Spectator was a short-lived daily publication (1711-12; 1714). Edited by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, it was a successor to Steele’s Tatler (1709-1711). Articles were written by the imaginary ‘Mr. Spectator’, who offered commentary on the London social scene and introduced several members of a ‘Spectator Club’, whose ‘histories’ and ‘commentaries’ also appear in its pages. Mr. Spectator notes in the first issue, ‘I have been often told by my Friends that it is Pity so many useful Discoveries which I have made, should be in the Possession of a Silent Man…I shall publish a Sheet full of Thoughts every Morning, for the Benefit of my Contemporaries’. The number of readers is hard to quantify, since the publication was part of the London coffee house culture, and one issue could be read by hundreds.]]> [Joseph Addison and Richard Steele]]]> Periodicals]]> The Illustrated London News (1842-2003) transformed the reporting of current affairs, politics, and world events. It was the world’s first illustrated weekly newspaper, visibly different from its competitors. The ILN initially featured a large number of wood engravings; photographic reproductions began to appear in the 1890s. The paper sold at sixpence a copy and achieved impressive circulation figures through special editions, including the celebration of the opening of the Crystal Palace in 1851, and the death of the Duke of Wellington in 1852 . The ILN’s reputation was confirmed by its reports and photographs from the Crimean War in 1855, when sales reached more than 200,000 copies a week.

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[Herbert Ingram]]]> Periodicals]]>
The Boy’s Own Paper (1879-1967) was published by the Religious Tract Society to counter the effects of penny dreadful magazines with ‘pure, entertaining, and useful reading, such as should find a place on the shelves of every Boy’s Library’. At a penny a week, the journal offered wholesome, patriotic adventure fiction by the likes of R.M. Ballantyne and Jules Verne. By the end of the century, its circulation figures were almost 250,000 and its readership stretched across the British Empire. The publishers sold Boy’s Own Annual bindings at the end of each year – priced at between seven and nine shillings, depending upon the trim – to allow owners to collate weekly issues. The tiger featured here was the sole coloured plate of the year 1887.

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[Religious Tract Society]]]> Periodicals]]>
Punch, or the London Charivari (1841-1992, revived 1996-2002) was founded by a group that included social reformer Henry Mayhew, engraver Ebenezer Landells, and journalist Mark Lemon. It quickly became known for its lively political and social satire. Early circulation figures were modest at around 6000, but by 1860 they had risen to 40,000 copies each week. Contributors included Richard Doyle, William Makepeace Thackeray, John Tenniel, and George du Maurier. Punch was a great supporter of the 1851 Great Exhibition at Hyde Park and is credited as the originator of the name, ‘The Crystal Palace’.]]> [Henry Mayhew, et al.]]]> Periodicals]]> The Union Jack (1880-1883, 1894-1933) was a weekly magazine for boys. Its founding editor, the novelist W.H.G. Kingston, died only a few months after the first issue appeared. The adventure novelist G.A. Henty succeeded him. Initially, the journal struggled against its more popular competitor, the Boy’s Own Paper, and it folded in 1883. It was revived in 1894 by Alfred Harmsworth (later Viscount Northcliffe). The detective Sexton Blake – modelled on Sherlock Holmes – is credited with the Union Jack’s recovery, to the extent that, in 1933, the journal changed its name to Detective Weekly.]]> [Edited by W. H. G. Kingston]]]> Periodicals]]> The Girl’s Own Paper (1880-1965) was, like its counterpart for boys, published by the Religious Tract Society. It is regarded as the most influential publication for girls of the nineteenth century, and cultural critics suggest that it played an important role in shaping ideas of girlhood. Like the Boy’s Own Paper, its weekly editions could be preserved in an ‘annual’ binding, which was sold at the end of each year. The publication’s contents emphasized education and self-improvement, though there were also a number of lively adventure stories. Girl readers were invited to write in with questions and contributions.]]> [Religious Tract Society]]]> Periodicals]]> Is this letter Jane Austen’s first appearance in print? Some scholars think so. The Loiterer was a weekly periodical launched in early 1789 by James Austen, Jane’s brother. Printed in Oxford, it lasted for about fourteen months; the final issue appeared on 20 March 1790. ‘Sophia Sentiment’ was a character in William Hayley’s comedy The Mausoleum (1785), a work that Jane Austen owned. This three-paragraph letter shows the spark of humour that might well have come from a teenage Jane Austen.

