Despite their attempts to document exhaustively the work of particular authors, scholars often overlook the contributions of those writers to periodical publications. One result is that close inspection of periodicals is likely to yield a trove of unrecorded material. In what follows I would like to present my own recent gleanings from four such sources: The Nation of London, The Freeman and The Measure: A Journal of Poetry, both of New York, and the Dublin Magazine.
While the findings are of varying significance individually, they are valuable cumulatively for the point they drive home about the need to investigate newspapers, magazines, and journals when considering the output of a writer. Though I confine the list below to primary materials, the entries point to the wealth of secondary comment that can also be found. Incidentally included here, for instance, are previously unnoted reviews of Willa Cather, John Galsworthy, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Rebecca West, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf. (The same pages of these journals contain additional responses to these writers as well as to people such as Joseph Conrad, Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Edith Wharton.) The discoveries here also hint of other primary sources not yet fully identified. Copyright notices accompanying two articles of G. K. Chesterton, for example, suggest earlier publication in the New York World, a newspaper now extremely difficult to find. Periodicals that print letters to the editor provide still another opportunity for scholars, because such columns sometimes include reactions to a writer's publications.
One important source for the records that follow is the London publication
The Nation. While the contents of some periodicals may be neglected because they are not indexed adequately, this one may have received less than its due because it is sometimes confused with a New York periodical of the same name. Its presence may be further obscured by the numerous shifts in its identity: founded in 1907, it absorbed The Athenaeum in 1921 (adding that name to its own title) and then merged with The New Statesman in 1931 (to become The New Statesman and Nation). Henry William Massingham, who previously had written for or edited some five newspapers, was its influential editor from 1907 until April 1923; his role extended to reviewing most of the productions of the London stage. The report below is based on a survey of volumes 8 through 22 (from October 1910 through March 1918).
The Freeman, published in New York, was founded by Helen Swift Neilson. It ran weekly from 17 March 1920 through 5 March 1924, appearing in eight volumes of 208 numbers. The editors of A Literary History of the United States describe it in the fourth edition of their Bibliography volume (1974) as "a liberal weekly magazine of political and literary criticism which achieved great distinction" (p. 63). Frank Luther Mott devotes twelve pages (pp. 88-99) to it in volume 5 of his History of American Magazines (1968), the best account in brief compass. The most prominent member of the editorial staff was Van Wyck Brooks, who wrote a volume titled "A Reviewer's Notebook." Likewise prominent, as reviewers and essayists, were the Colums, Padraic and his wife Mary.
The Measure: A Journal of Poetry began in March 1921 and ran for sixty numbers to February 1926. Its nine-member editorial board included Padraic Colum, who remained in that role throughout the journal's lifetime. Colum was elected the quarterly "Acting Editor" for numbers 4, 5, and 6 (June, July, and August, 1921), succeeding Maxwell Anderson.
Earlier in these pages I have reported the results of a search in the original
Dublin Magazine, which ran from 1923 to 1958 ("Padraic Colum in The Dublin Magazine," Studies in Bibliography 49 [1996], 284-290). The current treatment is less ambitious, adducing only a letter signed by T. S. Eliot, George Bernard Shaw, and ten others, though it might be noted that the magazine is also a rich source for unreported reviews of Eliot's writings.
