SOURCE: Mott, Frank Luther. “General Periodicals in the Era of Expansion.” In A History of American Magazines: 1741-1850, pp. 339-74. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1930.

[In the following excerpt, Mott surveys developments in the American periodical from 1825 to mid-century, with special focus on women's magazines and literary weeklies.]

POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CONDITIONS IN 1825

The years immediately following 1825 were epochal in practically all fields of endeavor in most of Europe and America. From the accession of Charles X to the French throne in 1824 events ran on rapidly to the revolution of 1830; Belgium achieved her independence in this latter year; Spanish liberalism submitted to defeat when confronted by a French army in 1823, but was again active a few years later; the young Mazzini, graduated from law school in 1826, was having his first experiences with the Carbonari and was soon to forge the thunderbolt of Young Italy; in spite of Metternich and his severe censorship of the press and the universities, the spirit of liberalism was far from dead in the German states; and in Greece, the national flag at last floated triumphant in 1829. In short, the monarchic reaction to the French Revolution had spent its force, and all Europe was yeasty with liberal reform in government. England was no exception; progress there was steady throughout the twenties toward the enactment of the revolutionary Reform Bill of 1832. In literature as well as in politics, change was in the air: Goethe's work, and the period of German Romanticism, were over some years before the master's death in 1832; while in France Hugo published his Odes et Ballades in 1826, so that this date may be taken as the beginning of the French romantic poetry. In England romanticism was being modified by the new industrial, social, and economic forces; Carlyle is the voice of the period, and his first book appeared in 1825.¹

All these foreign tendencies, movements and events were important to the people of the United States; they were all mirrored more or less directly and copiously in those records of American thinking and feeling, the magazines. But certain distinctively American conditions and events also serve to fix the years 1825-30 as epochal. The West was just feeling its gianthood; and when, in 1825, the House of Representatives defeated Andrew Jackson for the presidency in spite of the fact that he had polled both a larger popular vote and a larger electoral vote than his rivals, the West formed a coalition with the South and elected “Old Hickory” triumphantly and unmistakably four years later. The accession of Jackson to the presidency represents no ordinary transition from one administration to another; it involved such important changes in policy that it is taken by all historians as marking the beginning of a new political era. Industrially and socially, too, the times were epochal. The Erie Canal was finished in 1825; the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was begun in 1828; the country-to-town movement had already become apparent; the Working-Men's Party of Philadelphia foreshadowed organized labor in 1828; and there was remarkable expansion in manufactures, finance, and investment. All these phenomena were initial events in great movements. In literature, too, some proud beginnings had been made, and 1825 saw Irving with four books to his credit and travelling delightedly in Europe, Cooper engaged in writing his fourth novel, and Bryant newly come to New York to follow up a reputation already considerable. Paulding and Halleck were well known in 1825, but Emerson was still studying divinity, Hawthorne had just immured himself in his Salem monastery, Longfellow was finishing at Bowdoin, Poe was ready to enter the University of Virginia, and Whittier in this year appeared first in print in William Lloyd Garrison's newspaper.

A PERIOD OF EXPANSION IN PERIODICALS

Moreover, 1825, as has been pointed out already, was the year in which the Port Folio was suspended, to appear thereafter in an ineffectual postscript; and in the next year Atkinson's Casket (forerunner of Graham's Magazine, one of the greatest periodicals of the era) first made its appearance. In the years immediately following 1825 there was an extraordinary outburst of magazine activity which paralleled the expansion in many other lines of development; this was particularly noticeable among the weekly literary papers. “This is the golden age of periodicals!”² exclaimed one magazine in 1831; and though some later periods were to be far more golden, these years did bring forth a flowering of periodical publications which seemed stupendous at the time and is still notable. “What! Will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?” quoted the New-York Mirror. “Another yet? I'll see no more! And yet—” And then it continued, dropping the quotation, and speaking from an unusually wide observation in the field of periodical publishing:

These United States are fertile in most things, but in periodicals they are extremely luxuriant. They spring up as fast as mushrooms, in every corner, and like all rapid vegetation, bear the seeds of early decay within them. … They put forth their young green leaves in the shape of promises and prospectuses—blossom through a few numbers—and then comes “a frost, a killing frost,” in the form of bills due and debts unpaid. This is the fate of hundreds, but hundreds more are found to supply their place, to tread in their steps, and share their destiny. The average age of periodicals in this country is found to be six months.³

Thus wrote General Morris in the beginning of our period. As the years went on there was no diminution in this publishing exuberance, and toward the end of the period we find C. F. Briggs saying in his Broadway Journal that “the whole tendency of the age is magazineward,”⁴ and Charles A. Dana observing in the Harbinger:

Among the animal tribes there are instances of remarkable fecundity, but not the most fruitful can boast of offspring more numerous than this family of magazines.⁵

Exact figures are impossible to obtain, but it is fairly safe to say that there were somewhat less than a hundred periodicals other than newspapers in 1825, and about six hundred in 1850.⁶ If the average age of these periodicals was two years—which is a more probable figure than the Mirror's “six months”—then four or five thousand of them were published during our period. Even the names of a large proportion of these ephemerae are sunk in oblivion.

