The Leisure Hour

The cover of issue 1032, with an illustration accompanying a story about a shipwreck.
Frequency	Weekly
Publisher	Religious Tract Society
First issue	January 1, 1852; 174 years ago (1852-01-01)
Final issue	1905; 121 years ago (1905)
Country	United Kingdom
Based in	London
Language	English
OCLC	362165421

The Leisure Hour was a British general-interest periodical of the Victorian era published weekly from 1852 to 1905.^[1][2] It was the most successful of several popular magazines published by the Religious Tract Society, which produced Christian literature for a wide audience.^[1] Each issue mixed multiple genres of fiction and factual stories, historical and topical.^[1]

The magazine's title referred to campaigns that had decreased work hours, giving workers extra leisure time.^[3] Until 1876, it carried the subtitle A Family Journal of Instruction and Recreation;^[4] after that, the subtitle changed to An illustrated magazine for home reading.^[5]

Each issue cost one penny and contained 16 pages.^[6] The layout typically included approximately six long articles, formatted in two columns per page, and five or six illustrations. The articles were a mix of biographies, poetry, essays, and fiction. Each issue usually started with a piece of serialised fiction.^[6]

The creation of the magazine was partly a response to non-religious popular magazines that the Religious Tract Society saw as delivering a "pernicious" morality to the working classes.^[1] The ethos of the magazine was guided by Sabbatarianism: the campaign to keep Sunday as a day of rest.^[4] It aimed to treat its diverse subjects "in the light of Christian truth".^[4] Despite this, The Leisure Hour carried far fewer statements of Christian doctrine than the Society's other publications,^[6] and had a greater emphasis on fiction than popular magazines of the time.^[7]

Two days before the magazine's launch in 1852, a warehouse fire destroyed the first batch of The Leisure Hour, so replacement copies had to be printed.^[3]

The magazine was edited by William Haig Miller until 1858,^[5] James Macaulay from 1858 to 1895,^[8] and William Stevens from 1895 to 1900.^[5] Harold Copping was one of its illustrators.^[9] Authors were initially only credited by initials rather than by name, giving the writing a collective rather than individual authority, though naming of authors became more common from the 1870s.^[1] In its jubilee issue, published in 1902, the magazine identified 111 authors who had contributed.^[1]