"A weekly fiction paper primarily produced for a working class, female readership in Scotland" (Cass, "The Cotton Factory Times, 1885-1937").

"The People's Friend has been the means of ringing many novelists and poets into public notice. Some of the earliest novels by Annie S. Swan were published in its pages, and it was to this magazine that Alexander Anderson ('Surfacement'), the well known Scottish poet, contributed some of the finest of his nursery poems” (Lamb, in SNQ).

"Unlike the Journal, the Friend did not draw attention to itself or celebrate its own success: ten years of publication, the thousandth issue, the half-jubilee all passed without comment; there was no leader or other significant editorial statement, so far as I am aware, at any time during the nineteenth century...The Friend introduced a fixed rate of payment, and this principle was in time extended to the Journal” (Donaldson, Popular Literature in Victorian Scotland).