University of Virginia Library

The following is the fifth installment in my series of articles designed to expand and, where necessary, to correct James M. Kuist's The Nichols File of The Gentleman's Magazine: Attributions of Authorship and Other Documentation in Editorial Papers at the Folger Library (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1982). For researchers active in the field of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British press history, especially those familiar with the Gentleman's Magazine and with John Nichols, the GM's long-time editor and presiding genius, Kuist's Nichols File needs little introduction. Based as it is on marginal annotations faithfully recorded by successive generations of the Nichols family in the staff copy of the Gentleman's Magazine, The Nichols File has provided scholars with nearly 13,000 attributions of authorship of hitherto anonymous letters, articles, reviews, and poems appearing in the Magazine from its beginning in 1731 through 1856, the year the Nichols family relinquished ownership of the enterprise.

Kuist's Nichols File does not purport, however, to provide a complete listing of the author of every contribution to the Gentleman's Magazine during the first 125 years of its history. As Kuist made the deliberate decision to include only those attributions of authorship specifically recorded in handwriting on the pages of the staff copy of the GM, The Nichols File is perforce limited in its scope and contains a multitude of omissions. Despite the care lavished on their massive task of annotation by John Nichols's son John Bowyer[1] and others in his family, vast numbers of attributions slipped through the net, some through haste or carelessness, some because their authorship defied all efforts at identification, others conversely because their authors' identities seemed at the time too obvious for anyone to bother writing down. Fortunately, thousands of the missing attributions of authorship can still be supplied through a variety of means: lists of known pseudonyms and sets of initials contained in Kuist's own index, information available in contemporary literary memoirs and the GM's columns of obituaries, the matching of authors with the towns and sometimes even street addresses

whence they wrote, the unscrambling of anagrams, and a gold mine of hundreds of leads concerning the authorship of GM contributions provided in Kuist's Catalogue II, which lists manuscripts, documents, and unpublished letters housed in the Folger's Nichols File.

The present article undertakes to update Kuist's Nichols File by providing 523 new or corrected attributions of authorship representing 183 contributors and covering the period from 1827 through 1848. It thus serves as a continuation of my four companion-piece articles, "Attributions of Authorship in the Gentleman's Magazine, 1731 — 77: A Supplement to Kuist," Studies in Bibliography 44 (1991): 271 — 302; "Attributions of Authorship . . ., 1778 — 92 . . .," Studies in Bibliography 45 (1992): 158 — 187; "Attributions of Authorship . . ., 1793 — 1808 . . .," Studies in Bibliography 46 (1993): 320 — 349; and "Attributions of Authorship . . ., 1809 — 26 . . .," Studies in Bibliography 47 (1994): 164 — 195.

In some respects opportunities for supplying missing attributions of authorship are more limited in the time period covered by this article than in the years spanned by the previous four installments. With changing times and customs, fewer contributors indulged in the literary game of signing letters with reverse initials, classical pseudonyms, or artfully crafted anagrams. With altered editorial policies after John Nichols's death in 1826 and the commencement of new series in 1834 and 1856, less and less space was allotted to letters to the editor from the GM's far-flung readership. The thousands of letters to Sylvanus Urban, by turns whimsical or argumentative or recondite, that had been the mainstay of the Magazine in John Nichols's day dwindled in the decades after his death to a trickle, relegated increasingly to the Minor Correspondence page or to the filler rounding out each monthly number. Mr. Urban in his mid-nineteenth-century incarnation was clearly less interested in the topics and passions that had preoccupied his eighteenth-century readers: the interpretation of a troublesome passage in Juvenal;[2] details of a newly discovered Roman coin;[3] helpful methods for destroying black beetles in London kitchens;[4] the elucidation of the origins of the phrase "to run amuck";[5] the minute description of "a curious, and . . . non-descript . . . caterpillar . . . uncommonly large and beautiful," found in a potato field in Kent.[6] Under the direction of Bowyer Nichols and his editor, the Rev. John Mitford, longer articles and reviews, written by a staff of paid contributors, replaced the myriad short items and letters on a vast variety of subjects that had formerly crowded Mr. Urban's pages (Kuist 4). In addition, contributions tended more and more to be signed, as authors ceased to bother with maintaining the pretense of anonymity.

The decades of the 1830's, 1840's, and 1850's do, however, offer new opportunities

for identification of contributors from an entirely different quarter — the thousands of manuscript articles and unprinted letters dating mainly from that period which form a separate part of the Nichols File at the Folger and which Kuist lists in his Catalogue II. With the help of information contained in Catalogue II it is possible to arrive at hundreds of additional attributions of authorship, though the use of Catalogue II requires caution. Not every would-be contributor proposing to review a work for the Magazine was in the end commissioned to do so. In addition, as Catalogue II demonstrates, in various instances several writers sent letters to Bowyer Nichols and his staff offering to review the same publication. In the present article all attributions of authorship based on offers from would-be contributors to supply book reviews, memoirs, and the like have been assigned a question mark unless the evidence makes it quite clear that the proffered material was actually accepted.

The mechanics in this article remain the same as those used in the four previous installments. All finds are cross-listed, with each item appearing in both the Chronological Listing and the Synopsis by Contributor. The Chronological Listing utilizes short titles throughout and employs the following designations:

• L: letter to Sylvanus Urban
• A: article, note, or query (including "Minor Correspondence" items)
• R: review
• V: poetry
• O: obituary
• S: staff item of editorial content

As usual the Chronological Listing provides in brackets the source of each attribution of authorship, the abbreviation "Sig." designating items assigned on the basis of known pseudonyms or initials, especially when internal evidence (for example, the incidence of place-names) corroborates the attributions. Full names of authors (plus birth and death dates when available) appear in the Synopsis by Contributor, the two William Robinsons being differentiated by the abbreviations "Eld." or "Yngr." Abbreviated titles in the Chronological Listing are as follows:

• BMGC British Museum. General Catalogue of Printed Books. 263 vols. Photo-lithographic ed. to 1955. London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1959 — 66.
• DNB Dictionary of National Biography. 1908 — 1909 ed.
• Eng. Cat. English Catalogue of Books . . ., 1801 — 1836. Ed. Robert Alexander Peddie and Quintin Waddington. London: Publishers Circular, n.d.
• GM Gentleman's Magazine.
• Illust. Nichols, John. Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century. 8 vols. London, 1817 — 58.
• Kuist Kuist, James M. The Nichols File of The Gentleman's Magazine: Attributions of Authorship and Other Documentation in Editorial Papers at the Folger Library. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1982.