Patterns of Authorship in Chambers’s Journal during the editorship of James Payn, 1858-1874

I am delighted to have received a Curran Fellowship for 2025-25 for a small project to explore the authorship of the contributions to the popular weekly miscellany Chambers’s Journal in a key period of its development from the late 1850s to the early 1870s, when it was edited by James Payn (1830-1898). Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal – from 1854 Chambers’s Journal – was, alongside Household Words and Once a Week, perhaps the most important of the Victorian miscellaneous weeklies. The broad outlines of its history are well-known, but there has been relatively little detailed appraisal of its history with the exception of the material in Sue Thomas’s valuable Chambers’s Journal, 1854-1910. Indexes to Fiction, (Victorian Fiction Research Guides 17, 1989).

James Payn, the journalist and popular novelist is also an interesting figure, probably best known for his editorship of the Cornhill Magazine in succession to Leslie Stephen, but an influential presence in London literary circles at least from the early 1860s. Smoking incessantly, eschewing all exercise, working long hours at the Chambers’s office, he was when the mood took him, and amongst friends, a really brilliant talker. He was also one of the most successful of that group of popular novelists whose writings although very widely read when published, have largely passed out of view, and a prolific journalist and memoirist in his own right.

Payn left no personal papers, and although fragments of his notoriously carelessly written correspondence survives in repositories across the world, this mostly dates from the Cornhill period, and to the publication of his own popular fiction. But he was clearly an influential editor, remembered by several later-Victorian authors, including the Boy’s Own adventure novelist Gordon Stables [and] as a key influence and encouragement. By using a number of correspondence files in the Chambers’ papers at the National Library of Scotland, and especially by analyzing the composition of the authorship of contributions to the Journal during his editorship, it is hoped to illuminate the role of the editor in the mid-Victorian periodical press, and the composition of the contributors to a key popular magazine.