Long before British newspapers included weekend magazine sections, they carried fiction and other diversions in their Saturday supplements. In the 1870s and 1880s, newspapers outside London commonly bought their fiction from syndicates that had grown out of two other provincial newspapers, the Sheffield Daily Telegraph and the Bolton Evening News. The Bolton firm of Tillotson also dealt extensively with the empire. A chapter of a serialized melodrama, cast in stereotype or printed on strips of paper and ready to be slotted into newspapers in towns and countries the author had never seen, is as good a metaphor of cultural standardization as any. While historians of modern Britain are familiar with the tradition of cultural pessimism that decried the evils of standardization, we know rather less about the kinds of decisions involved in assembling and promoting a list of fiction that could be offered to readers throughout—and beyond—Britain.Footnote ¹ What kind of fiction served that purpose at a time when the newspaper and periodical market was becoming more specialized, targeted at particular demographics? To what extent did judgments made on the basis of British audiences apply to their colonial counterparts? What impact did international syndication have on local literary cultures?

This article is an attempt to answer these questions, which are, among other things, questions about the relationship between “center” and “periphery” in the culture industry. At least in the early decades of fiction syndication, the “centers” of the industry were “metropolitan” only from the colonies’ point of view. Richard Price has lamented that what the “oft-stated objective of the new imperial history to decenter the metropole … means in actual historical practice is seldom spelled out.”Footnote ² However, within the past five to ten years, a number of empirically grounded works have posited new ways of envisioning the components and circuits of the empire by focusing on connections between colonies.Footnote ³ The province-colony axis has received less attention, even by imperial historians critiquing assumptions of a coherent British nation and attendant Island Story.Footnote ⁴ Yet, over the years, our conception of the nature of imperial relationships has been nuanced by studies that bring colonies into the same analytic frame as “peripheries” within the British Isles—not only Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, but also the English provinces. Exchanges between provinces and colonies are perhaps most readily traced in the spheres of popular politics (as in the work of Catherine Hall and Kathleen Wilson), migration patterns, and economic history (such as the struggles over cotton among the Lancashire textile lobby, the British government, the Government of India, and Indian manufacturers).Footnote ⁵

In the fields of media history and publishing history, London's dominance has meant that there are fewer connections to trace. Bolton is an unlikely setting for an international publishing operation: the early stages of the fiction syndication industry are an exception to the centripetal development of British media and publishing concerns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote ⁶ Indeed, Simon J. Potter has recently used the case of the increasing coordination of newspapers and wire services to challenge those, such as Tony Ballantyne and Alan Lester, who have highlighted the interpretative possibilities of seeing the empire in terms of “networks” or “webs,” emphasizing the provisional and informal character of many imperial connections.Footnote ⁷ Potter argues that, although some imperial relationships were “networked” and rickety, others, and perhaps a majority after the mid-nineteenth century, were more formalized “systems”—the mass media being a prime example.Footnote ⁸ Fiction syndication was unusual not only in that it was, for at least two decades, headquartered in Bolton and Sheffield but also because its imperial operations were tenuous and shaky “networks” in an industry that was, for the most part, “systematized.”

The account that follows is based on the Bolton syndication company Tillotson, whose business records are scrappy but rich and a rarity among companies that published ephemera.Footnote ⁹ These archives have been mined before by historians of Victorian publishing, such as Graham Law, Michael Turner, and Charles Johanningsmeier, and this article is indebted to their work.Footnote ¹⁰ Their research, however, focuses on the nineteenth century, while the Tillotson syndication business survived into the 1930s. Its fiction roster testifies to the persistence of popular Victorian genres into the quite different media environment and literary culture of the interwar period.Footnote ¹¹ For this reason, my discussion of the fiction Tillotson offered and the editorial policy underpinning its selections focuses on the first three decades of the twentieth century. However, my treatment of the ways those involved regarded syndication as an “imperial” enterprise and the impact on colonial literary cultures (subjects not examined so extensively by previous scholars) encompasses the lifespan of the company, from the early 1870s to the early 1930s. The first half of the article outlines the syndicate's overseas trade and argues that syndicated fiction constrained, though by no means extinguished, opportunities for colonial authors for reasons that have more to do with market structures than imperial identities. I also argue that those in charge of the business were not self-conscious imperial patriots but took the colonies for granted as part of the landscape of British commerce. As such they fail Bernard Porter's provocative test for genuine “imperialism”—dealing with the empire as an end in itself rather than in conjunction with other goals (such as profit)—but nevertheless exemplify a common and important form of engagement with the colonies.Footnote ¹² Tillotson's main imperial market was Australia and New Zealand. The primacy of Australasia in this instance owes more to the size and wealth of Melbourne as a market and regional entrepôt than it does to the peculiarities of settler colonies collectively; Tillotson's sales to South Africa did not eclipse those to English-language newspapers in India and Shanghai.

In the second half of the article, I approach the subject of the colonial, the provincial, and the metropolitan from a different angle—that of the imaginative geography of syndicated fiction. The “mighty Paternoster Row Machine” of British publishing did not dominate newspaper syndication, at least for a time, but an imagined London loomed large in the syndicates’ corpus of fiction.Footnote ¹³ Tillotson sold its nonmetropolitan clients stories of metropolitan and country-house glamour and intrigue. Late Victorian “sensation fiction,” the work of Mary Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and their imitators and heirs, worked for Tillotson because of the breadth of its appeal. Unlike many newspaper and magazine companies of the late nineteenth century that sought national audiences defined by gender or class, Tillotson remained committed to audiences defined by region. It marketed the same fiction to nearly all its clients and thus had to ensure that its wares were acceptable to any local newspaper's readership. Among other things, that required careful management of the role of imperial settings in its fiction. And, of course, this strategy meant avoiding stories that appealed primarily or exclusively to class- or gender-specific markets. However, genres that, in Britain, were thought of as the preserve of working-class readers could appeal more widely in a colonial context. Local editors and readers could judge “stereotyped” material differently from the British syndicates that sold it; a degree of uniformity in reading matter did not entail a degree of uniformity in reading culture.

