INTRODUCTION: NEW READERS AND NEW WRITERS IN JOHN O'LONDON'S WEEKLY

The flag of John O'London's Weekly echoed that of the Illustrated London News, with the paper's title in large letters under a silhouette of the London skyline. With an irregular line not quite enclosing the dome of St Paul's, possibly suggesting a cloud but also imparting a whip-like energy emanating from the silhouette, and with bold teasers for featured articles above it (‘Striking Article by H. G. Wells’ on the first number), the flag suggests a welter of publishing energy emanating from London. One could assume from the title and the flag that John O'London's operated on similar navigational and geographic tropes as the Illustrated London News. And when the paper debuted in 1919, there were similar suggestions of cartographic guidance and imaginative travel. The first edition contained a ‘London in Little’ column – a short piece about obscure corners of London worth visiting – and introduced editor Wilfred Whitten with reference to his reputation as a travel writer. ‘He has been familiar to the great reading public as one of the most genial and vivid writers of our time,’ the introduction begins. ‘He is the author of several delightful books, notably A Londoner's London. As a literary critic and essayist and a frequent writer on the country-side he is equally well-known.’ But this emphasis on Whitten as ‘John o'London’, though it does present the newspaper as an opportunity for imaginative travel, more powerfully personalises the paper, organising the paper around ‘John O'London's’ (semi-fictional) personality, as compared with the more corporate identity of the Illustrated London News. That newspaper's ‘Our Notebook’ column title gestures towards corporate authorship despite its signature by James Payn; indeed, the plural possessive pronoun is endemic to the Illustrated London News, in such repeated phrases as ‘our artist’, ‘our special correspondent’, ‘Our Illustrations’, emphasising the power and reach that the newspaper exercises through collaborative, corporate reportage and authorship.