Before the British illustrator Leonard Raven-Hill started as a Punch cartoonist in December 1895, he edited a magazine called The Unicorn: An Illustrated Weekly for Society at Home and Abroad, which ran for at least two issues. Like the eponymous cryptid, very little information can be uncovered about its true nature: no scans exist on online periodical archives, no lists of contents on databases. The best statement of fact comes from the art critic Marion Spielmann, who profiled Raven-Hill for the Magazine of Art in 1896. The Unicorn was ‘born to an ineffectual struggle of only three weeks,’ he wrote, ‘[and] succumbed to its birth-throes through misunderstanding and financial mismanagement’.
But why should we be interested in this short-lived publication? For one, Raven-Hill commissioned two popular writers of his day – Arthur Machen and H. G. Wells – to write some short stories for him. Machen’s The Great God Pan and the Inmost Light had been published the year before, and his The Three Impostors was scheduled for release in November. Wells, meanwhile, was in the middle of an extraordinary output. The Time Machine had come out in May, followed in September by his debut short story collection and a new novel The Wonderful Visit. He was also agreeing terms with the publisher Heinemann for The Island of Dr Moreau. Wells’s sole contribution (‘The Cone’) appeared in the second issue, originally written not for Raven-Hill but composed in 1888 as the opening to a projected novel. It was a tale of adultery and murder set in an ironworks in Stoke-on-Trent. The magazine folded before anything by Machen could be published. Had the magazine lasted, it might have developed into an unlikely venue for early speculative fiction.
But we are in luck. A copy of The Unicorn’s second issue (September 18, 1895) is kept at Merton College Library, Oxford, donated almost a decade ago by a collector of Wellsiana. The cover’s banner is a striking deep blue and gold effect by illustrator Edgar Wilson, a regular collaborator of Raven-Hill’s and strongly influenced by Japanese art. His skinny, heraldic unicorn rears on its hind legs, chained to a ragged flag. The contents include ‘Notes on Foppery’ by Max Beerbohm, a poem in French by Hugh Cayley (presumably the Canadian lawyer and politician), and a regular feature commenting on current events, high society and literary gossip. There are also caricatures by Lewis Baumer and cartoons by Raven-Hill himself, prefiguring his future Punch fame. Wells’s ‘The Cone’ is headed by one of Wilson’s tropical fish designs, of a kind previously used in another of Raven-Hill’s failed magazines, The Butterfly. The effect of the whole is a lack of focus, a mishmash of anything the editor could find to fill its pages. The art is its most interesting aspect.
Wells recorded nothing about his work for The Unicorn or whether he produced anything else for it, but for poor Machen the experience of delivering Raven-Hill’s commission was excruciating. ‘I was to do a series of horror stories. I won’t deny that I swelled a little and was cheered and elated by the fact of my being asked to write by anybody’. But he had tired with the style he had picked up from Robert Louis Stevenson, and was now being asked to ‘recook that cabbage which was already boiled to death … I wrote four stories in a kind of agony, my pen shrieking “rubbish!” at me with every stroke’.
So the question remains: what happened to Machen’s rubbish stories? Were they typeset, in preparation for an expected future issue, or did the magazine fold before Machen could send them off? They were part of the reason he refused to write a continuation of The Three Impostors, so miserable did he find the experience. Wells’s tale and the ghost of these unpublished horrors, together with the arresting image of the legendary animal itself, are all part of the legacy of the ephemeral Unicorn.
Reading list:
Arthur Machen, Things Near and Far (Martin Secker, 1923)
Marion Spielmann, ‘Our Graphic Humourists’ (1896)
For more on Edgar Wilson and The Butterfly see Mark Valentine’s post at Wormwoodiana.
With thanks to The Warden and Fellows of Merton College, Oxford.