William Frederic Tillotson's syndication business grew out of the stable of penny weekly newspapers for Lancashire towns that he ran in tandem with the Bolton Evening News. The flagship weekly was the Bolton Weekly Journal, founded in 1871. Copy from the Bolton paper formed the core of the content of the other Lancashire weeklies, to which would be added local news specific to each town.Footnote ¹⁴ These papers also carried fiction. The combined circulation of the Lancashire weeklies was insufficient to cover the expense of buying serial rights from well-known authors, so Tillotson began to sell serials to newspapers further afield to cover his costs.Footnote ¹⁵ What began as an adjunct to the Lancashire journals became a business unit in its own right, known variously over the years as the Fiction Department and the Newspaper Literature Bureau. Representatives of the company wrote to famous authors soliciting novels and short stories.Footnote ¹⁶ Some deals were negotiated by mail; others were concluded in person by Robert Sheppard, who worked as a traveler for the Fiction Department and later headed it.Footnote ¹⁷

The provincial market was open to smaller operators such as Tillotson and W. C. Leng of the Sheffield Daily Telegraph because the London heavyweights of the publishing industry took little interest in it. Tillotson's Fiction Department earned its best profits in the 1870s and 1880s, after which it competed against more syndicates and against the succession of monthly magazines for the middle class launched in the 1890s.Footnote ¹⁸ In the mid-1920s, when the serial rights to one well-known author's latest novel fetched £12,000, Tillotson paid a total of £1,363 for the twelve serials in its program for 1925. It had, as Turner remarks, “fallen a long way out of the top league.”Footnote ¹⁹ At the time, the Fiction Department still paid its way within Tillotson's overall enterprise, but in 1935 the directors sold it off, accepting an offer from a Fleet Street syndicating firm whose main product was features.Footnote ²⁰

Although British newspapers outside London were the mainstays of Tillotson's clientele, the firm also succeeded in overseas sales. Newspaper syndicates were an important feature of the American literary marketplace in the 1880s and 1890s: yet, as Johanningsmeier shows in his study of American syndication, it was Tillotson that pioneered the business in the United States.Footnote ²¹ Tillotson's American business dwindled after the 1880s, but it continued to sell small numbers of short stories each year to the New York publisher Edward Clode, who sold them on to destinations that included the Chicago Tribune and the Buffalo Express.Footnote ²² In the nineteenth century, the Bolton company also sold translation rights to firms in Germany, France, Spain, and Italy. The very idea of syndicating fiction in newspapers came from the feuilleton sections to be found first in French newspapers and then in German ones.Footnote ²³ Tillotson's most important continental market was Germany, with its large and highly literate population, well-developed press, and substantial general interest bourgeois periodicals.Footnote ²⁴ Authors as well as publishers relished the thought of success in that market. In 1888, William Black tried to interest W. F. Tillotson in the translation rights to a story that “ought to do very well for translation into the German. It is all about the theatrical and musical life in London—with a house-party in a shooting box in the Highlands coming in as an interlude.”Footnote ²⁵ Tillotson's German trade was substantial enough for the company to open a Berlin office in the late 1880s and “employ German translators and compositors in Bolton,” one of whom maintained connections with Tillotson after his return to Germany, buying short stories to publish in Berlin or sell on.Footnote ²⁶ This side of Tillotson's business is frustratingly underdocumented, but it appears that, aside from some windfalls, the company's continental European trade was not substantial after the turn of the century.Footnote ²⁷

As Tillotson's American and continental European business dwindled, the company was pushed back toward its core business, syndicating fiction to the British provinces and, to a lesser extent, the colonies. Among the newspapers buying fiction from Tillotson in the twentieth century were the Johannesburg Illustrated Star, the Kimberley Diamond Fields Advertiser, the Durban Guardian, the Madras Daily Express, the Madras Times, the Hindustan Review, the Karachi Daily Gazette, the Rangoon Times, the Colombo Sunday Illustrated, Lloyd's Weekly of Shanghai, and the Shanghai Shipping Register.Footnote ²⁸ However, as Graham Law observes with regard to the company's nineteenth-century serial sales, it was “the market in Australia and New Zealand” that was “the centre of the Bolton agency's Colonial ventures.” “Arrangements with journals in India, in the Cape, and in other parts of the Empire seem to have been less frequent, commanded relatively small payments, and … tended to involve only a single major journal,” whereas the Australasian market “represented a steady if unspectacular source of income.”Footnote ²⁹ Law's assessment applies equally to the firm's twentieth-century trade in short stories. Australian and New Zealand newspapers predominate among Tillotson's imperial clients in the short fiction ledgers. To judge from these accounts, colonial sales accounted for about a fifth of the Fiction Department's revenue in the Edwardian period and the 1920s. Different papers paid different rates, presumably according to their estimated circulation. For one “season” of thirteen stories in 1926, for instance, the highest fee was 18 guineas, paid by the Yorkshire Weekly Post. For the same stories, the Liverpool Weekly Post, the Nottingham Guardian, and the Glasgow Evening Citizen paid £17.10. The Auckland Weekly News paid £10, the same as the Coventry Standard did.Footnote ³⁰

