Tit-Bits

In 1886, the magazine's headquarters moved from Manchester to London[2] where it paved the way for popular journalism – most significantly, the Daily Mail was founded by Alfred Harmsworth, a contributor to Tit-Bits, and the Daily Express was launched by Arthur Pearson, who worked at Tit-Bits for five years after winning a competition to get a job on the magazine.[3]

From the outset, the magazine was a mass-circulation commercial publication on cheap newsprint which soon reached sales of between 400,000 and 600,000. Like a mini-encyclopedia it presented a diverse range of tit-bits of information in an easy-to-read format, with the emphasis on human interest stories concentrating on drama and sensation.[4] It also featured short stories and full-length fiction, including works by authors such as Rider Haggard and Isaac Asimov, plus three very early stories by Christopher Priest.

Virginia Woolf submitted her first article to the paper in 1890, at the age of eight, but it was turned down.[5] The first humorous article by P. G. Wodehouse, "Men Who Missed Their Own Weddings", appeared in Tit-Bits in November 1900.[6] During the First World War Ivor Novello won a Titbits competition to write a song soldiers could sing at the front: he penned Keep the Home Fires Burning.[7]

Pin-ups appeared on the magazine's covers from 1939 and by 1955 circulation peaked at 1,150,000. At the beginning of 1973 Tit-Bits lost the hyphen from its masthead. In 1979 Reveille (a weekly tabloid with a virtually identical demographic) was merged into Titbits, and the magazine was briefly rebranded as Titbits incorporating Reveille. This however was dropped in July 1981. On 18 July 1984,[7] under its last editor Paul Hopkins, Titbits was selling only 170,000 copies and was taken over by Associated Newspapers' Weekend. At the time, the Financial Times described Titbits as "the 103-year-old progenitor of Britain's popular press".[7] Weekend itself closed in 1989.

In All Things Considered by G. K. Chesterton, the author contrasts Tit-Bits with the Times, saying: "Let any honest reader... ask himself whether he would really rather be asked in the next two hours to write the front page of The Times, which is full of long leading articles, or the front page of Tit-Bits, which is full of short jokes." Reference to the magazine is also made in James Joyce's Ulysses,[8] George Orwell's Animal Farm, C. P. Snow's The Affair,[9] James Hilton's Lost Horizon, Virginia Woolf's Moments of Being, H. G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon and A. J. Cronin's The Stars Look Down. It has been also mentioned in Stanley Houghton's play The Dear Departed. Wells also mentioned it in his book Experiment in Autobiography. The magazine is burlesqued as "Chit Chat" in George Gissing's New Grub Street. In the closing scene of the film Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), the protagonist Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) is approached by a journalist (Arthur Lowe) from Tit-Bits.

The magazine name survived as a glossy adult monthly, Titbits International.

Endnotes