In making a cursory survey of the more important magazines of the time, attention will be directed first to the general literary monthlies of the leading cities, while the quarterlies and weeklies, as well as the class periodicals and the magazines of the more remote sections, will be reserved for special consideration.

GENERAL MONTHLY MAGAZINES

It may be mentioned in the beginning that the only literary monthlies of importance which lived over from the former period into the one now under consideration were the New-York Review and the United States Literary Gazette, combined in 1826 as the United States Review and abandoned the next year; and the 1826-27 postscript of the Port Folio just referred to. Two local and short-lived early ventures may be named here also, before proceeding to the more important monthlies of the period: the Boston Monthly Magazine,⁷ begun June, 1825, and continued thereafter through fourteen months by Samuel L. Knapp, the biographer and journalist; and the Philadelphia Monthly Magazine, begun October, 1827, by Dr. Isaac Clarkson Snowden and continued after his death by B. R. Evans until it had completed two years. Both of these were creditable but undistinguished.

In 1826 Samuel C. Atkinson and Charles Alexander, publishers of the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post, founded the Casket: Flowers of Literature, Wit and Sentiment.⁸ Alexander dropped out after two years, but Atkinson continued for ten years to issue the Casket in connection with the Post, utilizing frequently the same material for both. In 1839 an ambitious young publicist named George R. Graham bought the Casket and soon changed it from a cheaply printed catch-all with borrowed engravings into an attractive magazine. The next year Graham bought the Gentleman's Magazine,⁹ edited by the famous actor William E. Burton. Burton and Charles Alexander had founded this magazine in 1837, and Burton had been having a good time editing it for three and a half years, but now he needed his money for theatrical ventures and was glad to dispose of it to young Graham. It had been a lively and attractive serial, far from Puritanical, and filled with the personality of its actor-editor. With these two magazines the new owner made a combination which he called Graham's Magazine,¹⁰ and which not only became one of the three or four most important magazines in the United States but, in the five years 1841-45, displayed a brilliance which has seldom been matched in American magazine history. Edgar Allan Poe was literary and contributing editor during fifteen months in 1841-42, and was succeeded by Rufus W. Griswold. Bryant, Cooper, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Willis, and Paulding were among the more famous of the contributors in those years. The plates by Sartain were often excellent; and one of the most admirable things about the magazine was a certain liveliness in the writing not often achieved in these times. But perhaps George R. Graham's chief contribution to the development of American magazines was his demonstration of the fact that good pay to contributors was a policy which yielded golden returns.

One of Graham's star contributors was Nathaniel Parker Willis, an outstanding magazine figure of the times. In 1829 he had started his own American Monthly Magazine¹¹ in Boston, but his spicy style and general insouciance were without honor in his own country, and after two years he transferred his magazine to New York, where it was united with the Mirror, of which he became a contributing editor residing abroad.

A more notable Boston venture was the New-England Magazine,¹² founded in 1831 by Joseph T. Buckingham, formerly of the Polyanthos and the New-England Galaxy, and his son Edwin. It published some memorable literature, notably fifteen pieces by Hawthorne. The American Monthly Review,¹³ a Cambridge periodical founded in 1832 chiefly for the criticism of American books, and edited by Professor Sidney Willard of Harvard, was absorbed by the New-England Magazine at the end of 1833. In 1835 Park Benjamin got possession of the publication and the next year combined it with another American Monthly Magazine,¹⁴ which had been begun in New York in 1833. An attempt was made to publish this periodical in New York and Boston simultaneously, but Boston did not rise to the bait and the American Monthly returned to its Knickerbocker fleshpots. For a time Charles Fenno Hoffman and Benjamin were associated in the editorship, but eventually the undertaking was given over, and the subscription list transferred to Horace Greeley's weekly New-Yorker, upon which Benjamin found employment.

Down in Philadelphia the poet Summer Lincoln Fairfield began the North American Magazine in November, 1832. His wife, Jane Fairfield, tells in her Life of her husband¹⁵ the story of how she and the poet's mother canvassed for the subscriptions which made the magazine possible; something of their trials in this work is shown in the acrimonious controversy which the magazine carried on with John T. Adams, of the Massachusetts Centinel, who traduced and insulted these women when they were working in Boston.¹⁶ Fairfield's magazine, which was called the North American Quarterly after April, 1835, was well printed, and contained some good criticism. There was much of John Howard Payne, a friend of the editor. Suspended in 1837, the magazine issued two quarterly numbers in 1838 under the management of Nathan C. Brooks, a young school teacher of Baltimore, and was then converted by Brooks into the monthly American Museum of Science, Literature and the Arts. The Museum had Edgar Allan Poe for a contributor, but it survived only ten months—September, 1838, to June, 1839—under the new title.

