ABSTRACT
George Newnes was one of a handful of great late Victorian and Edwardian print media entrepreneurs who successfully purveyed and shaped culture for profit through their innovations in a new type of journalism. He began his periodical publishing career in 1881, in Manchester, as the editor and publisher of a penny paper. He had studied the field of popular journalism as a reader, had experienced commercial and urban conditions in London and Manchester, and had a flair for novelty and an instinct for marketing and promotion. He developed into a wealthy philanthropist, Liberal MP and newspaper proprietor, publisher and editor of national and international renown, producing a variety of innovative periodicals, and commanding enormous respect as a man of high social and professional position with political connections and a reputation for commercial success within periodical publishing, despite the setbacks and failures that blighted the last years of his career. This book has traced this progression, through some of the most popular and distinctive periodicals established by Newnes and the discursive, journalistic and cultural contexts in which they were embedded.
