For Love or Money: Popular 1920s Artist Stories in The Royal and The Strand

Abstract

From Hutchinson’s Story Magazine and Cassell’s Magazine to The New Magazine and The Grand Magazine, standard illustrated popular magazines are a neglected but rich source for anyone interested in short fiction. In this essay, I examine how these magazines’ brand identity and editorial practices affected their fictional contents. In order to do so, I explore just one subgenre of short fiction published in these magazines during the early 1920s: the artist story. Through an examination of five humorous artist stories by Morley Roberts, Joyce Cary, Robert Magill, H. C. McNeile and Christine Castle, published in The Strand and The Royal, I argue that these stories were shaped both by the magazine’s intended readership and the publication’s wider stance on art, as indicated by their editorials and accompanying non-fiction pieces.