"It will probably surprise you to learn that over 70 years ago there was a periodical issued called Time, more or less along the lines of your TIME, featuring articles and sketches that were then of current interest. I understand that copies of that old print are now very rare indeed. I have, however, looked through one, as a friend of mine who is a bookworm has a copy which he values highly. There is a sharp contrast between the TIME of today and the Time of the other days."
This bit of information from Maurice P. Riordan, one of our readers in Limerick, Eire, was surprising indeed, and we proceeded at once to investigate it via our London bureau. Here is what we found out about our Victorian predecessor.
Time's founder and editor was Edmund Yates, a novelist and playwright who, like Dickens, Thackeray and other contemporary 19th Century literary figures, was also a working journalist. He founded Time in 1879. It was by no means a news magazine, nor was it departmentalized like our TIME, but it did print many articles on current affairs, along with poetry, serialized fiction and short stories. In its first six issues, for example, Time carried articles on the doings of Parliament, the state of the nation's defenses, profiles on Disraeli and George Sala, one of the first roving correspondents. There was an article on Queen Victoria's Windsor apartments by an anonymous palace stringman, a first-rate TiMEstyle piece on James Marwood, the public hangman; a survey of drunkenness in Britain, several articles by a Time reporter on industrial relations and strikes, a blast at England's Royal Academy.
Yates's Time also concerned itself with education, concentrating on Eton, Oxford and the fashionable philosophy of the day, sport (the decline of the British racehorse) and theater (an account of a rehearsal at the Comédie Française with Sarah Bernhardt, muffled in a jacket to protect her from stage drafts, explaining the proper nuances of her lines). For women, there were articles like "How To Become Beautiful" with such admonitions as "The first cosmetic is, after all, ordinary soap" and "As for that relic of barbarism—the tinting of the nails—it is useless and coarse."
In a preface to the bound volume of Time's first six issues, which listed such contributors as Oscar Wilde, Bret Harte and W. S. Gilbert (The Bab Ballads), Yates wrote: "Believing that a monthly magazine should bear as close a relation as possible to contemporary events, I shall endeavour to supply my readers with materials which are of contemporary interest. National institutions will be examined and described—not as abstractions, but as concrete realities; and current affairs—whether in the region of science, art, literature, society, or politics—will be discussed from no purely theoretical standpoint. That is what I have striven ... to do."