The Strand Magazine in Time

The lives of Arthur Conan Doyle and the Strand Magazine were so entwined that the majority of notices marking their respective deaths, twenty years apart, seemed incapable of referring to one without the other. This book offers a reading of the magazine and its most famous author through the lens of their relationship and the footprints that they left elsewhere upon British culture. Ultimately, it will argue that the interdependence of Conan Doyle and the Strand 's reputations was not an arbitrary occurrence, but instead the symptom of a series of shifts in the production and consumption of popular culture. The story of their relationship can illuminate these changes and further explain how author and publication sought to shepherd a determinedly Victorian audience through the turbulence of the early twentieth century. Reading a single, middlebrow magazine like the Strand over this period affords the opportunity to observe a series of slow transformations in literary form, ideology, cultural attitudes and social values. Away from the white heat of artistic innovation, we can discover how a generation of Victorians acclimatised to the altered realities of the twentieth century.

Beyond Sherlock Holmes, the Strand has survived in the popular imagination as, in the words of Mike Ashley, a ‘pot-pourri of human-interest snippets, fairly useless knowledge and fiction aimed at lower-middle class and “aspiring” working-class readers’.