Cornhill Magazine, The

founded in 1860 by George Murray Smith; it quickly achieved huge sales through its policy of offering the serialization of two novels in each issue. William Makepeace Thackeray, who edited it from 1860 to 1862, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Wilkie Collins were eminent among the contributors in its early years. Henry James and Thomas Hardy supplied novels serialized during the 1870s, when the magazine was edited by Leslie Stephen. Literary standards declined when his editorship ended in 1882, but rose again under Reginald John Smith, the editor between 1898 and 1916; during this period poems and prose pieces by Hardy were published and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Virginia Woolf, Julian Huxley, and Edmund Gosse were among the contributors of essays and criticism. Work by Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford), Katherine Tynan, and Robert Bridges also appeared. After the First World War the Cornhill had a high reputation for its essays on literary history, biography, and criticism, though it became somewhat inert under the editorship of Lord Gorell in the 1930s and closed in 1939. In 1944 it re-emerged as a quarterly, edited by Peter Quennell, who published verse and prose by a wide range of authors including John Betjeman, Max Beerbohm, Truman Capote, Andre Gide, Evelyn Waugh, and Somerset Maugham. During the magazine's last decades it carried important work by Philip Larkin, Robert Graves, Frank O'Connor, John Fowles, Laurie Lee, Joyce Cary, and others; from 1955 onward, however, the continuing fall in its circulation proved irreversible and it ceased publication in 1975.