Arts and Crafts in/of the Century Guild Hobby Horse

The Germ and the OCM were trailblazers in both the little magazine genre and in British Aestheticism, and appeared too early to be able to fall back on a subculture from which to draw the contributors, patrons and even readers to make their enterprise an unmitigated success. The publication of their few issues was, however, a pivotal event in the formation of such a community. Whereas The Germ, though largely unnoticed at the time, had caught the attention of the younger generation of Morris and Burne-Jones and supplied them with themes and aesthetic concepts without which their talents might well have died in the bud, these core members of the OCM Set later in turn assumed as important a role by introducing their own younger followers to a coherent belief system that insisted on an unseverable link between politics and aesthetics. While an interesting but failed attempt to institutionalise Aestheticist art and literature was made through the more inclusively marketed magazine the Dark Blue (1871–3) (see Chapter 6), the remarkable earliness of these two pioneering little magazines is best appreciated if one considers that it took nearly three decades for them to receive a genuine successor, that like them was conceived as the periodical platform of an avant-garde group. The magazines under scrutiny in this chapter, the Century Guild Hobby Horse (1884/6–92) and its successor the Hobby Horse (1893–4), served to consolidate across the literary and artistic fields the notion of a diverse but interconnected Aestheticist avant-garde, and went much further than the little magazines of the 1850s in working out alternatives to common practices of the contemporaneous periodical market through aestheticising their own production methods. Thereby they turned the end product of the printed text into a never-before-seen integrated Total Art project, which would stimulate a whole new fashion in artistic book design and provide the blueprint for Aestheticist little magazines of the genre's coming first heyday in the 1890s.

To understand where these endeavours came from we need to return briefly to the background of the journals discussed in Chapter 1.