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Once A Week was a British weekly illustrated literary magazine published by Bradbury and Evans from 1859 to 1880.[1] According to the academic and author John Sutherland, “historically the magazine’s main achievement was to provide an outlet for [an] innovative group of illustrators [in] the 1860s.”[2]
The magazine was founded as the result of a dispute between Bradbury and Evans and Charles Dickens. Bradbury and Evans had been Dickens’ publisher since 1844, and he was in partnership with them in publishing his magazine Household Words.[2][3] In the 12 June 1858 edition of Household Words, Dickens announced his formal separation from his wife Catherine, expecting that the announcement would be reprinted in Punch, another Bradbury and Evans publication. Furious when it was not, Dickens founded a new magazine, All The Year Round, which he decided would be editorially independent of any publisher. Bradbury and Evans responded by founding Once a Week under the leadership of Samuel Lucas, which although also a literary weekly, differentiated itself from Dickens’ offering by including illustrations from some of the best artists and engravers available.[3]
In its first six months alone, Once a Week illustrated forty-two of its fifty-three original poems. with Lucas adamant that the artwork should illustrate the textual content.[3] Serial fiction was also a central feature of the magazine; among other works, it published Charles Reade’s A Good Fight, George Meredith’s Evan Harrington and Charles Felix’s The Notting Hill Mystery, an early detective novel.[2][4]
Following Lucas’s death in 1865, he was succeeded as editor by his assistant Edward Walford. But although the magazine had strong sales it was probably under-priced, and was in decline.[2] Once a Week was purchased by James Rice in 1869, and then by George Manville Fenn in 1873.[5] But it had become “a shadow of its former self”, and publication ceased in 1880.[2]