Neither Tillotson nor its Sheffield competitor was a pioneer in selling serial fiction to Australasia. Before the syndicates entered the market, individual authors were making deals with colonial editors or their London representatives.Footnote ³¹ Mary Braddon, whose run of extravagant success as a novelist began in 1861 with Lady Audley's Secret, was being published in Melbourne before the syndicates were players in the Australian market.Footnote ³² Braddon's business affairs were managed by John Maxwell, her publisher and de facto husband. Maxwell wanted someone to handle the republication of his wife's novels outside London, and, in 1873, he went into a loose and volatile partnership with W. F. Tillotson, making Braddon the star author of the new syndicate. Maxwell retained a keen interest in the Australasian market.Footnote ³³ On one occasion, after Maxwell had agreed to accept £750 for the serialization rights to Braddon's next novel, Tillotson asked him to sign over the Australasian rights. Maxwell asked for more money, and when Tillotson refused, Maxwell sold the Australasian serial rights by himself to the Melbourne Argus.Footnote ³⁴ Tillotson appears to have tried sometimes to acquire Australasian rights together with British rights without offering additional payment for them. Not only Maxwell but also William Black demanded more money for the inclusion of Australasian rights: “With regard to Australasia: if you cannot make me an offer of £100 for that little continent, please delete [the appropriate part of the contract].”Footnote ³⁵ F. Frankfort Moore, long a mainstay of the Tillotson list, wrote in 1897 to thank the firm for accommodating a change in the appearance of his serial in an Australian paper and expressed the hope that “the acceptance of any future serial” of his would now be “certain in Australia.”Footnote ³⁶ If the Australasian market was a comparatively small one for British authors, it was clearly not beneath their consideration. The speed and extent of Melbourne's growth prompted some to call it “the Chicago of the South.” By the end of the nineteenth century, its population exceeded half a million, more than double Toronto’s. In 1891 its ratable value was the third highest of any city in the empire after London and Glasgow.Footnote ³⁷

When Tillotson sought Australasian serial rights from Maxwell, he actually asked for the rights to the peculiar aggregate of “Australia; Australasia; New Zealand; Queensland; and the Polynesian Islands.”Footnote ³⁸ The colony of Queensland is counted three times here; the comment hints at the “unsystematized” quality of the syndication trade and at the actual and metaphorical distance between Bolton and the South Pacific. Given this distance, the roster of Australasian clients that Tillotson maintained is quite impressive, certainly so after 1900. In the nineteenth century, it appears to have been common practice to deal only with a single major colonial newspaper, leaving that newspaper free to sell subsidiary serial rights on to other journals in Australasia.Footnote ³⁹ Tillotson also appears to have syndicated fiction to small local newspapers through Gordon & Gotch, the periodical and book distribution company of imperial reach founded in Melbourne that, by 1870, had offices there, in Sydney, and in London.Footnote ⁴⁰ In the twentieth century, Tillotson dealt directly with a number of papers in what was now, after Australian federation, the state of Victoria that were much less weighty than the Melbourne dailies: the Ballarat Star, the Melbourne Weekly Times, and Weigel's Journal of Fashion. It also sold short fiction to multiple Sydney papers and to the Courier-Mail and Queenslander in Brisbane. Elsewhere in Australia, Tillotson fiction sold to papers in Adelaide, Launceston, Hobart, and Townsville; the Perth Western Mail was a regular client with whom Tillotson worked out a special pricing deal.Footnote ⁴¹ In New Zealand, too, the company had buyers in the larger towns and also more obscure clients that it may well have discovered through the Australasian Newspaper Directory or regional contacts. For instance, in December 1908 and June 1909, Tillotson sold two packages of short fiction, each for £2.10, to the Wanganui Chronicle, the newspaper of a small regional center that was still to some extent a frontier town in the first decade of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁴² Queensland was confusing enough: who in Britain knew where Wanganui was?

The imperial traffic tended to run in one direction. The Tillotson Fiction Department sold British material to the colonies without doing much to introduce colonial voices to British audiences. Every author who signed a contract for a serial or other series with Tillotson in 1907 was domiciled in Britain. Of the twenty-two authors in the volume of contracts covering the years 1923–25, only two were based outside Britain; both were Americans.Footnote ⁴³ Tillotson traded on the names of its authors, and it was hard to build a profile as an author from the remote parts of the empire, as any colonial writer bound for London could have testified. One of the few colonials on Tillotson's serial roster in the twentieth century, Miss M. L. Chalmers of Auckland, was paid £30 for a serial during the First World War—an unusually low sum by Tillotson's standards.Footnote ⁴⁴

Moreover, newspaper fiction imported from Britain could inhibit colonial writers’ opportunities for publication. Working as a journalist in Melbourne in the late 1880s, Randolph Bedford tried freelancing to supplement his income but found that “the Australian writer had little chance in Australia. If he were a story or serial writer he found that the big Australian dailies bought their serials from London, paying £10 or so for the rights to a serial running into sixty to one hundred thousand words.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Beginning in the early 1870s, Ada Cambridge, a clergyman's wife living in rural and small-town parishes, enjoyed a “little boom on the Australian press,” selling romances set in Melbourne society and pastoralists’ homesteads. Then, in the late 1880s, a British syndicate “took possession of the fiction columns” of Melbourne's newspapers, bringing her run of good luck to an end.Footnote ⁴⁶