Probably a chief reason for the failure of the American Monthly was the success of a rival in the New York literary group—the Knickerbocker Magazine.¹⁷ The Knickerbocker got off to bad start in 1833, but in the next year Lewis Gaylord Clark became editor; and thereafter for more than a quarter of a century “Old Knick” was in the forefront of American magazines. Irving, Cooper, Bryant, Halleck, Paulding, and Willis represented New York among the contributors; Longfellow, Hawthorne, Whittier, and Holmes spoke for New England; and Philadelphia and other cities were represented only less conspicuously. Yet, as its name certified, the Knickerbocker was definitely a New York magazine. The feature which chiefly characterized it throughout Clark's editorship was the “Editor's Table,” which abounded with light, good-humored talk, and eventually came to occupy a large proportion of the magazine's space.

There was one magazine of the period which made a success of the admixture of politics and literature: the United States Magazine and Democratic Review,¹⁸ founded in 1837 by an exuberant Irishman named John L. O'Sullivan and his partner S. D. Langtree. Politics furnished a large part of the Democratic's contents; but Hawthorne, Bryant, and Whittier were frequent contributors, as well as many others of somewhat less note. Beginning at Washington, it moved after three years to the publisher's magnet, New York, and continued there up to the eve of the war. A short-lived rival was the American Whig Review¹⁹ of 1845-47.

Another monthly which did much reviewing was Arcturus,²⁰ which, according to its own statement, sustained the “mixed character of a review and a magazine.”²¹ It was founded in December, 1840, by Cornelius Mathews, who later won a fame of some small magnitude by his satire, The Career of Puffer Hopkins. Evert A. Duyckinck was brought in as associate editor, and there was a really good list of contributors; but the journal lasted through only eighteen numbers.

Of yet briefer life were two promising Boston youngsters whose motto here may well be “The good die young.” The Boston Miscellany,²² edited by a younger brother of Edward Everett Hale, in 1842-43, reached but little over a year's age; it numbered Lowell, Hawthorne, Poe, Longfellow, and Thoreau among its contributors. Lowell's own Pioneer²³ (1843) published only three numbers, but they were admirable: Poe, Hawthorne, and Whittier helped to make them so. Dr. Thomas Dunn English's Aristidean, A Magazine of Reviews, Politics and Light Literature, New York, lived but little longer, publishing a single volume in 1845.²⁴ English gained some fame by his sentimental ballad “Ben Bolt,” and by his controversy with Poe. That merciless critic remarked that the editor of the Aristidean “had, for the motto on his magazine cover, the words of Richelieu,—Men call me cruel; I am not: I am just. Here the monosyllables ‘an ass’ should have been appended.”²⁵ English later claimed that an article by Cornelius Mathews killed the Aristidean.²⁶

More popular was Sartain's Union Magazine.²⁷ It was founded in New York by Mrs. Caroline M. Kirkland, the writer of western sketches, in 1847 under the title of the Union Magazine of Literature and Art; but John Sartain, the engraver, moved it to Philadelphia two years later. It bore a strong resemblance to Graham's. Though its tables of contents were not as distinguished as those made up for that magazine, they carried the names of Longfellow, Lowell, Poe, Bryant, and Willis; and in illustration the Union was especially brilliant.

Only two other monthlies need to be mentioned in this roll-call:²⁸ Timothy Dwight Sprague's American Literary Magazine²⁹ (1847-49), published first at Albany and then at Hartford, and Holden's Dollar Magazine, of New York. The former printed contributions by such popular writers as Mrs. Sigourney, Alfred B. Street, and C. A. Goodrich, with a portrait on steel embellishing each number. There was much about manners, including a serial “Short Talks About Good Manners,” written “By an Ex-Member of Society.” After the change to Hartford, Yale professors were frequent contributors. The Dollar Magazine was founded in 1848 by Charles W. Holden, a journalist who died the following year while on a visit to the California gold fields. Charles F. Briggs (“Harry Franco”) was editor for a time. The magazine was a part of the movement for cheap literature which was most noticeable in the weekly field, in the magazines of knowledge, and in the output of pirated English novels. Of all of which more anon. The Dollar Magazine was merged with the weekly North American Miscellany (New York, 1851-54) in August, 1851.

WOMEN'S MAGAZINES

The monthly magazines of general literature were closely related to the magazines designed chiefly for women, and sometimes found in them very difficult competition. Indeed certain of the women's magazines led all their competitors a merry chase, forcing some of the merely masculine periodicals to print fashion plates and household hints. There were those, however, which stood apart and scoffed: among them was the Democratic Review. “The mass of the matter is inanity itself,”³⁰ wrote the literary critic W. A. Jones in discussing in that magazine the contents of the women's periodicals; and later another writer in the same review returned to the charge:

Our sister city of Philadelphia has long been famous for the number of family newspapers and picture magazines which she annually pours forth. … Stories of fashionable life, the most insipid of themes, … stories in which the women are always angels, the men either Adonises or Calibans, life always a ball-room, and in which flirtations and marriages are represented as the great ends of existence … Their fashion plates are the chief glory of the Philadelphia magazines.

