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Notes
Documentation for the following discussion of the magazine's history may be found in the introduction to my book, The Nichols File of "The Gentleman's Magazine" (Madison, WI: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1982), pp. 3-22, and in my earlier monograph, The Works of John Nichols: An Introduction (New York: Kraus Reprints, 1968).
The most extensive collections of archival materials on the Nichols family and their various enterprises are to be found today at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Columbia University Library, the Bodleian Library, and the British Library. Manuscript letters and other documents are also to be found in the Osborn collection at Yale, at the John Rylands in Manchester, and at the Advocates Library in Edinburgh. The Nichols File contains a catalogue of materials at the Folger and includes a discussion of some of the materials available at other sites.
I have not thus far identified articles written either by the Rev. William Tooke or by his son William beyond those in The Nichols File. I must here record that the assignment of work attributed to the two men in my book contains several errors. The handwritten attributions in the editorial file copy refer ambiguously to "Tooke" or to "W Tooke" or to "Mr Tooke" at each of the works included in my listing. Fairly arbitrarily, I assigned the installments of the long work on Horace to the younger Tooke: he was the first to use the initials "W. T." and he shared his father's interests both in literature and in Russia. I did not at the time consult the elder Tooke's obituary in the magazine in which, as I indicate later in this essay, reference is made to his authorship of the commentary in question. On the basis of place as indicated in the headings of the printed articles, I now assign to the younger Tooke only the following items listed in my catalogue: the first item; the nine items in the next column beginning with the note on Dr. Beadon; and the final three items in the listing. All others I now assign to the Rev. Tooke, though the two obituary notices (see hereafter) may have been written by either man.
See among others his letter dated 20 July 1782 O. S. (Bodleian MS. Eng. lett. c. 366, f. 124): "I read the volume of the Gentleman's Magazine which is come over, and there discover numberless traces of J. N."
The motto is explained (without documentation) in the account of the younger William Tooke in the DNB. The Rev. Tooke's playful references to his manifold warfare, at various places in his articles, make the motto pretty accessible.
That on James Ward in 1806 (LXXVI, ii, 985-987) was doubtless by the senior Tooke, an old friend of Ward. He may also have written the obituary of Nathaniel Rix in 1820 (XC, ii, 375) since he appears to have been working actively up to the time of his own death later that autumn. Neither article bears a signature in print, and the marginal attributions in editorial records are ambiguous without other documentary evidence.
In searching for other works he may have published, the only one I have found over the signatures he used is an article in three installments entitled "The Science of Political Economy," signed "E. P.," in the New Monthly Magazine in 1821 (I, 329-335; 476-484; and 701-707). Although the expository style is similar to that of Phillips' essays in The Gentleman's Magazine, the subject is not one which he addressed even in passing in the Gentleman's, and it seems to me unlikely that he was the author of this article. In his correspondence that I have seen with the Nichols printing firm, he refers to a slim volume of his work for which the firm arranged publication. I do not know its title. The volume apparently found few buyers, and I have not found it in catalogues of the standard British and American repositories.
LXXXVII, i, 512-514. At this time, the June number and mid-year Supplement were published, probably together, at the beginning of the next month. As published, the "Essay on Greatness of Mind" is dated 2 June (with no indication of place). Both the note of salutation and the essay are signed "E. P."
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