Cosmopolitan cover image
Cosmopolitan 1911

Cosmopolitan began as a family magazine in 1886, in New York City, becoming a literary magazine in 1889. Its stature declined during the 1950s with the ascent of the paperback and television, until Helen Gurley Brown turned it into a magazine for the single career woman in 1965. This single issue is presented as part of the 1910 Collection, a group of 24 magazines (links below) published in or around the year 1910, which has important implications for literary modernism.

Virginia Woolf famously observed that “on or about December 1910, human character changed”—by which she meant to locate the shift to modernism at the end of the reign of King Edward VII and the beginning of the reign of King George V. To assist teachers and students studying this transitional moment, the MJP offers this collection of sample issues of British and American periodicals from 1910 and 1911, plus one from 1912. These samples are here mainly to provide a perspective on what was being thought, said, pictured, and advertised in both Britain and America at the moment when “human character changed.” Please note that, in addition to the issues in this special collection, there are other magazines from 1910 and 1911 in the main archive.

The following issues comprise the 1910 Collection:

Cosmopolitan. Vol. 51, No. 1, Narcross, C. P. (editor)
New York: International Magazine Company, 1911-06
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