ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how the format of the Strand Magazine itself purified' experience, particularly in the supposedly threatening realm of crime narratives. The establishment of a community of readers was a key feature of all Newnes's publications. At the turn of the twentieth century, Arthur Conan Doyle took a trip to the Continent. He later wrote of his journey in a letter to the literary editor of the Strand Magazine, remarking that Foreigners used to recognize the English by their check suits. The concept is a development of the work of Stanley Fish on interpretive communities', being a set of readers who bring certain interpretive strategies' to bear on a text. Kate Jackson argues that the creation of a community was at the heart of Newnes's publishing enterprise, and sees this process as operating most obviously in the miscellany Tit-Bits. It is not my intention to restore the response theory elements that Jackson's discussion elides.