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[James Austen]]]> Periodicals]]>
A Spectator [Jane Porter]]]> Periodicals]]> The Monthly Magazine (1796-1843) first appeared under the editorship of John Aikin, and it became a favourite among liberal and radical readers. Aikin and his sister, Anna Letitia Barbauld, had collaborated on Evenings at Home (1792-1796), a series of stories for children, and Barbauld occasionally wrote for the Monthly. In the essay on display, she challenges some of Rousseau’s ideas regarding children and education. At the time, most periodicals published articles anonymously or under a pseudonym. However, the London publishing world was a small community, and the identity of regular contributors was often an open secret. Here, a previous owner has added ‘Mrs. Barbauld’ beneath the article’s title.

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[Anna Barbauld]]]> Periodicals]]>
The New Monthly Magazine (1814-1884) was an early production of Henry Colburn, one of the century’s most important publishers. Each issue included an engraved portrait of a well-known figure. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge thought the drawing from which this engraving was made ‘the most striking likeness ever taken’ of him. This issue includes ‘Anecdotes of Lord Byron’ by a still unidentified writer, who offers some colourful details (Byron ‘never went to sleep without a pair of pistols and a dagger by his side’). Readers were also treated to the first printing of ‘The Vampyre’, supposedly written by Lord Byron but in fact the work of his doctor and friend, John William Polidori.

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Edited by Alaric Alexander Watts]]> Periodicals]]>
Pierce Egan’s Life in London began in July 1821 as a monthly publication. It followed the high and low adventures of three young men about town: Tom, Jerry, and Logic. The series was an instant success and inspired a number of theatrical versions (and yes, the animated cat and mouse take their names from Egan’s characters). The dazzling illustrations, by artist brothers Isaac and George Cruikshank, were central to the work’s popularity. George Cruikshank would become one of the century’s most successful commercial artists, illustrating some of Charles Dickens’s early writings, including Oliver Twist.

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Pierce Egan]]> Periodicals]]>
Elizabeth Barrett was already a famous poet when she secretly married Robert Browning in 1846 and moved with him to Italy. In the following years, she produced some of her finest works, including Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and the long poem Aurora Leigh (1856). She was an early contributor to Thackeray’s Cornhill Magazine, which was a rival to Dickens’s All the Year Round. Barrett Browning’s ‘A Musical Instrument’, a meditation on the suffering that produces art, appears here with a striking wood engraving after Frederic Leighton. Leighton, later president of the Royal Academy, designed Barrett Browning’s tomb in Florence.

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Edited by William Makepeace Thackeray]]> Periodicals]]>
Edinburgh Review. He had previously described William Wordsworth as a talented but misguided poet. For Jeffrey, Wordsworth’s The Excursion, a 400-page discursive poem set in the countryside, was the last straw: ‘The case of Mr. Wordsworth, we perceive, is now manifestly hopeless; and we give him up as altogether incurable, and beyond the power of criticism’.]]> [Francis Jeffrey]]]> Periodicals]]> Examiner and its editor Leigh Hunt. John Gibson Lockhart produced a series of articles for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine mocking the Cockney School, and his arrogant critique of Keats was particularly vicious. Noting Keats’s previous employment, Lockhart wrote, “It is a better and wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John’. Another journal, the Quarterly Review, also attacked Keats, leading poet Percy Shelley to claim (falsely) in his 1821 elegy Adonais that harsh reviews had doomed his friend.]]> Z. [John Gibson Lockhart]]]> Periodicals]]> In 1848, Charlotte Brontë published her first novel Jane Eyre under the pseudonym Currer Bell. Elizabeth Rigby, writing anonymously, produced a particularly scathing review. Rigby – one of the first women to write for the Quarterly – declared Jane Eyre ‘a decidedly vulgar-minded woman’ and Rochester ‘a strange brute’. If the author was a woman, wrote Rigby, ‘she had long forfeited the society of her own sex’. Unaware of her reviewer’s identity, Brontë responded, “I am afraid he is no gentleman’.

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[Elizabeth Rigby]]]> Periodicals]]>
Poet Thomas Pringle edited the 1829-1833 issues of the popular annual Friendship’s Offering. Early in his editorship, he contacted many of the most popular writers of the day in search of contributions. William Wordsworth and Joanna Baillie politely declined, but the Scottish poet James Hogg sent him several works, including ‘The Minstrel Boy’, which appeared with a suitably sentimental engraving of a young shepherd.