But, adds our critic, these plates are “intensely vulgar and often … indecently and shamefully loose”—which was putting it rather strongly.³¹ Charles A. Dana is disgusted by the assumption which these magazines “constantly put forth of being designed for ladies, and of representing in some way the women of the country. … Heaven protect us from such literature!”³² The Christian Examiner was also “grieved and disgusted at the amount of idle, ephemeral, useless fiction which they pour out.”³³ While these criticisms were just enough as applied to much of what was published for women, they disregarded the fact that no small amount of the contents of some of the women's periodicals was of as high a standard as any of the literature printed in the general magazines.

The first women's magazine to reach an age of more than five years was the Ladies' Magazine,³⁴ founded in Boston in 1828 by Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, of whom Elizabeth Oakes Smith once wrote: “Her whole life was a tribute to the respectabilities, decorums, and moralities of life.”³⁵ She meant more than that to her times, however. She was a leader in many public activities, but her greatest work was in the cause of “female education.” She advocated the preparation of women for the teaching profession and the establishment of female seminaries; the Ladies' Magazine shows this purpose on nearly every other page. Not that it was altogether didactic; it was not. But in the midst of the sentimentality with which the magazine reeks, or in the midst of a business announcement, the educational note may be heard. Witness this passage from the Prospectus:

The lover will no longer, when bidding adieu to the “lady of his love,” request her to gaze on that inconstant thing, the moon, so often obscured by clouds, and then remember her vows. He will present her his subscription for the Ladies' Magazine; and the sweet smile with which the gift is received will recur, like a dream of light to his memory, while reflecting that the soft eyes of his charmer are, for his sake, often employed on its pure pages, while her fancy, and taste, and mind, are improving by its scenes, characters and sentiments.³⁶

The above is submitted as something unique in the way of a sales talk, while the subscription premium suggested is, to say the least, attractive. The fact is that, in spite of sentimental trumpery, Mrs. Hale was a practical woman, and her educational activities were extremely valuable. The pages of her magazine were sober and moral, though often mildly entertaining. Mrs. Sigourney, Mrs. Child, Miss Gould, and Miss Sedgwick were among the contributors. There was an engraving, a colored fashion plate, and a piece of music in each of the numbers throughout much of the magazine's file.³⁷ It is doubtful if it was ever very prosperous. Masonic brethren of Mrs. Hale's husband, who had died leaving her with five children and no financial resources, are said to have had a hand in starting the magazine and putting her in charge. After the publication of nine annual volumes, the Ladies' Magazine was combined with a much more successful Philadelphia rival; the fact was thus noted in the American Annals of Education:

The Ladies' Magazine, which has been for nine years devoted, in part, to female education, has recently lost its identity, and, like many a “better half,” assumed the name of a worse one. It is united with the Lady's Book, a periodical of much interest; but far less important, in its tendencies on sound literature, morals, and education.³⁸

But Mrs. Hale was herself transferred to Godey's along with her magazine, and continued in its pages her educational campaigning.

Most prominent of all the women's magazines of the period was Godey's Lady's Book.³⁹ Its story, like those of the other more important magazines of the period, shall have a chapter of its own later in this volume, so there is no need here to do more than suggest its position with respect to the general magazine history of the period. That position was important for several reasons: because of the prominence of Godey's contributors, for to name them over would be to call the roll of the principal writers of America; because of its encouragement to writers, for it was not behind Graham's in liberal payments to contributors; because of its popular success, for by the end of our period its list had reached forty thousand—“an edition unprecedented in this or any other country”;⁴⁰—and because of its influence on its competitors, for it was the model for many similar attempts, as well as a molding force upon more sober magazines. Under its influence Graham's became at least half a women's magazine. “Look at the attempts that have been made in every quarter copying the form of our Book and our name!” exclaimed Mr. Godey in the publisher's department of his magazine in 1842. “In January,” he continues, “we altered our page, put figured rules around it expressly for our work, and now every magazine has pages of the same kind.”⁴¹ Even London magazines imitated Godey's. But not all of the Lady's Book was written by Emerson and Poe and their like; a very large proportion of it was thick with sentimentality, pathos, and banality. It was chiefly against Godey's that the criticism of the Democratic Review quoted on a preceding page was directed. There were many such criticisms printed, and whether or not there was some jealousy at the bottom of them, candor compels the admission that they were in the main just. Yet Godey's continued successfully upon its rather pleasant if bourgeois way, adding more of its boasted “embellishments” and more subscribers. It lived for half a century after the end of our period.