Toni Johnson-Woods's index of serials in nineteenth-century Australian newspapers makes it possible to assess these claims by disappointed authors. Johnson-Woods's data show that the proportion (and actual number) of serials of Australian origin published in the weekly papers associated with capital-city dailies declined after the 1880s, while the volume of imported serials held steady or increased.Footnote ⁴⁷ The Australasian, where Ada Cambridge got her break, carried thirteen Australian serials and twenty-one from overseas (mostly from Britain) in the 1880s; in the 1890s, the number of foreign serials remained at twenty-one, while the number of Australian stories dropped to four.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the 1870s, approximately 21 percent of the Melbourne Leader's serials were of Australian origin; in the 1880s the proportion was 23 percent, but in the 1890s it dropped to 10 percent. In the 1890s, the Leader carried five Australian serials and forty-six from overseas.Footnote ⁴⁹ The Queenslander carried eight local and fifteen British serials in the 1880s; the following decade, it carried only three Australian serials, one American serial, and twenty-six British serials.Footnote ⁵⁰ Many Australian publications carried the occasional serial from the United States, but the bulk of the imported fiction came from Britain—from Tillotson and its rivals.Footnote ⁵¹ Thus, while it would be too much to say that British syndicated fiction locked local writers out of the fiction columns of the Australian press, it was indeed harder for an Australian writer to get a serial published in a colonial newspaper after the 1880s.

Editors’ access to syndicated material could also disadvantage colonial writers in ways less dramatic than outright exclusion. When M. H. Holcroft became subeditor of the Christchurch Weekly Press in the 1920s, he discovered that it “had to use syndicated stories from England, available at a guinea each.” This did not stop the Weekly Press from carrying local writing, but the paper's access to cheap syndicated material kept down the payments it offered to New Zealanders.Footnote ⁵² “Management could not be made to understand why local writers should receive more, so that a guinea was all we could pay.”Footnote ⁵³ The pattern was similar on another “periphery.” In the late nineteenth century, Scottish writers who published fiction in local newspapers were pressed into competing with authors of national stature such as Braddon and Wilkie Collins. As William Donaldson writes: “As mass-produced stereotyped copy became available in quantity, the flow of distinctive original writing faltered and imported agency fiction bought on the cheap from English syndicates became increasingly common.”Footnote ⁵⁴

The relative cheapness of syndicated fiction from Britain was one of the things that commended it to colonial editors. Fiction from Britain was also, of course, the product of a literary industry vastly more competitive than any colonial city's local scene. These considerations, rather than any increase in colonial hunger for things British, explain the growing preponderance of British material in the fiction columns of Australian papers; the fiction columns of the 1890s do not reflect the Australian cultural nationalism of the decade before federation in 1901.Footnote ⁵⁵ Furthermore, Australian (and New Zealand) newspapers did not present their fiction as an engine of Britishness. Colonial readers may well have felt that, in reading Miss Braddon's latest novel, they were keeping up with what all London was talking about, but this was not how newspapers pitched fiction to them. Australasian newspapers tended, instead, to promote a sense of connectedness to contemporary Britain through human interest stories or letters of “London gossip.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Did the owners and staff of the Tillotson syndicate see their business as helping maintain the cultural bonds of empire, as Reuters’ directors did?Footnote ⁵⁷ In its promotional material, Tillotson claimed the patronage of “newspapers at home and throughout the Empire,” papers “in every part of the British Empire,” “nearly all the leading weeklies throughout the United Kingdom,” “most of the principal newspapers of the overseas Dominions,” and newspapers in “the British realm at home and overseas.”Footnote ⁵⁸ But in some years during the same period as the examples quoted here, the 1910s and 1920s, they referred more generally to “English-speaking lands” and claimed an “intimate connection between ourselves and newspaper proprietors and editors throughout the English-speaking world.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Recalling the height of the firm's American trade long after it had passed, the 1922 brochure stated that (after 1871) “not only throughout the British Empire, but throughout the United States, the name of Tillotson became known to every important newspaper editor.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Tillotson thus moved back and forth between claims of imperial reach and claims of engagement with the broader Anglophone community that is now, as Catherine Hall wryly notes, “sometimes called, not always with the degree of distance and irony one might hope for, ‘the British world.’”Footnote ⁶¹ The company did not assert specifically imperial credentials nor did it claim that its syndication enterprise conduced to stronger imperial ties, in contrast with those “constructive imperialists” campaigning for stronger press and wire-service links in the cause of imperial unity whom Potter examines in News and the British World.Footnote ⁶²

These “constructive imperialists” were Tories and Liberal Unionists, not Free Traders and Home Rulers. The members of the Tillotson family were active Lancashire Liberals.Footnote ⁶³ So were some of their staff, though Philip Gibbs, later a prominent Conservative commentator, was the Fiction Department's editor from 1900 to 1902.Footnote ⁶⁴ The Bolton Evening News was consistently Liberal, and while “all sensible men” in local Conservative circles spoke to its reporters, a handful who clearly saw the paper as the enemy did not—“Ald. Horridge and some of the ‘young bloods,’ chiefly Tariff Reformers,” as the editor and managing director William Brimelow identified them in 1911.Footnote ⁶⁵ The Bolton Evening News report of Brimelow's speech at the company picnic in 1912 paraphrased him as saying rather jadedly that Britons “were constantly being told in these days that they must think and speak about everybody and everything in terms of Empire.”Footnote ⁶⁶ It seems most likely that the company kept up its interest in imperial markets because its trade with the colonies remained profitable rather than because its directors saw that trade as contributing to a worthwhile imperial project.

