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
presence grew avuncular: he served as an arbiter and genial host.
Correspondents almost invariably addressed him among their opening
remarks. This matter of form attended to, however, the contributing writers
developed discourse almost entirely intended for one another. The pages of
The Gentleman's Magazine became a forum in which many
individual voices were to be heard, and each was to be given an equal
hearing (or at least the opportunity for one). The value and significance of
such an opportunity were not lost on several generations of literate men and
women in England, continental Europe, and America.
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
and entertainment for the magazine's readers than was the assortment of
periodical literature already in the hands of this readership. That after Cave
died in 1754 he was succeeded by proprietors with less aggressive instincts,
ideally suited as editors to compile and to arrange, doubless helped to
confirm Cave's redefinition of editorial policies which was their immediate
inheritance.
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
there constitute perhaps the only remaining traces of the personal
circumstances out of which his essays in the magazine emerged. Lasting
well over a century, for insight into the literary lives of persons such as
Edward Phillips, we have relied on the selected correspondence which
Nichols and his son published in the
Literary Anecdotes and
the
Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth
Century.
But Phillips' letters were not selected for either series, and even Tooke's
correspondence, we can now see, was edited considerably. The treatment
of Tooke and Phillips in the present study has been informed greatly by a
reading of the letters which they and the many persons like them exchanged
with members of the Nichols family and which today are available again to
introduce us to the realities within which they lived.