The most successful of the magazines modeled directly upon Godey's was Peterson's Ladies' National Magazine.⁴² It was founded in Philadelphia by Charles J. Peterson of the Saturday Evening Post in 1842, and its editor in our period was Mrs. Ann S. Stephens, a prolific writer of serial fiction who had been editor a few years before of the Portland Magazine⁴³ up in Maine. Mrs. Stephens, assisted somewhat by John Neal, wrote most of the Portland Magazine; and she contributed largely to Peterson's. The time was to come when Peterson's would forge ahead of the Lady's Book, but not until after the Civil War. It died at last in the same year as its rival and model, 1898, both of them having been purchased by Frank A. Munsey and merged into his periodicals. A somewhat similar but shorter-lived magazine was the Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's, founded by Israel Post in New York in 1844. Post later withdrew, leaving the magazine in the hands of John Inman, brother of the painter and a journalist of experience. Stephen M. Chester was editor for a few months before the Columbian's demise in 1849. Edgar Allan Poe once remarked in his Broadway Journal that Godey's, Graham's, and the Columbian (and he might have added Peterson's) “are so nearly alike that if the covers were changed it would not be easy to distinguish one from the other. They nearly all have the same contributors and the same embellishers.”⁴⁴ With these we should consider also William W. Snowden's Ladies' Companion,⁴⁵ to which Poe and Longfellow, and a host of minor writers nourished by this group of magazines, contributed. Snowden was combative and quite unliterary, but he made rather a splurge during the life of the Companion (1834-44). Finally, two others scarcely less prominent, but of shorter life, may be named: Epes Sargent's magazine, published through the first six months of 1843 in New York and called Sargent's New Monthly Magazine of Literature, Fashion and the Fine Arts; and Miss Leslie's Magazine; Home Book of Fashion, Literature and Domestic Economy. Of this latter, T. S. Arthur, who had lately come to Philadelphia from Baltimore, where he had been in journalism, but who had not yet written his classic of a kind, Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, was publisher; and Eliza Leslie, author of a cook-book and of magazine tales which had achieved the distinction of a collected edition in three volumes, was editor. Their magazine lasted only through the year 1843 under the name first chosen; thereafter Arthur continued it under the name of the Ladies' Magazine until it was merged with Godey's, in May, 1846.

Somewhat different and inferior were those magazines which were issued monthly but designed, when bound into yearly volumes, to be used as gift books like the annuals. This was the purpose, in some years at least, of the Ladies' Wreath,⁴⁶ of New York (there were Ladies' Wreaths and Lady's Wreaths in other cities, too), which was begun in 1846 and continued to 1855 under the successive editorships of Mrs. S. T. Martyn and Helen Irving, the latter the wife of the nephew-biographer of Washington Irving. It published only about thirty-six pages in an issue, and numbered such people as Mrs. Stephens, Mrs. Sigourney, Mrs. Eames, T. S. Arthur, and J. S. C. Abbott among its contributors. Its two distinctive features were its hand-colored flower plate and steel engraving with each issue, and its price of a dollar a year. It claimed 25,000 circulation in 1853. Very similar was the Ladies' Garland⁴⁷ (1837-49), of Philadelphia, another dollar magazine, which was described in its subtitle as “devoted to literature, amusement and instruction, containing original essays, female biography, historical narratives, sketches of society, topographical descriptions, moral tales, anecdotes, etc., poetry, original and selected, etc., etc.” There was more than a little of “lifted” material in the periodicals of this class. The Rev. Daniel Wise's Ladies' Pearl (1840-43) of Lowell, Massachusetts, may be mentioned further, and there an end made.

There were also a number of weeklies designed for women. Most of these are either totally forgotten, or have their memorials not in regularly preserved files but in random and occasional references. The Philadelphia Album appears to have been started in 1826 by Thomas Cottrell Clarke after his retirement from the editorship of the Saturday Evening Post, to have absorbed the Ladies' Literary Port Folio (begun 1828), combining the titles, to have been edited thereafter by Robert Morris, and finally to have merged into the Philadelphia Inquirer. Godey had a Lady's Dollar Newspaper which he offered as a premium with his magazine; it was edited by Grace Greenwood during at least a part of its life.

LITERARY WEEKLIES

The literary weeklies, indeed, furnished one of the most interesting phases of this period of American magazine history. There were a great many of them. The reader of the New-York Mirror will find new ones noticed in its columns week after week through the twenties—sometimes two or three in a single number. In March, 1830, the Mirror says, “We have of late received several dozen first numbers of new publications”; but it resolves to give no more notices to the new, cheap, and ephemeral literary weeklies. In those days one could start a paper on faith and a hundred-dollar bill, but to keep it going the editor had need to add not only works to faith, but thousands to the original hundred; consequently many weeklies were launched, made a fine showing for a little while, and then sank beneath the waters of oblivion very silently, leaving scarce a ripple for the historian.