By Bernard Porter's criteria, the Tillotson family, Brimelow, and the rest of the staff of the fiction syndicate would not count as “imperialists.” Arguing against historians who regard the empire as constitutive of British culture, Porter is unwilling to characterize involvement with the colonies as “imperialist” unless it is driven by a faith in the imperial project as an end in itself.Footnote ⁶⁷ The only genuine imperialists are those whose imperial faith is not ancillary to other commitments, such as Christianity or trade. As Dane Kennedy points out, Porter's index entry for “imperialists” reads: “See zealots.” The “zealots” in question are people such as Joseph Chamberlain, Alfred Milner, and Leo Amery.Footnote ⁶⁸ This approach to the place of imperialism in British culture rules out of consideration cases such as Tillotson’s—a company not animated by imperial patriotism or zeal but conscious of the empire as a market and ready to do business with it. The Tillotsons and their staff were not “absent-minded imperialists”: it was their hearts, not their minds, that the empire had little hold on. The fact that a medium-sized Lancashire business whose main markets were domestic and provincial could trade consistently with the settler colonies without much fanfare is an indication of how much a part of the fabric of British commerce and culture the empire was. It is also an instance of what Hall and Sonya Rose have called “the ‘taken-for-grantedness’ of empire.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Tillotson did not approach its colonial clients radically differently from its provincial ones. With an exception that will be discussed below, the company did not maintain separate rosters of material to offer its clients in different markets, and the choice of serials, stories, and other matter that colonial editors could purchase from Tillotson was predetermined by the company's measure of its primary clientele, editors in the English provinces and in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.Footnote ⁷⁰ Law has argued persuasively that there were two paths available in the 1880s for a provincial syndicate: continuing to cater to regional audiences by selling fiction to other provincial newspapers, or—the way of the future—courting a national audience, trading readerships divided along regional lines for audiences divided along lines of class or gender. Tillotson's early rival, the Leng family of Sheffield, took the latter course. In the 1880s, C. D. Leng made plans to turn the Sheffield Daily Telegraph's Saturday supplement into a penny paper aimed at a national readership. The news was to be dropped, the serials and short stories would remain, and the rest of the content would consist of competitions, anecdotes, and other snippets after the fashion of George Newnes's Tit-Bits, which had been launched in 1881.Footnote ⁷¹ Repackaged in 1887 as the Weekly Telegraph, the old Saturday supplement developed into a magazine with a large national circulation, and as the Weekly Telegraph grew the company apparently let its syndication work slide. By contrast, provincial newspapers remained Tillotson's primary focus, which meant that the Bolton firm would find its share of the market pinched as the provincial press came under increasing pressure in the twentieth century. Dealing especially with provincial weekly papers committed Tillotson to a relatively heterogeneous audience: local weeklies “tended to have more of a community readership” that cut across classes than daily newspapers did.Footnote ⁷²

The strategy of piecing together discrete regional audiences meant that Tillotson's offerings had to be congenial to different demographics. It made sense, then, that Tillotson's 1894 prospectus promised that its fiction possessed “universal acceptability.”Footnote ⁷³ (The program used the phrase twice.) The publicists were keen to stress that the stories were “suitable for the family circle”—the company was understandably sensitive to anything morally doubtful, and it refused to publish Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D’Urbervilles on receiving the first portion of it.Footnote ⁷⁴ However, Tillotson's publicists also spoke of “universal acceptability” outside the context of morality. The syndicate's fiction had to appeal to the different kinds of reader in each home. As one brochure claimed, the “newspaper serial … is the one feature of common interest to every member of the home circle.” A serial “ensures that the busy housewife”—as well, presumably, as the paterfamilias—“will pick up the paper, and therefore is of advertising value.”Footnote ⁷⁵ At a time when “men” was casually used as a synonym for “people,” Tillotson's publicity material persistently and conspicuously spoke of “men and women.” The foreword to the 1915 fiction program, for instance, proposed that there were three kinds of newspaper reader and used the words “men” and “women” as it described each category; the 1917 program referred to “the average man and woman.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Serials that might be thrilling to young males but boring or repellent to women were not suitable for audiences defined by locality, as provincial newspapers were. Tillotson had to deal in fiction possessing the highest common factor of satisfaction. The rest of this article focuses on the fortunes of this nineteenth-century business plan and the kinds of fiction (heavily influenced by Victorian models) that Tillotson selected in accordance with this strategy in the first three decades of the twentieth.

The genre that Tillotson deemed to serve its business plan best was the late Victorian sensation novel: the mystery stories with love interests that were the successors of the more transgressive 1850s and 1860s works of Mary Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and Mrs. Henry Wood. As late as 1913, the company's promotional material compared Richard Marsh's imagination and feel for “the novel of sensation” to Collins and Eugène Sue, more than twenty years after Collins's death and nearly sixty after Sue’s. The same program said that if L. G. Moberley “must be compared with novelists of world-wide fame, she is a 20th century Mrs. Craik and Mrs. Henry Wood in combination.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Tillotson's ongoing investment in the genre bears out Philip Waller's argument that the major sensation novelists enjoyed a sustained popularity outside the ranks of “the educated” well into the twentieth century. Braddon, still alive and writing in the Edwardian period, “was being treated by popular literary journals much like a national treasure.”Footnote ⁷⁸ From the beginning, as critics in the 1860s recognized, sensation novels enjoyed a cross-class and cross-gender appeal.Footnote ⁷⁹ In the early twentieth century, too, they appealed to manual workers as well as middle-class readers. In her survey of Middlesbrough iron-workers in 1907, Lady Bell found to her surprise that Mrs. Henry Wood was “nominated as a favourite author more times than Shakespeare and Dickens put together,” even though Wood had died in 1887 and her best-known novel, East Lynne, had been published as long ago as 1861.Footnote ⁸⁰ Jonathan Rose has argued that “at any given point, the reading tastes of the British working classes consistently lagged a generation behind those of the educated middle classes,” but middle-class readers who had more access (through circulating libraries, for instance) to the latest novels also shared a persisting taste for nineteenth-century genres and authors.Footnote ⁸¹

