"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 Comedie Franc,aise 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."

Yates's mother, Elizabeth Brunton Yates, was Dickens' favorite actress. Yates, who was born in 1831, was a clerk in the General Post Office when he turned to spare time journalism in 1852. He wrote for Chambers' Journal, the Daily News and Dickens' Household Words, meanwhile trying to persuade London newspapers to let him do a gossip column for them. In 1855 a new paper called the Illustrated Times let him try this new experiment in journalism. It was so successful that within three years Yates was invited to edit a new paper, Town Talk.

In his second issue of Town Talk Yates wrote an impertinent, unfriendly piece about Thackeray, accusing him, among other things, of "an extravagant adulation of birth and position." Thackeray accused Yates of picking up gossip at the Garrick Club and managed to have him blackballed. Dickens, who had been the subject of a flattering piece in the first issue, defended Yates, although he condemned the article and wrote that the entire incident, which had become a literary sensation, was "a frightful mess, muddle, complication and botheration." The incident definitely scarred Dickens' and Thackeray's relationship. Yates remembered it bitterly all his life, and in the issue of Time for January, 1880 (see cut) gave his own version of the old scandal.

For a while, Yates, who had gone to America in 1872 to lecture, was European correspondent for James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald. In 1874 he started The World, a respectable and, within six months, very profitable magazine. In 1884, five years after founding Time, he gave up its editorship. The year before, in The World, he had managed to turn out a spicy paragraph on the Earl of Lonsdale which the court found libelous. He served seven weeks in prison and, although he went on writing after his release, his health broke down. In 1894, he died. Time, which continued under various editors, finally ceased publication in 1891. Although no figures can be found, its circulation probably did not exceed 2,000 monthly copies.

Cordially yours,

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