The Mirror,⁴⁸ begun in the closing years of the preceding period, ran almost to the end of the one now under consideration, or to 1846. Always lively and interesting, it is a matchless history of the manners, fads, foibles, bickerings, and interests of its times. The Saturday Evening Post⁴⁹ continued steadily to furnish light Sunday reading to Philadelphians, and the New-England Galaxy to provide material for Boston libel suits. Godey puffs his weekly contemporaries in 1841, mentioning the Post, “one of the oldest, and under its present able management one of the best conducted journals in the country”; the Saturday Courier and the Saturday Chronicle; and, with especial praise, Charles Alexander's Weekly Messenger. Philadelphia, Godey says, “is particularly rich in papers issued weekly.”⁵⁰ The Philadelphia Home Weekly, founded in 1842, lasted for thirty years or more, and built up a fine list of contributors. But to go back to the early years of our period, the volatile John Neal sought an outlet in his Yankee (1828-29), published briefly at Portland. This periodical experienced several mergers and finally, under the title of the Yankee and Boston Literary Gazette, was published at the capital of New England; but, as Neal tells it, Boston air agreed with it no better than the ozone of Portland,⁵¹ and it was merged with the New-England Galaxy at the end of a year's life there. Poe, Whittier, and Mellen were contributors, and the poet John W. Miller was a joint editor in the Boston period. In November, 1828, William Leggett began in New York his Critic, which unfortunately met with so little encouragement that after six months' trial its editor combined it with the Mirror, himself enlisting in an editorial capacity under the Mirror banner. Leggett had had wide experience on the sea and on the western frontier, and these settings were reflected in the stilted but sometimes racy tales which he printed, one each week, in the Critic. His longer story, “The Squatters,” ran as a serial; and his friend P. W. Wetmore contributed much verse. Twenty years later the Literary World summed up the Critic thus:

Leggett wrote feeling Tales and Essays (the latter somewhat after the manner of Johnson), forcible dramatic criticism and reviews, and graceful verses. He did all this for the Critic and repeated the task weekly, and what is more, published the whole himself—and was rewarded by the discontinuance of his work.⁵²

Thus the Critic was mostly Leggett; but it was creditable, for Leggett was an able man. He was later associated with Bryant on the Post, and became famous as a fiery abolitionist. It was “In Memory of William Leggett” that Bryant wrote in the Democratic Review:

His love of Truth—too warm, too strong,
          For hope or fear to chain or chill—
His hate of tyranny and wrong
          Burn in the breasts he kindled still!(53)

A unique periodical of the times was the Paul Pry, of Washington, which published five annual volumes beginning December 3, 1831. It contained highly personal observations of Washington politics and society by the eccentric Mrs. Anne Royal. In 1836, when she was seventy-one years of age, Mrs. Royal dropped Paul Pry and began a new weekly of personalities called the Huntress (1836-54), which she continued until her eighty-ninth year. Isaac C. Pray's Boston Pearl (1831-34?), a literary miscellany of piratical tendencies, may be mentioned in passing. But the weekly which flew the black flag most frankly (though no more truly or consistently than many others) was the Corsair,⁵⁴ published by Nathaniel Parker Willis and his friend Dr. T. O. Porter, brother of the editor of the great sporting weekly, the Spirit of the Times. Willis at first proposed to name the paper “The Pirate,” and wrote a prospectus in which he set forth the editorial purpose

to take advantage, in short, of the privilege assured to us by our piratical law of copyright; and, in the name of American authors (for our own benefit) “convey” to our columns, for the amusement of our readers, the cream and spirit of everything that ventures to light in England, France, and Germany.⁵⁵

Willis contributed some original and characteristic chat on art and drama and this and that to the early numbers, and then went off to Europe. Shortly after the Corsair first hove in sight, the New-Yorker called it

dashing and clever and Frenchified—and if Mr. Willis but goes to Europe next month, as it is said he will, he will dash it and clever it and Frenchify it still more. It will be popular with the élite, but caviare to the general. We once heard a little anecdote that will illustrate our meaning. A city beau went upon a visit to his relations in the little village of Greenwich in Connecticut. To astonish the natives he Adonized extremely, and among other remarkable adornments, wore very copious ruffled wrist bands to what, Mrs. Trollope would not hesitate to call, his shirt. As our beau walked up and down the single street of the village, a young urchin on his way to school stopped, and, after having regarded him for some time, exclaimed, “'Twon't do—that's too much shirt for Greenwich.” Let the Corsair beware, or it may find, by and by, that it has on “too much shirt for Greenwich.”⁵⁶

The time was to come when Willis's cleverness should be very popular, but for 1839 it was doubtless “too much shirt” for chaste New York. From England Willis sent back Thackeray's travel letters, for which he had paid real money—a guinea a column⁵⁷—as well as letters of his own, to stimulate the Corsair's failing fortunes. Dr. Porter, left in charge while Willis was abroad, was a remarkable man. “Your talent is to be the main-stay of the paper,” wrote Willis to him, “and you are the best off-hand writer I know. You are world-wise, which no other literary man I know is except Halleck.” In the same letter Willis says: “If I had not heard you … talk like a Professor in a hailstorm, I should never have started on a cruise like ours with you.”⁵⁸ But despite good off-hand writing and talk like professors in hailstorms, the piratical craft foundered in open sea, just a year after it had set sail in March, 1839, and the crew was taken off by the Albion, a companion vessel which had been long afloat.