Although Braddon supplied Tillotson with many more serials than Collins did in the 1870s and 1880s, the latter author arguably did more to establish the parameters of the syndicate's later offerings. While the company and others still referred to these serials as “novels of sensation” or “sensational” stories, some of the original characteristics of the genre had dropped away. The protagonists of the early twentieth-century “novels of sensation” had little of the moral ambiguity of Braddon's Lady Audley, and the topical “sensational” plot elements, such as the bigamy at the heart of Lady Audley's Secret, gave way to unexpected inheritances of money and noble titles (and usurpations of inheritances). Collins's brand of stories of shocking crimes and elaborate intrigues within complicated domestic situations with their share of family secrets remained central to this later fiction. Detectives, a legacy of Collins as well as, more immediately, Conan Doyle, were stock character types in twentieth-century Tillotson fiction, as were gentlemanly colonels and the aristocrats whose family seats often furnished a story's setting. In his autobiography, Gerald Cumberland facetiously described his efforts to crack the code of the genre while down on his luck in the second decade of the twentieth century. He recalled reading a letter from R. D. Blackmore to Hall Caine written over thirty years previously, suggesting that Caine try “Tillotsons of Bolton.” Wrote Cumberland: “I don’t think Hall Caine had ever tried Tillotsons of Bolton, but then and there I made a resolve that I would do so at once. … I invented and worked out a plot about a cypress chest, an Egyptologist, an embalmed woman, an explorer, a craven valet, Scotland Yard, and so on.”Footnote ⁸² By the end of the next day he had dictated a chapter of 4,350 words to a typist and had “sketched out the full synopsis of my heart-rending, hair-raising and flesh-creeping story. I sent it to the magic ‘Tillotsons of Bolton,’ not knowing if that firm still survived.” Soon afterward, the company sent him “an offer of a hundred pounds for the serial rights of my ghastly novel.”Footnote ⁸³

The popular fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had a wide range of settings, but Tillotson's sensation stories had a very restricted geography.Footnote ⁸⁴ The brief description of their requirements in the Writers’ and Artists’ Year Book for 1921 stated: “Domestic and sensational serials … English setting.” In the 1928 edition, the latter phrase was changed to “English setting preferred.”Footnote ⁸⁵ When Arnold Bennett submitted his first serial to Tillotson in 1898, James Lever Tillotson accepted it, but he reproved Bennett for setting part of it in France. Tillotson told him the story should have been set wholly in Britain—or rather, we might say, the sensation-fiction Britain of Mayfair, Covent Garden, and country houses.Footnote ⁸⁶ When Bennett—later to establish himself as the provincial novelist par excellence—wrote that first serial for Tillotson in 1898 (“an uncompromising and high-coloured blood & thunder sensational serial”), he “laid aside the manuscript of what was to become Anna of the Five Towns.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Tillotson did sell some serials rooted in the life of industrial cities, such as the “Lancashire novels” of J. Monk Foster, some fifteen of which the company distributed between 1890 and 1906; both author and publisher were participating in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tradition of self-consciously local, and more broadly “Northern,” popular literature.Footnote ⁸⁸ However, Lancashire serials such as Foster's “tended to appear” in Tillotson's own stable of Lancashire weeklies and in “minor local papers concentrated in the English North and Midlands”: they were not part of the Fiction Department's main list.Footnote ⁸⁹ The “regional” fiction that the Bolton company thought worth offering to national and international clients (rather than small newspapers in neighboring parts of the North) involved locations with recognized general appeal, such as Thomas Hardy's Wessex, Arthur Quiller-Couch's Cornwall, and Allen Raine's Wales. The “wild grandeur of the Yorkshire moors” appealed but not the towns of the West Riding.Footnote ⁹⁰ Why some parts of the North struck Home Counties readers as picturesque while others seemed unattractively provincial was a question that would vex northern writers for years to come.Footnote ⁹¹

An important exception to the rule that serials should be set in Britain was fiction involving America. A number of serials had a transatlantic cast of characters (some included Anglo-American Society marriages); a few were mysteries set in New York and San Francisco.Footnote ⁹² The author of the San Francisco tale, The Phillimore Necklace, which featured Charlie Chan, a “sharp-witted Chinaman” on secondment from “the Honolulu detective force,” was Earl Derr Biggers, billed by Tillotson as a Harvard-educated writer for “the world famous Saturday Evening Post.”Footnote ⁹³ Tillotson was peddling standardized metropolitan glamour and big-city intrigue that could be happily consumed by readers in Coventry and Auckland alike without any personal knowledge of London or Manhattan life.

The role of the British empire in Tillotson's serials is more complex.Footnote ⁹⁴ A number of stories had imperial content that at once governed the narrative and remained confined to the edges of the text. Tillotson's publicity staff took care to emphasize how little of the action took place outside Britain. Describing a tale that turned on a skull with rubies in the eye sockets that provided a clue to the location of “a secret Eldorado,” the publicity writers stressed that the story was “entirely English and modern.”Footnote ⁹⁵ The device of the exotic object at the heart of a mystery, such as the skull with rubies here or the cypress chest in Gerald Cumberland's story, owes more than a little to Collins's The Moonstone, the London and Yorkshire intrigues of which revolve around a diamond looted from India. Collins's novel is also paradigmatic in a less conspicuous way: events in exotic lands provide the basis for a plot that will nevertheless unfold in a familiar British setting.

