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During the last fifty years of the eighteenth century and the first three decades of the nineteenth, The Gentleman's Magazine published thousands of articles, poems, and reviews submitted by writers in the public at large.[1] Before 1750 and after about 1830, the magazine was largely the product of a paid staff, but during the intervening eight decades—nearly a century of publication—this periodical took its character from qualities inherent in the ideas and opinions of the hundreds of writers who contributed to its pages each year on a volunteer basis. Although in its general format and informational features The Gentleman's Magazine perpetuated qualities which gave it popularity and wide circulation in its earliest years, the grounds on which it maintained its strength after 1750 were the intimacy and plenitude with which it represented the mind of its audience since it published work emanating from that audience itself. The leading feature of the magazine each month, the section of "Miscellaneous Essays," which ran to half or more of each number, was nearly exclusively the domain of contributing writers. The next featured section, the poetry, also was largely supplied by contributors.
The editors, of course, published selectively and maintained a discernible presence. They tended, however, to appear submerged in the identity of the fictitious proprietor Sylvanus Urban, and even Mr. Urban changed the manner in which he presided over the publication so widely recognized as his. In the beginning, he had served the public, city and country at once, by selecting from other periodicals the most readable essays and other literary works and by providing the most current information. With the years, however, his
To the cultural historian, The Gentleman's Magazine serves today as an authentic compendium of thought, opinion, and learning from the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. If it is not encyclopedic in its nature, the magazine represents the times voluminously. It is also a fascinating record of the intellectual lives of individual persons. Insofar as it is possible to detect and isolate the work of individual writers, most of whom published anonymously or over pseudonyms in the magazine, we may learn much about the concerns, the habits of mind, and the evolving thought of the people of this age. Within the past decade, the recovery of files kept by the editors has made it possible to reconstruct the corpus of texts produced by each of several hundred writers in The Gentleman's Magazine during this period.
Such documentation may help to confirm, though it does not greatly extend, our knowledge about the lives and work of Samuel Johnson, William Cowper, Bishop Percy, and others who have attracted prior biographical and bibliographical attention. More compelling, however, is the opportunity now first readily available to us of reading as one corpus the various writings of George Bennett, a solicitor of Rolstone, Somerset; of the Rev. Samuel Denne, a vicar in Kent; of Mr. John Hodgson of Red Lion Square in London; of the Rev. Joseph Mills of Cowbit, Mrs. Jane West of Little Bowden, and Mr. John Roby in Ireland. The list of names might cover several pages. A common denominator exists among all those on such a list: largely, in some cases exclusively, The Gentleman's Magazine served as the medium by which their private learning became public discourse, and had the magazine not given them this opportunity much of their learning would never have achieved its articulation. For few people of any other age has such an opportunity existed.
More than any other factor inducing the magazine's conversion from reprocessing periodical literature to publishing original contributions was the sheer abundance of such materials. The printing of original work which correspondents might submit was within the scope of editorial policy as Edward Cave outlined it in the earliest numbers. But though the magazine carried occasional articles and poems supplied by writers beyond the staff, Cave seems to have intended to include only the most interesting or controversial within the regular monthly format, diverting such other pieces as came to hand into a series of supplementary pamphlets, a procedure he followed during the 1740s. By 1750, as the annual prefaces for that and the next year announced, the flow of work from the editor's correspondents had convinced Cave that the public at large was a more promising source of edification
By 1778, when John Nichols—a young printer who had already contributed several pieces to the magazine—bought part of the proprietorship, the partnership between The Gentleman's Magazine and a reading public which wrote for it had been firmly cemented through two decades of collaboration. The manner in which Nichols cultivated and extended an arrangement he inherited was characteristic of a man of his energies. Although the procedures of submission and selection functioned so well as to need little stimulation, he seems to have given considerable impetus to the practice of writing for the magazine. Through a column he instituted, he established public communication with correspondents, and he doubled the number of pages in each issue from 1783 onwards. Nichols remained in charge of the magazine's affairs until his death some fifty years later.
His son and grandson, both of whom worked with him in managing The Gentleman's Magazine, shared in the decision to limit the participation of contributing writers beyond a paid staff when the elder Nichols died in 1826. That decision apparently had more to do with contemporary publishing fashions and with the presence of strong editorial associates such as John Mitford than with disinclination to admit unsolicited work into the magazine. Nonetheless, between 1834, when they began to publish a New Series, and 1856, when the family sold the proprietorship, the policies of John Bowyer Nichols and John Gough Nichols effected only a limitation upon rather than the exclusion of contributions from writers in the public at large.
We may understand with greater immediacy the habits of mind and qualities of thought and the motives shared by the magazine's many contributors by looking closely at individual writers whose work appeared during this period. The two considered here are representative in many specific ways of the magazine's broad clientele. The Rev. William Tooke was a prolific author noted particularly for his works on Russia. Before he achieved wide public recognition, however, his frequent contribution to The Gentleman's Magazine served as a crucial means of development in his authorial practice. Tooke's articles nearly spanned the period of John Nichols' editorship. The second writer, Edward Phillips of Melksham, was ten years younger than Nichols and Tooke. His essays in the magazine, which he seems to have produced in his later years and which thus incorporate the reflections of a lifetime, reveal many of the preoccupations of educated people in this era as they attempted to come to terms with cultural change. Phillips' correspondence with the editors of The Gentleman's Magazine has recently come to light in the massive manuscript archives of the Nichols family.[2] His letters
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