Notes

1. For an analysis of changing conditions in English literature at this time, see Ashley H. Thorndike, Literature in a Changing Age (New York, 1920), passim.

2. Illinois Monthly Magazine, I, 302 (April, 1831).

3. New-York Mirror, VI, 151 (Nov. 15, 1828). “Six months” is, of course, a mere guess, and is probably too low.

4. Broadway Journal, I, 139 (March 1, 1845).

5. Harbinger, III, 138 (Aug. 8, 1846).

6. Available figures are fragmentary and unreliable throughout this period. Even the census figures for 1850 are inaccurate (the number of quarterlies being plainly too small) and confused (as in the matter of monthlies in Pennsylvania); confession that the figures given fall short of the actual number is made. (Compendium, Seventh Census, p. 154.) But figures may be found here and there, and the hypothetical conclusion noted above is of some value in pointing out the general course of magazine development. Adrian Balbi, the French geographer, published in the Annals des Travaux for 1827 some figures purporting to show the distribution of periodicals throughout the world: he gave the number in the United States, including newspapers, as 978. (See Mirror, V, 375. May 30, 1828.) Now, in most of the estimates and tables given throughout this period the newspapers form about nine-tenths of the total periodicals, so that we may guess there were in the neighborhood of a hundred magazines and journals other than newspapers in 1827, if Balbi's figures are approximately correct. The Balbi table was reprinted in the New Monthly Magazine, of London, in December, 1832 (XXXV, 583), and was thence transferred into the American Almanac (II, 96) for 1834, which says it is incomplete and there are (1834) 1,265 newspapers in the United States. At the proportion of nine to one this would call for 140 other periodicals in 1834. Professor George Tucker, in an address to the Charlottesville Lyceum on Dec. 19, 1837, printed in the Southern Literary Messenger (IV, 87. February, 1838) gives 1,265 as the number of newspapers in 1834 and 130 as the number of “journals of religion, law, medicine and literature”; this also is the figure given for 1834 in the American Almanac (XI, 196) of 1840. The American Quarterly Observer placed its estimate lower than the others in 1834 (III, 144. July) when it reckoned “about 1,100” periodicals. The Western Monthly (II, 486. October, 1833) about the same time said: “There are published in the United States six quarterly publications, two once in two months, twenty-two monthlies, besides very many semi-monthlies, and more than a thousand newspapers.” This is not very helpful. The Sixth Census (1840) makes an unexplained distinction between newspapers and “periodicals,” giving the number of the latter as 227. The American Almanac in the same year (XI, 196) prints “from returns made to the Post Office Department and copied from the Globe” the number of newspapers, magazines and other periodicals published in the United States on July 1, 1839; these figures show 395 monthlies, semi-monthlies, and quarterlies, and 991 weeklies. This is a wide divergence. The two tables give totals near enough together: the postal table 1,555, the Census 1,631. But surely none of the 395 monthlies, semimonthlies, and quarterlies counted by the Post Office Department were newspapers, and certainly at least a hundred of the weeklies were not; so we have at least 500 publications other than newspapers in the Post Office figures, as against the 227 (periodicals) of the census. The larger number is undoubtedly nearer correctness. The Seventh Census (1850) admitting failure to enumerate all, gives us 214 monthlies, semimonthlies, and quarterlies, and 1,902 weeklies. It abandons the distinction between newspapers and periodicals, but divides into Literary and Miscellaneous 568; Political, and Neutral and Independent totaling 1,713, Religious 191, and Scientific 53. Very few of the first class can have been newspapers, practically all of the second class must have been, at least two-thirds of the religious publications doubtless were newspapers, and practically none of the last named. This would indicate that there were at least six hundred publications other than newspapers in 1850.

7. This magazine resembled a review in its contents, though the articles were shorter than those of the reviews of the time. There were many memoirs, historical articles, and book reviews, with some poetry. It was illustrated with lithographs by Pendleton.

8. Treated more fully in a separate sketch on pp. 544-45.

9. Treated more fully in a separate sketch on pp. 673-76.

10. Treated more fully in a separate sketch on pp. 544-55.

11. Treated more fully in a separated sketch on pp. 577-79.

12. Treated more fully in a separate sketch on pp. 599-603.

13. Treated more fully in a separate sketch on pp. 604-05.

14. Treated more fully in a separate sketch on pp. 618-21.

15. New York, 1847. See also The Autobiography of Jane Fairfield (Boston, 1860).

16. North American Magazine, II, 98-107 (June, 1833).

17. Treated more fully in a separate sketch on pp. 606-14.

18. Treated more fully in a separate sketch on pp. 677-84.

19. Treated more fully in a separate sketch on pp. 750-54.

20. Treated more fully in a separate sketch on pp. 711-12.

21. Arcturus, I, 2 (December, 1840).

22. Treated more fully in a separate sketch on pp. 718-20.

23. Treated more fully in a separate sketch on pp. 735-38.

24. March, April, September, October, November, and December. Whitman, Poe, Mrs. Ellet, Mayne Reid, H. S. Saroni, and others were contributors. It was a five-dollar democratic magazine. See Thomas Ollive Mabbott's introduction to The Half-Breed and Other Stories by Walt Whitman (New York, 1927).

