[1] The magazine was edited by H. G. Bonavia Hunt from 1874 to 1896, Max Pemberton from 1896 to 1905, David Williamson from 1905 to November 1908, Walter Smith from December 1908 to 1912, and Newman Flower from 1912 to 1922.

Contributing authors included Wilkie Collins, whose 1870 novel Man and Wife raised the magazine's circulation to 70,000.

Following the success of George Newnes's Tit-Bits, the Strand Magazine and Alfred Harmsworth's Answers, Cassell's began publishing a combination of journalistic miscellanea and illustrated fiction by popular novelists such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Quiller-Couch, Sheridan Le Fanu, J. M. Barrie, Bertram Fletcher Robinson, P. G. Wodehouse,[1] Marjorie Bowen and Warwick Deeping.

In January 1908 he instructed his agent, 'Please secure the number' (CL 4:31), suggesting that Conrad was interested in seeing its illustrated publication in one of the most popular magazines of that time.

[4] This version of Cassell's carried fiction by E. Phillips Oppenheim,[5] E. F. Benson, Robert W. Chambers, Max Pemberton and Vincent Ems.