Where the Eldorado and cypress chest stories were more “exotic” than “imperial,” John K. Prothero's With Links of Steel, from 1910, made the business of empire-building part of the plot. The action of the first installment reverses Conrad's Heart of Darkness: it begins with the hero returning to England from a colony in West Africa, where he had been sent to “open up the interior by trade” and to look for his company's former employee, whom the “natives” are said to worship. The Kurtz figure turns out to be a defender of the “natives,” and the real villain is his calumniator, who had sent the hero in search of him. The rest of the story will turn on vindicating the Kurtz figure. Although this was clearly an “imperial” plot, Tillotson's publicity material twice made the point that “the story itself is laid in England.”Footnote ⁹⁶ This narrative pattern of beginning in the empire and then decamping to Britain after chapter 1 or chapter 2 was repeated many times in the following decades.Footnote ⁹⁷ Two serials by different authors during the First World War turn on the children of colonial exiles returning to Britain to claim an inheritance, who, for different reasons, get a friend and fellow colonial to go in their place, masquerading as the colonial heir whom the British family has never seen.Footnote ⁹⁸ In both cases the scene shifts from colony to metropole after the first installment or two. One of these stories opens in a Canadian logging camp; the other begins on a ship sailing from Australia. The strangers-on-a-boat device, by which a shipboard meeting in the first chapter sets up the romance or intrigue on which the story pivots, was very popular with Tillotson authors.

Tillotson consistently selected fiction that, if it had imperial content, kept it to the margins of the text, anchoring the narrative but not obliging a reader to spend much time in settings outside Britain. Why would the empire play a carefully circumscribed role in Tillotson's fiction roster in the heyday of popular fiction with imperial settings? And why would Tillotson's publicity take the trouble to emphasize the limits of the imperial dimension by saying that the substance of a story unfolded in Britain? An answer, I suggest, is that fiction set wholly in exotic places could easily fail the “universal acceptability” test. Men and women alike read fiction set in the colonies, but distinct genres were addressed to each sex. Boys and men were the primary audience for imperial adventure fiction of the Rider Haggard variety.Footnote ⁹⁹ Recognizably feminine genres of empire-themed fiction also flourished in the early twentieth century. After the First World War, the fiction magazines directed at working-class women carried numerous stories about female emigrants to the colonies.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ These romances pitted their heroines against the masculine world of the wild, or only barely tamed, frontier—the South African veldt, Australian sheep runs, Canadian forests.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The 1920s were also the zenith of another feminine genre that was arguably “imperial”: the desert romance. Q. D. Leavis wrote astringently of E. M. Hull's The Sheik: “Within a year of its publication [it] was to be seen in the hands of every typist and may be taken as embodying the typist's day-dream.”Footnote ¹⁰² Boys’ weeklies and magazines for “mill-girls” could thrive on imperial stories—among other types of fiction—because their business plan did not depend on universal acceptability.Footnote ¹⁰³

Outside the British social context, however, fiction about the empire—and about working-class subjects that Tillotson avoided altogether in its main list in the twentieth century—did not carry the same baggage. The Bolton firm's judgments about the nature of its markets within Britain did not hold outside it. The point may be illustrated by the Auckland Weekly News, a regular customer of Tillotson that also bought serials and short stories from other British syndicates.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Like many Australasian weeklies, the Auckland Weekly News began as an adjunct to a city daily (in this case, the New Zealand Herald, the more conservative of the two daily newspapers serving what was, from the late nineteenth century, New Zealand's largest city) and developed some of the characteristics of a magazine. As late as the interwar period, though, the Auckland Weekly News retained some of the functions of the country weekly informing readers in isolated rural areas; in the 1920s it bore the subtitle Town and Country Journal.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ As well as national and foreign news, country news, and sports coverage, the Auckland Weekly News carried many photographs and a good deal of fiction. In the 1890s, there would usually be three serials running at any one time; in the 1910s and 1920s, each issue carried the latest installments of three serials and several short stories of overseas provenance, as well as the odd short story from New Zealand.

Tillotson's ledger records a steady flow of sales to the Auckland Weekly News in the 1920s—eleven thirteen-week seasons of short stories.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The columns of the paper also include serialized novels that we know from Tillotson's promotional material to have reached Auckland via Bolton. Allen Raine's Neither Storehouse Nor Barn, for instance, appeared in the Auckland Weekly News between 13 June and 8 August 1907 and was on Tillotson's program for that year.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The Weekly News ran Louis Tracy's One Wonderful Night in October, November, and December of 1913, the same year it became available to British newspapers.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ And in 1923 the readers of Auckland province were treated to The Cypress Chest, Gerald Cumberland's “ghastly novel.” Authors who sometimes sold their work to Tillotson, such as Arthur W. Marchmont and Eden Phillpotts, appeared in the Auckland Weekly News through the offices of other syndicates or agents.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Some of the short stories in the Auckland Weekly News share the sensation-fiction milieux and stock devices of Tillotson's serials. “A Simple Sum,” by F. Frankfort Moore, whom we have encountered expressing gratitude to Tillotson for “placing” a serial in Australia, is set in Society and involves intrigue about the theft and valuation of some plate; when one character sorts matters out, the baronet who owns the plate plays fairy godfather and offers him a job.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Yet there were also significant differences between the fiction carried by the Auckland Weekly News and the stories offered by Tillotson. The case of Ottwell Binns is revealing. Binns, a clergyman who lived near Bolton, was a prolific popular novelist.Footnote ¹¹¹ Tillotson regularly bought serials from him.Footnote ¹¹² The company took his West Country tales, a recognized category of fiction at the time. In their 1914 prospectus, Tillotson's publicists said that, though he was a Lancashire native, his métier was Cornish stories; a few years later, they noted that his Dorset fiction had been compared with Hardy’s.Footnote ¹¹³ In fact Binns was not a West Country “specialist”—he worked with other settings, too, including exotic and imperial ones. The serial of his that Tillotson distributed in 1916, The Lady of the Miniature, opens in New Guinea and the northern tip of Australia, where the heir to an English manor has been living as a long-lost son; the rest of the story is a tussle between the Australian and the cousin who would otherwise inherit the estate. At least one of Binns's other stories (not published by Tillotson) was set entirely in the French Pacific.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Others have titles like The Forest Ranger and The Shadows of the Yamen. In 1923, the Auckland Weekly News carried Binns's serial Clancy of the Mounted Police, a story set in Western Canada.

