Time and Tide goes digital!
Exciting news for researchers, teachers, and enthusiasts of interwar magazines and culture: digital publisher AM has launched the 1920s Module of its Interwar Culture product!
Comprising a collection of twenty-seven digitised periodicals, published in Britain, America, and France between 1919 and 1929 – including Time and Tide! – the resource grants access to a glittering hoard of primary sources which, until now, have been available only in physical libraries and archives.
In this module, complete runs of each publication offer dynamic perspectives on the social and cultural landscape of a fascinating decade. Alongside political, religious, literary, theatrical, and travel magazines, magazines targeting children and factory workers, and a men’s tailoring catalogue, luxury fashion magazines inform wealthy women about high-end trends, domestic magazines support hard-working housewives, and general interest magazines cover topics including sport, politics, and film.
The inclusion of Time and Tide in this mix is a very exciting development so soon after the centenary celebrations of this magazine hosted by the Time and Tide: Connections and Legacies project. To read the journal, you can flip through its pages, as you would with the Souvenir Edition on the project's website, or perform searches using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software. Helpful for browsing, a full contents list will take you straight to each feature.
Front cover with masthead, Time and Tide, 14 July 1922. Image © The British Library. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
The direct access to Time and Tide offered by Interwar Culture is very special. You don’t just get to read the publication, and admire its illustrations, fonts, layout, and distinctively modern masthead – you get a sense of what it is like to hold. Throughout the 1920s, Time and Tide was printed on pale, creamy paper: early issues crumble at the edges, but those from the end of the decade seem more robust. Of course, there is no substitute for actually holding a magazine – but for those who have felt pages disintegrate beneath careful fingers, the opportunity to browse without fear of damage is most welcome. And you can drink tea whilst reading!
Giving access to periodicals in full, Interwar Culture deepens and extends content showcased in the Time and Tide centenary project’s Making Modern Women exhibition, which situated Time and Tide among a range of publications produced by and targeting women in interwar Britain. Operating within overlapping periodical networks, Time and Tide interacted and competed with feminist and socialist papers, and shared contributors with these and commercial women’s magazines as well as elite literary journals. The resource allows Time and Tide to be explored within this rich and varied publishing landscape. For instance, Time and Tide’s socialist and feminist content might be read alongside the Labour Party Journal for Working Women, The Labour Woman; its cultural features resonate with those in the highbrow review The Dial.
'Parnassus in Academe', Time and Tide, 28 December 1928. Image © The British Library. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
The OCR search functionality enables the discovery of a network between Time and Tide and other publications. For instance, essays by Theodora Bosanquet are quoted in profiles of Harriet Martineau and Henry James in The Dial; E. M. Delafield published short stories in Home, which, along with Ideal Home, reviewed and advertised her works. Home and Ideal Home also reviewed and advertised works by Naomi Royde-Smith, the “well-known author” spotted at the theatre by a World Traveler gossip columnist:
I noticed that she was one of the hardy ones who took off their coats. Perhaps enthusiasm kept her warm, but at all events she revealed an attractive red dress.
The capacity to search a large number of periodicals allows such links to be found more quickly than would be possible in a physical collection, raising all sorts of possibilities for research and teaching.
So that visitors to this website can explore digitised issues of Time and Tide for themselves, AM has generously made two volumes of the journal open access, until 11 June 2022. To view them, follow the image links embedded in this blog. I highly recommend that you do – it is so exciting that this material has been made digitally accessible, and the greater and more diverse its audience, the greater its impact will be on understandings of culture and society, both during the 1920s and in the present.
About the collection
Interwar Culture, module II: 1930-1939 is out now.
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