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The Ettrick Shepherd [James Hogg]]]> Periodicals]]>
Friendship’s Offering and a request for further work. Their relationship soured when Pringle deemed one of Hogg’s later contributions to be inappropriate for his mostly middle-class and female readers.]]> Thomas Pringle]]> Manuscripts]]> Forget Me Not and Friendship’s Offering, they were published in November, just in time for Christmas. The poet and humourist Thomas Hood edited the 1830 Gem. Its frontispiece (inspired by one of the stories included) and title page suggest the ornate style typical of these publications. By the early 1860s, the proliferation of other journals and gift books brought the era of the annual to a close.]]> Edited by Thomas Hood]]> Periodical]]> Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine was founded by the bookseller John Bell as a monthly magazine for women. Noted for its vibrant fashion plates, the journal also published serial fiction and articles on politics, science, and the theatre. Notable writers including Jane Porter and Mary Shelley contributed work, but readers were also encouraged to submit articles of their own for publication.]]> Founder John Bell]]> Periodical]]> Westminster Review (1824-1914) was known primarily for its social and political engagement. It was neither popular nor successful in its early years. By the 1850s, the Westminster had become a respected journal, noted for its intellectualism. The writer George Eliot was assistant editor from 1851 to 1854, although she had in reality done most of the editorial work herself. ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ was one of her last essays for the Westminster, and it sought to expose the ridiculous nature of many works for and by women, a concern to which she was to return in her fiction.]]> George Eliot]]> Periodical]]> The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (1852-1879) was published by Samuel Beeton. Its aim was to become ‘an encouraging friend to those of our country women already initiated in the secret of making ‘‘home happy.”’ Between 1859 and 1861, the journal included regular supplements by Samuel’s wife Isabella, and these became the basis for her 1861 Book of Household Management. A conservative publication, themagazine featured domestic advice and fashion tips for the middle-class woman. The monthly publication also included ‘The Englishwoman’s Conversazione’, an advice section which attracted some notoriety in the 1860s through a series of letters relating to the tight-lacing of corsets and the disciplining of young women.

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Samuel Beeton]]> Periodical]]>
Bentley’s Miscellany (1837-1868) offered an assortment of serial fiction, short stories, historical writing, reviews (musical, culinary, and literary), and other snippets of information. Charles Dickens served as the journal’s inaugural editor, although he soon severed ties with its owner, Richard Bentley, whose interventionist approach to editing infuriated the up-and-coming novelist. This instalment of Dickens’s Oliver Twist features George Cruikshank’s famous illustration of Oliver asking for more. William Harrison Ainsworth succeeded Dickens as editor in 1839, and his serialized novel, Jack Sheppard, was even more successful than Dickens’s classic tale.

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Charles Dickens]]> Periodical]]>
Household Words (1850-1859) was ‘conducted’ and founded by Charles Dickens in collaboration with his publishers, Bradbury & Evans. The publication featured articles dealing with social reform, emigration, and the British Empire, alongside novels in serial form. Works by Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Reade, and Dickens’s own Hard Times appeared over the years. Sales sat at around 40,000 copies per week (it was priced at tuppence per issue), although readership could triple for special holiday editions, and this figure does not account for the many working readers who would band together to buy a shared copy. All articles were published anonymously, yet the identities of featured novelists tended to be an open secret.

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Charles Dickens]]> Periodical]]>
All the Year Round (1859-1895) was founded by Dickens in response to a quarrel with his publishers, Bradbury & Evans. The new journal was strikingly similar to its predecessor, Household Words. Each issue began with an instalment of a novel, with Dickens effectively self-publishing both A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, since he was both owner and editor of the publication. Authors of serials were now identified by name. Sales were typically around 100,000 copies per week, and contributors included Edward Bulwer Lytton, Frances Trollope, and Edmund Yates.

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Charles Dickens]]> Periodical]]>
Leisure Hour: A Family Journal of Instruction and Recreation (1852-1905) was a weekly periodical published by the Religious Tract Society. Committed to providing the public with appropriate, moral reading for the Sabbath, the Leisure Hour was usually sold on a Saturday. The contents included religious poetry and stories from the Bible, along with articles detailing the work of missionaries, and fiction that upheld the RTS’s values. The publication was priced at a penny, making it accessible to working-class readers. It occasionally included colour plates, as is exemplified here by the rather startling image of a young man having his head measured by a phrenologist. Contributors included Margaret Oliphant, Frances Browne, and Mary and William Howitt.]]> Religious Tract Society]]> Periodical]]>