“By the mid [eighteen] fifties The Family Herald and The London Journal dominated the market; their combined sale was at least three-quarters of a million copies a week. If most of these issues were read aloud in the family or passed along to friends, one of the two magazines must have reached nearly one person in three among the literate population” (Mitchell, The Fallen Angel, p.1-2).

"The London Journal...was not run by societies but by publishers whose object was to make money. [It] was astonishingly successful at it; the London Journal at one point made an annual profit of over £10 000" (Mitchell, p.5).