The Strand Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 4 (April 1891)
The fourth issue of The Strand, April 1891.
What it is
The fourth issue of The Strand, April 1891. The frontispiece is a picture letter drawn by Sir Edwin Landseer. Features include Babies around the world, Sir Wilfrid Lawson's temperance memoir On the Stump for the Pump, Portraits of Celebrities (Earl Granville, G. F. Watts, Millais, Marion Terry), Grace Harriman's fruit gardens for gentlewomen near Derby, orchid prices set beside the Dutch tulip mania, part one of The State of the Law Courts, Victoria Cross stories, facsimiles of playwrights' manuscripts and a visit to Jamrach's animal shop on Ratcliff Highway. Fiction includes Maupassant's Two Fishers and Stanley Weyman's The King's Stratagem. Among the ads: a house ad for Tit-Bits, sent from the same Burleigh Street offices, paying one guinea a column; a Mother Seigel's page told in a customer's own words; Bovril claiming 50 times the nourishment of meat extract; and Frazer's sales from 81,760 to 412,000 packets.
Why read it now
The ad pages hold the core tools of Victorian direct response, and most still work when the claim is true. Mother Seigel's lets Caroline Sage of Whitechapel Road tell her illness in her own words, and her turning point is a booklet about a Holyhead policeman whose complaint matched hers. That is similarity at work; Cialdini's research on social proof finds people follow others most when those others resemble them. Bovril and Frazer's lead with precise numbers, which tend to read as more credible than round claims but would need proof today. The Tit-Bits ad recruits writers as well as readers, with a rate and a plain brief: send nothing that will bore. What has dated: the medical promises, and a Harness page so garbled in this scan that little can be read. The editorial formula holds up better: recurring series, first-person accounts and facsimiles give each issue a reason to be bought. Use: collect testimonials from customers who match each segment, and show each reader the one closest to them.
Passages worth keeping
Contributors should send nothing that will bore, nothing that will pollute
تعليمات الكتابة في سطر واحد: المعيار الأول ألا يمل القارئ، والثاني ألا يُخدش ذوقه.
The narrative of the Policeman of Holyhead greatly impressed me.
العميلة اقتنعت بعد أن قرأت قصة شرطي عانى المرض نفسه، فالشهادة تولد شهادة أخرى حين يرى القارئ نفسه في صاحبها.
IS THE GUARANTEED PRODUCT OF PRIME OX BEEF ONLY, & CONTAINS 50 TIMES MORE ACTUAL NOURISHMENT THAN ORDINARY EXTRACT OF MEAT
الإعلان يقارن المنتج بالبديل المعروف برقم محدد، وهي مقارنة قوية لكنها تحتاج اليوم إلى إثبات علمي.
81,760 To 412,000 In One Year
نمو المبيعات يُعرض دليلًا على أن الناس جربوا المنتج ثم عادوا لشرائه.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
Read the original wellcomecollection.org
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