The Wide World Magazine

The Wide World Magazine was a British monthly illustrated publication which ran from April 1898 to December 1965.[1]

The Wide World Magazine - half-yearly volume edition

History

The magazine was founded by well-known publisher George Newnes, also famous for Tit-Bits, The Strand Magazine, Country Life and others. It described itself as "an illustrated magazine of true narrative" and each month purported to feature "true-life" adventure and travel stories gathered from around the world. Its motto was "Truth is stranger than fiction".[1]

In August 1898, it published the first in a number of installments of "The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont", billed as "the most amazing story a man ever lived to tell", and claiming to be an account of a man who had spent thirty years in the outback of Australia.[2] The story caused a sensation, but was exposed as a hoax by the Daily Chronicle, to the embarrassment of the publisher.[3]

Some famous names occasionally wrote for the magazine (such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry Morton Stanley, Douglas Reeman etc.), and it was copiously illustrated with photographs, as well as black and white drawings by such artists as Terence Cuneo, Cecil Stuart Tresilian, Alfred Pearse, Chas Sheldon, Paul Hardy, William Barnes Wollen, John L. Wimbush, Charles J. Staniland, Joseph Finnemore, John Charlton, Warwick Goble, Tom Browne, Ernest Prater, Gordon Browne, Edward S. Hodgson, Norman H. Hardy, Inglis Sheldon Williams, and Harry Rountree.[4]

The May 1913 issue contained the first reports of the death of notorious outlaw Butch Cassidy in Bolivia.[1]

Ben Macintyre, writing in 2004, humorously described the magazine as being about "brave chaps with large moustaches on stiff upper lips, who did stupid and dangerous things".[5]

Editions online

Selected stories
  • Safont, Paul, ed. (2004). The Wide World: True Adventures for Men. London: Macmillan. ISBN 1405049316.
  • A floating Gold-mine (story from The Wide World Magazine, May 1907 – "Welcome to Brightlingsea")
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References
  1. The Wide World Magazine (collectingbooksandmagazines.com).
  2. The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (stories from Wide World Magazine, volume 3, May 1899 & June 1899 , pp. 3–15 and pp. 115–131).
  3. John Arnold, Sally Batten. The Bibliography of Australian Literature, Volume 2, pp. 259–60.
  4. See Volumes 3 and 7, for example (bibliography).
  5. Macintyre, Ben (16 October 2004). "Buried alive by an elephant!". The Sunday Times.

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