Conrad First The Joseph Conrad Periodical Archive
Periodical

Tit-Bits (London, UK)


23 November 1889

A weekly miscellany founded by George Newnes in 1881, Tit-Bits From All the Interesting Books, Periodicals, and Newspapers of the World spawned a host of imitators and occupied the vanguard of the transformation of the British press at the end of the nineteenth century. The magazine, which famously paid contributors at the princely rate of a guinea per column, attracted submissions from Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and James Joyce, who immortalized its fiction page in the fourth episode of Ulysses (1922).

NOTE
This entry is a deliberate anomaly on the Conrad First site, which otherwise includes only periodicals that serialized Conrad's writing.

In 1886, Conrad submitted a now-lost draft of "The Black Mate" to a Competition for Sailors in George Newnes's pioneering magazine Tit-Bits. Although Conrad's submission did not win the prize and was only published many years later in revised form, we have nonetheless chosen to include the issues of the magazine relating to the Competition for Sailors, believing that its special nature makes it of interest to students of Conrad's work.