Good Words: Travel in a Sixties Magazine

This chapter focuses on Good Words as a publication typical of a new generation of illustrated literary family magazines that emerged in the 1860s. Its prime audience consisted of the middle-class family, and it mainly presented travel as part of Victorian middle-class life, publishing significantly fewer articles on modest forms of travel than the Leisure Hour. The chapter further shows that intermediality was a pillar of the magazine’s travel-cultural work. Articles on travel in Good Words were more frequently and lavishly illustrated than those in the Leisure Hour, and the illustrations appear more deliberately chosen and arranged. To demonstrate this, the chapter explores the interplay of verbal and visual rhetoric in “Eastward” and “Peeps at the Far East”, two serial travelogues by Norman Macleod, the long-term editor of Good Words.