adminCirculation figures for magazines and newspapers in the nineteenth-century US are both difficult to find and notoriously unreliable. It can be frustrating to not be able to find what we think should be a basic statistic about these publications, but allow me a moment to explain why they can be elusive.
Today, we scholars usually want to know about subscription figures as a proxy for how far content and ideas in a periodical spread across its readership area (for the case of Harper’s Weekly, the nation). Subscription figures in the 19C were important for a periodical’s creators and managers for similar reasons, but, above all, for financial ones. Subscribers did pay for their periodical, so growing subscriber numbers meant growing revenue. However, the amount of subscription revenue paled in comparison to advertising revenue. Consider the fact that, in 1858, early in the magazine’s run, a year’s subscription to Harper’s Weekly cost $2.50 while one line of advertising across just one column for one issue cost $0.50. Clearly, winning advertisers was more important than winning subscriber’s for the periodical’s bottom line, even though the latter was important to getting the former. Namely, a larger the number of subscribers meant that a periodical could charge a higher amount for ad space because more people would presumably see the ad, hopefully bringing a larger return for an advertiser’s investment.
Therefore, it would have been in a periodical’s best interest to publish the largest subscriber number they could swing–either by rounding up, by stretching the truth, or by outright lying and hoping that no one would notice. (It’s not that every number was total baloney; it’s rather that the numbers should be read with a hunk of salt.) It also would have been in their best interest to keep the real, internal records of subscribers under lock and key to make sure that no one could call their bluff. Finally, if the news about subscribers wasn’t good–wasn’t large, wasn’t growing and was in fact shrinking, or had been surpassed by another periodical–it perhaps would have been in their best interest to say nothing at all.
[Source about how rude it was to ask.]
Reliable circulation figures for Harper’s Weekly are as difficult to find as many other publications from the era. I have not found internal records. If someone has, please let me know! The best third-party figures I have found are from newspaper directories that publish Harper’s Weekly statistics. The first I’ve found is Rowell’s American Newspaper Directory (examples of 1891 key here, methodology here). The second is N. W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual (methodology example from 1890 here). They have statistics on other publications you might find useful.
Harper’s Weekly did sometimes publish their circulation figures, often in spurts. I searched the HarpWeek database for mentions of “Harper’s Weekly” and circulation, turning up 814 results.
Over three-quarters of those search results were relevant, but many were about Harper’s Monthly and not Harper’s Weekly. Still, just under half of the total results gave me a circulation number that Harper’s Weekly published about itself.
The spreadsheet that compiles the subscription figures from both the directories and Harper’s Weekly itself is linked here. I will update it when I find new data (and please send me links if you find sources yourself!), but for now the last update is October 2022.
Finally, here is a quick line graph showing their subscription figures that I will also update.
