British magazine
Blackwood's Magazine
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine
, Vol. XXV, January?June 1829. William Blackwood, Edinburgh and T. Cadell, Strand, London.
(With a portrait of 16th century Scottish historian
George Buchanan
on the cover)
|
Categories
| Miscellany
|
---|
Frequency
| monthly
|
---|
Founder
| William Blackwood
|
---|
Founded
| 1817
|
---|
Final issue
| 1980
(
1980
)
|
---|
Company
| Blackwood
|
---|
Country
| United Kingdom
|
---|
Based in
| Edinburgh, Scotland
|
---|
Language
| English
|
---|
ISSN
| 0006-436X
|
---|
Blackwood's Magazine
was a British
magazine
and
miscellany
printed between 1817 and 1980. It was founded by the
publisher
William Blackwood
and was originally called the
Edinburgh Monthly Magazine
. The first number appeared in April 1817 under the editorship of
Thomas Pringle
and James Cleghorn. The journal was unsuccessful and Blackwood fired Pringle and Cleghorn and relaunched the journal as
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine
under his own editorship. The journal eventually adopted the shorter name and from the relaunch often referred to itself as
Maga
. The title page bore the image of
George Buchanan
, a 16th-century Scottish historian, religious and political thinker.
Description
[
edit
]
Blackwood's
was conceived as a rival to the
Whig
-supporting
Edinburgh Review
.
Compared to the rather staid tone of
The Quarterly Review
, the other main
Tory
work,
Maga
was ferocious and combative. This is due primarily to the work of its principal writer
John Wilson
, who wrote under the
pseudonym
of Christopher North. Never trusted with the editorship, he nevertheless wrote much of the magazine along with the other major contributors
John Gibson Lockhart
and
William Maginn
. Their mixture of satire, reviews and criticism both barbed and insightful was extremely popular and the magazine quickly gained a large audience.
For all its conservative credentials the magazine published the works of radicals of British
romanticism
such as
Percy Bysshe Shelley
and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
, as well as early feminist essays by American
John Neal
.
[1]
Through Wilson the magazine was a keen supporter of
William Wordsworth
, parodied the
Byronmania
common in
Europe
and angered
John Keats
,
Leigh Hunt
and
William Hazlitt
by referring to their works as the "Cockney School of Poetry". The controversial style of the magazine got it into trouble when, in 1821, John Scott, the editor of the
London Magazine
, fought a duel with Jonathan Henry Christie over
libellous
statements in the magazine. John Scott was shot and killed.
[2]
By the mid-1820s Lockhart and Maginn had departed to London, the former to edit the
Quarterly
and the latter to write for a range of journals, though principally for
Fraser's Magazine
. After this, John Wilson was by far the most important writer for the magazine and gave it much of its tone, popularity and notoriety. In this period
Blackwood's
became the first British literary journal to publish work by an American with an 1824 essay by
John Neal
that got reprinted across Europe.
[3]
Over the following year and a half the magazine published Neal's "American Writers" series, which is the first written history of American literature.
[4]
Blackwood's relationship with Neal eroded after publishing Neal's novel
Brother Jonathan
at a great financial loss in 1825.
[5]
[6]
By the 1840s when Wilson was contributing less, its circulation declined. Aside from essays it also printed a good deal of
horror fiction
and this is regarded as an important influence on later Victorian writers such as
Charles Dickens
, the
Bronte sisters
, and
Edgar Allan Poe
; Poe even satirised the magazine's obsessions in "
Loss of Breath
: A Tale A La
Blackwood
," and "
How to Write a Blackwood Article
." The four surviving Bronte siblings were avid readers and mimicked the style and content in their
Young Men's Magazine
and other writings in their childhood
paracosm
, including
Glass Town
and Angria.
The magazine never regained its early success but it still held a dedicated readership throughout the
British Empire
amongst those in the
Colonial Service
. One late nineteenth century triumph was the first publication of
Joseph Conrad
's
Heart of Darkness
in the February, March, and April 1899 issues of the magazine.
Important contributors included:
George Eliot
,
Joseph Conrad
,
John Buchan
,
George Tomkyns Chesney
,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
,
Felicia Hemans
,
James Hogg
,
Charles Neaves
,
Thomas de Quincey
,
Elizabeth Clementine Stedman
,
William Mudford
,
Margaret Oliphant
,
Hugh Clifford
,
Mary Margaret Busk
and
Frank Swettenham
.
