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| Temple Bar (magazine) | |
|---|---|
| Title | Temple Bar |
| Category | Literary magazine |
| Frequency | Monthly |
| Firstdate | 1860 |
| Finaldate | 1906 |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Based | London |
Temple Bar (magazine) was a Victorian and Edwardian monthly literary and contemporary-interest periodical published in London from 1860 until 1906. It combined fiction, poetry, biography, criticism, and reportage, attracting contributors active in the literary circles around Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Alfred Tennyson, and William Makepeace Thackeray. The magazine intersected with institutions and movements such as the Royal Society of Literature, the British Museum, the Bodleian Library, and the expanding periodical culture of the late 19th century.
Founded in 1860, Temple Bar emerged during a flourish of illustrated and text-driven periodicals including Household Words, All the Year Round, The Cornhill Magazine, and Blackwood's Magazine. Its title referenced the historic Temple Bar gateway in the City of London and evoked proximity to legal and literary districts like Fleet Street, The Inns of Court, and Lincoln's Inn. Early proprietors and editors sought to position the periodical between highbrow reviews such as The Edinburgh Review and mass-market weeklies like Punch. Over the decades Temple Bar navigated editorial changes amid the wider consolidation of publishing interests represented by houses such as Smith, Elder & Co. and Chapman & Hall. The magazine survived shifts in readership preferences through the Second Reform Act era and the cultural reconfigurations preceding the Edwardian era before ceasing publication in 1906.
Temple Bar cultivated an editorial profile attentive to narrative fiction, historical essays, and literary criticism, courting contributors active in metropolitan networks surrounding Samuel Smiles, Anthony Trollope, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and Wilkie Collins. Editors and staff maintained correspondence with figures linked to the Royal Academy, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Society of Antiquaries of London, integrating antiquarian interests and contemporary debates. Regular contributors included novelists, poets, dramatists, and reviewers who moved among periodicals such as The Fortnightly Review, The Pall Mall Gazette, The Spectator, and Scribner's Magazine. The magazine published work by authors associated with the Aesthetic Movement, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and literary circles that intersected with personalities like Oscar Wilde, John Ruskin, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Content emphasized serialized fiction, standalone short stories, verse, antiquarian topography, literary criticism, and biographical sketches related to figures in theatre, exploration, and scholarship. Themes often reflected Victorian preoccupations with urban life in areas like Whitechapel and Soho, imperial encounters involving regions such as India, Egypt, and South Africa, and historical retrospectives on events like the Napoleonic Wars and the Crimean War. Cultural pieces engaged with theatrical developments at venues such as Drury Lane, The Haymarket Theatre, and Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, while travel writing connected to routes via the Great Western Railway, the London and North Western Railway, and steamship lines to Ceylon and Australia. Scholarly notes drew on manuscript holdings at institutions including the British Library, the Bodleian Library, and the National Archives.
Published monthly, Temple Bar combined text with occasional wood-engraved illustrations and frontispieces produced by artists who also worked for The Graphic, The Illustrated London News, and Cassell's Magazine. The magazine's physical format ranged from duodecimo to octavo sizes across different proprietors, with volumes often issued annually. Advertising pages reflected commercial ties to publishers, theatrical managements, bookshops on Paternoster Row and Charing Cross Road, and patent-medicine vendors prominent in Victorian periodicals. Binding and subscription practices paralleled those of contemporaries such as Bentley's Miscellany and Longman's Magazine, and collected volumes were acquired by collectors with interests in authors catalogued in the Dictionary of National Biography.
Contemporaries reviewed Temple Bar in journals like The Athenaeum, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Saturday Review, which situated the magazine within debates about taste championed by critics such as Henry James and Matthew Arnold. Its serialized fiction and essays influenced popular reception of writers later canonized alongside Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and Rudyard Kipling. Library holdings and citation in bibliographies indicate Temple Bar served as a venue for early appearances of work by figures who later contributed to the modern novel and dramatic forms associated with George Bernard Shaw and Noël Coward. The magazine's archival traces inform studies of periodical networks, metropolitan readerships, and the commercial dynamics of Victorian publishing dominated by firms like Harper & Brothers and Macmillan Publishers.
Temple Bar issued notable serializations and special numbers that featured early installments by novelists linked to Anthony Trollope's circle and essays on antiquarian discoveries comparable to those in Archaeologia. Serial fiction in its pages anticipated motifs later central to works by Thomas Hardy, Wilkie Collins, and George Gissing, while occasional issues collected biographical essays on figures such as Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, and Horace Walpole. Special issues coincided with public events like royal anniversaries for Queen Victoria and explorations associated with Captain James Cook-related commemorations. The magazine's serial publications and contributions remain catalogued in major research libraries including the British Library and the Bodleian Library.
Category:Defunct literary magazines published in the United Kingdom