The Readership of the Victorian Periodical Press, starts with a bare recital of a few circulation figures that indicate the periodical’s mass-market status.
