Home Chimes

Home Chimes was a British magazine published weekly from 2 January 1884 until 26 December 1885, and thereafter monthly until December 1894.^[a]A total of 212 issues.^[1] Edited by the novelist F. W. Robinson and published by Richard Willoughby, its main focus was on fiction, especially from younger, less-well known authors, a precursor of the popular fiction magazine. Robinson’s own work tended to be deeply religious, or set among the poor, but in contrast the magazine’s content was largely humorous and light-hearted.^[1]

Notable contributors included Jerome K. Jerome, who was working as a clerk at twenty-five shillings a week when Robinson commissioned a series of essays from him that were subsequently collected in book form as The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886); others were J. M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, and Edith Nesbit, author of The Railway Children (1906).^[2]

As Robinson is reported to have said to one of his contributors, G. B. Burgin, “Though the magazine doesn’t pay, it helps you youngsters train on for a generation of readers I shall never see”.^[2]