25. This is from the “Thomas Dunn Brown” article in Godey's for July, 1846. See Poe's Works (Stedman and Woodberry ed., Chicago, 1896), VIII, 68.

26. John-Donkey, I, 152 (March 4, 1848).

27. Treated more fully in a separate sketch on pp. 769-71.

28. Those founded in 1849 which lived into the next period are reserved for treatment in the second volume of this work.

29. Vols. I (July-December, 1847) and II (January-June, 1848) published at Albany; III (July-December, 1848), IV (January-June, 1849) and V (incomplete, July, August, 1849), published at Hartford. “All our papers will be original.”—I, 61. Much biography; comment on art; brief book reviews.

30. Democratic Review, XV, 247 (September, 1844).

31. “Parlor Periodicals,” by “H,” in Democratic Review, XXX, 76-87 (January, 1852).

32. Harbinger, III, 138 (Aug. 8, 1846).

33. Christian Examiner, XXXVI, 141 (January, 1844).

34. Titles: The Ladies' Magazine, 1828-29, 1833; The Ladies' Magazine and Literary Gazette, 1830-32; American Ladies' Magazine, 1834-36. Publishers: Putnam & Hunt, 1828-29; John Putnam, 1830; Marsh, Capen & Lyon, 1831-33; James B. Dow, 1834-36—all of Boston. See Lawrence Martin, “The Genesis of Godey's Lady's Book,” in the New England Quarterly, I, 62 (January, 1928).

35. Mary Alice Wyman, Selections from the Autobiography of Elizabeth Oakes Smith, p. 98.

36. Ladies' Magazine, I, 3 (January, 1828).

37. It was with some reluctance that Mrs. Hale began publishing fashion plates and thus encouraging frivolity. See New England Quarterly, I, 41-70 (January, 1928).

38. American Annals of Education, VII, 142 (March, 1837).

39. Treated more fully in a separate sketch on pp. 580-94.

40. Godey's Lady's Book, XXXVIII, 439 (June, 1849).

41. Ibid., XXV, 252 (November, 1842).

42. To be treated more fully in the second volume of this work.

43. Her husband, Edward Stephens, was publisher. It is complete in twenty-one numbers, October, 1834-June, 1836. It was then merged with the Eastern Magazine (July, 1835-June, 1836), of Bangor, Maine, to form the Maine Monthly Magazine (July, 1836-June, 1837), Bangor. Matilda P. Carter had been editor of the Eastern Magazine for its first five months, and was then succeeded by Charles Gilman, who became editor of the Maine Monthly after the merger.

44. Broadway Journal, I, 60 (Jan. 25, 1845).

45. To be treated in a separate sketch in the second volume of this work.

46. Publishers: Martyn & Ely, 1846-51; J. C. Burdick, 1852-53; Burdick and Scoville, 1854-55. Annual volumes (I-VII) May, 1846-April, 1853, semiannual volumes (VIII-XII) May, 1853-August, 1855 (end?).

47. Vol. I, consisting of semimonthly numbers April 15-June 15, 1837, and monthly numbers July, 1837-June, 1838; and Vol. II, consisting of twelve undated numbers with a title-page dated 1839, were published by John Libby. Vols. III-IX (annual volumes July, 1839-June, 1846) and X-XII (semiannual volumes July, 1846-December, 1847) were published by J. Van Court. Vols. XIII-XV (January, 1849-June, 1849) were published by Samuel D. Patterson. New series I-VI were equivalent to VII-IX in old series, two volumes of the new equalling one of the old numbering.

48. Treated more fully in a separate sketch on pp. 320-30.

49. To be treated more fully in a separate sketch in the second volume of this work.

50. Godey's Lady's Book, XXIII, 192 (October, 1841).

51. See sketch of Neal (undoubtedly written by himself) in Duyckinck's Cyclopaedia of American Literature, I, 875; and his Wandering Recollections of a Somewhat Busy Life (Boston, 1869), pp. 336-37. There was a New York Yankee, 1847-49.

52. Literary World. I, 61 (Feb. 20, 1847).

53. Democratic Review, VI, 430 (November, 1839).

54. See Henry A. Beers, Nathaniel Parker Willis (American Men of Letters series), pp. 239-43.

55. Ibid., p. 240. Dillon & Co. issued a Bucaneer in New York in 1842.

56. New-Yorker, VII, 13 (March 23, 1839).

57. Beers, Willis, p. 254.

58. Francis Brinley, William T. Porter (New York, 1860), p. 75.