Robert Macnish
contributed under the epithet, Modern Pythagorean. It was an
open secret
that
Charles Whibley
contributed anonymously his
Musings without Methods
to the Magazine for over twenty-five years.
T. S. Eliot
described them as "the best sustained piece of literary journalism that I know of in recent times".
[7]
The magazine finally ceased publication in 1980, having remained for its entire history in the Blackwood family. Mike Blackwood was the last family member to manage the firm and now enjoys retirement in England with his wife Jayne.
The
Blackwood's
name lives on in the name of the bar at the Nira Caledonia Hotel in Gloucester Place, Edinburgh, the former home of John Wilson from 1827 until his death in 1854.
Cultural references
[
edit
]
Edgar Allan Poe
published a short story entitled
How to Write a Blackwood Article
in November 1838 as a companion piece to
A Predicament
.
[8]
In
Dorothy Sayers
's detective novel
Five Red Herrings
(1931) the Scottish
Procurator-Fiscal
working with
Lord Peter Wimsey
is mentioned as "reading the latest number of
Blackwood
to wile away the time" as they spend several boring night hours while waiting for the murderer to reveal himself.
Vera Brittain
lists "numerous copies of
Blackwood's Magazine
" among her literary possessions in her description of her time as
V.A.D.
nurse in
Malta
in her memoir,
Testament of Youth
.
In
George Orwell
's
Burmese Days
, the main protagonist, James Flory, associates the magazine with mediocre crassness as he thinks about the other British at the European Club: "Dull boozing witless porkers! Was it possible that they could go on week after week, year after year, repeating word for word the same evil-minded drivel, like a parody of a fifth-rate story in
Blackwood's
? Would none of them ever think of anything new to say? Oh, what a place, what people! What a civilization is this of ours?this godless civilization founded on whisky,
Blackwood's
and the
Bonzo
pictures!"
[9]
In Part Four of the
Doctor Who
story
The Talons of Weng Chiang
, Professor Litefoot is seen reading the February 1892 issue.
In
Larry McMurtry
's novel
Lonesome Dove
, Clara, who lived a frontier life in Ogallala, Nebraska during the 1870s but dreamed of a literary life, "would have to wait for two or three months for her
Blackwood's
, wondering all the time what was happening to the people in the stories."
[10]
See also
[
edit
]
Notes
[
edit
]
- ^
Sears, Donald A. (1978).
John Neal
. Boston, Massachusetts: Twayne Publishers. p. 99.
ISBN
080-5-7723-08
.
- ^
"Newspapers and publishers at dawn of 19th century"
.
www.georgianindex.net
. Archived from
the original
on 7 July 2015
. Retrieved
22 January
2009
.
- ^
Sears, Donald A. (1978).
John Neal
. Boston, Massachusetts: Twayne Publishers. p. 71.
ISBN
080-5-7723-08
.
- ^
Pattee, Fred Lewis (1937). "Preface". In Pattee, Fred Lewis (ed.).
American Writers: A Series of Papers Contributed to Blackwood's Magazine (1824-1825)
. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. p. v.
OCLC
464953146
.
- ^
Sears, Donald A. (1978).
John Neal
. Boston, Massachusetts: Twayne Publishers. p. 73.
ISBN
0-8057-7230-8
.
- ^
Lease, Benjamin (1972).
That Wild Fellow John Neal and the American Literary Revolution
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 59.
ISBN
978-0-226-46969-0
.
- ^
H. C. G. Matthew, ‘
Whibley, Charles
(1859?1930)’,
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
,
Oxford University Press
, September 2004
- ^
Sova, Dawn B.
Edgar Allan Poe: A to Z
. New York: Checkmark Books, 2001. p. 200
- ^
Orwell, George.
Burmese Days
. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace & Co. p. 33.
- ^
Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove, Kindle 1985 loc 10631.
List of publications
[
edit
]
Further reading
[
edit
]
- Finkelstein, David.
The House of Blackwood. Author?Publisher Relations in the Victorian Age
. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002.
ISBN
978-0-271-02179-9
- Finkelstein, David (ed.),
Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition 1805?1930
. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.
ISBN
978-0-8020-8711-9
- Flynn, Philip, 'Beginning Blackwood's : The Right Mix of Dulce and Utile',
Victorian Periodicals Review
39: 2, Summer 2006, pp. 136?157
External links
[
edit
]
Wikisource
has original text related to this article: