Mark J. Noonan's insightful volume offers a penetrating view of one of the most important publications of the American Gilded Age. Using clear, lucid prose, Noonan positions the monthly literary and lifestyle periodical The Century Illustrated at the intersection of a multitude of broader intellectual currents and socioeconomic developments, including industrialization, Victorianism, the genteel tradition, literary realism and idealism, and post-Civil War American nationalism. Grounded in thorough readings of The Century's contents and a broad base of secondary sources, Noonan's work is an admirable contribution to the burgeoning field of periodical studies.

Achieving prominence at the moment when revolutions in communications and transportation helped create a national media market, the editors of The Century (titled Scribner's Monthly from 1870 to 1881) saw their magazine as a vehicle for the genteel values of self-improvement, rigid morality, and good taste. Their authors therefore extolled sobriety and the middle-class family while denigrating African Americans and immigrants who stood outside the Victorian ethos. Also pivotal to The Century's mission was its desire to heal sectional wounds lingering from the Civil War. Romanticized remembrances of the antebellum South and tales of former slaves yearning for their masters expanded the magazine's popularity in the South while offering a path to national unity through a commitment to white, middle-class supremacy and a common embrace of industrial capitalism.

As Noonan establishes, however, The Century's editors' inability to bar dissenting voices and unsettling social complexities from their pages muddied their clear ideological vision. The female authors whose eloquence buoyed the publication's fortunes often questioned middle-class gender conventions or highlighted socioeconomic inequalities. References to racial injustice blurred glamorized pictures of the South. Realist authors bent on presenting unkind social truths offered jarring counterpoints to idealist pieces that revelled in higher principles and spiritual nobility. Lurking behind these disputes was The Century's most pervasive conflict – its desire to uplift versus its need to make a profit. Daring writing styles, thematic variety, and mild titillation enthralled subscribers while straying from the editors' righteous intentions.

Exactly how the magazine's overseers reconciled the often clashing virtues of money and morality perhaps merits a more substantial treatment here. Indeed, throughout Noonan could provide additional insight into the coexistence of varying strands within mainstream American culture and do more to illuminate the difficulties inherent in attempting to present a fairly stable and narrow message to a rapidly modernizing audience. One also wishes the author had done more to, as he puts it, “examine the complete contents of periodicals as a whole” (x), as discussions of the publication's advertisements and regular nonfiction departments take a backseat to dissections of its fiction. Finally, Noonan's work suffers from a shortage of primary sources beyond The Century itself. If available – by no means a certainty – corporate records, additional documentary material from authors and editors, and contemporary readers' responses to the stories Noonan highlights would bolster his conclusions while giving the reader a clearer view of the magazine's behind-the-scenes workings.

These quibbles aside, there is much to recommend in this book. Reading The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine offers a compelling look into the world of writers, editors, and mass communications at a transformative moment in American history. Its enormous cast of characters ranges from the famous (Joel Chandler Harris, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain) to the obscure (George Washington Cable and Mary Mapes Dodge, to say nothing of The Century's primary editors, Josiah Holland and Richard Gilder). Its extensive summaries and interesting analyses of some of the most widely read contributions to late nineteenth-century literature shed new light on the literary culture of a society balancing the uncertain potential of an industrialized, urbanized future with the simplicity and security of its idealized past. Both historians and literary scholars will benefit from Noonan's endeavour.