The Auckland paper also carried fiction by non-Tillotson authors that was more thoroughly “imperial” in setting and theme than anything Tillotson distributed. Between May and July 1913, the Auckland Weekly News ran a serial by Silas K. Hocking, another minister-cum-popular-novelist (Philip Waller calls him “the Nonconformists’ favourite fabler”).Footnote ¹¹⁵The White Angel of El Tabra is a desert romance written a decade before Hull's The Sheik. Hocking's hero is an Egyptologist, a type of the time (or rather, of the 1880s and 1890s, when ancient Egypt was most “in the news”).Footnote ¹¹⁶ The Egyptologist is searching for a buried temple with the help of his “native” servants. In the first installment, he glimpses a white woman in a Coptic house. Later, the woman is kidnapped by a sheikh, who wants her to renounce Christianity. In the end the sheikh is put to flight, and the Egyptologist and the “white angel” are happily united.

In 1923 the Auckland Weekly News ran another serial unlike anything on the Tillotson list at this time. Mary Fraser's Threads in the Loom was a specimen of a genre popular from the end of the nineteenth century and flourishing until the Slump: the “mill-girl” tale.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Fraser's earlier works included Shuttle and Loom, A Twisted Thread, and The Strike Breaker; chapter 1 of Threads in the Loom is entitled “A Mill-Girl's Love.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ The heroine, Dorothy, is a virtuous, shawl-wearing factory worker in a Lancashire town. She is secretly courting the mill-owner's son, the redeemable wastrel Phil Ingram. Ingram senior is the story's villain. In chapter 2, he attempts to win the sheds manager, Ted, over to his plan to lay off workers. Mr. Ingram tells Ted that the men who will keep their jobs will defy their union and accept the new terms if Ted does too. Ted refuses, telling Ingram that he will not accept double his wage to betray the men. As Billie Melman has shown, in Britain in the 1920s, “mill-girl” stories appeared in papers for female industrial workers.Footnote ¹¹⁹ They were the cultural property of working-class women and were not judged to have much claim on middle-class readers. Yet, in the same period, such a story could appear in a magazine run by Auckland's conservative daily newspaper, to be presented to a largely middle-class audience that included farmers, the mainstays of New Zealand conservatism, at a time when the virulently antilabor Reform Party dominated New Zealand political life.Footnote ¹²⁰ Unlike the southern New Zealand cities, 1920s Auckland had little industry; the Weekly News’ readers, or at least its editors, could apparently view an industrial melodrama as just another melodrama, untroubled by the political freight it would have had for a Conservative editor in provincial Britain.

One of the ironies of Tillotson's business practice is that it was not the Bolton firm that sold this “Lancashire tale” to Auckland. Tillotson preferred the West End and its country house satellites and parts of Britain deemed picturesque enough to have their own recognizable fictional types, like the West Country. Tillotson inevitably missed opportunities to sell mill-girl serials because it attempted to provide a single, universally acceptable fiction list—rather than a larger, more varied list from which different newspapers could put together very different fiction programs. The universal acceptability policy required solving equations that had two sets of variables: working assumptions about the fictional (genre, setting) and working assumptions, based on familiarity with British rather than colonial clients, about audience demographics (gender, class, age). A further irony is that the Tillotson Fiction Department was a spin-off of a proudly provincial newspaper business that would itself be affected by the growing heft of the London press, even as its syndication business stunted opportunities for writers in the colonies to publish stories set locally. But the imperially “standardizing” effects of syndicated fiction should not be overstated. It hardly stamped out local (and self-consciously local) writing, and newspaper fiction syndication was nowhere near as powerful a force in colonial literary markets as the Publishers’ Association of Great Britain, the cartel that fixed margins between wholesale and retail prices and whose members published cheap “colonial editions” of British books, the prices of which local publishers could not expect to match.Footnote ¹²¹

Tillotson's combination of imperial trade and absence of “zeal” for the empire is, I have suggested, a sign of how thoroughly the settler colonies, at least, were integrated into British business and culture. Yet the same could be said of the United States and continental Europe, where Tillotson also did business. As historians of modern Britain, we sometimes attribute more weight to an activity involving the colonies than we do to the same activity when it involves other countries.Footnote ¹²² It has been suggested, for instance, that migration to the colonies helped reinforce imperial bonds at a personal and familial level.Footnote ¹²³ But the fact that many more Britons emigrated to the United States than to the colonies in the nineteenth century does not prompt an argument that transatlantic cultural bonds surpassed imperial ones. To take an example closer to the concerns of this article, the popularity of Ruritanian romances in Britain is seldom taken as evidence of a pervasive cultural investment in Eastern Europe in the way that the popularity of jungle and desert adventures stories is read as evidence of imperial sentiment.Footnote ¹²⁴ If we are to accept an encompassing definition that takes being “imperialist” to mean having some stake in, or connection to, the empire, we need to take care that we do not reflexively privilege imperial investments over other ones.