The Gentleman's Magazine

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Title page from 1737

The Gentleman's Magazine , originally The Gentleman's Magazine; or, Trader's Monthly Intelligencer , was a magazine published in London . First published in 1731, the magazine was one of the first periodicals to cover a wide range of topics from various sources, and the first to use the title magazine. It appeared regularly monthly until 1907.

title

Founder Edward Cave chose the magazine title, alluding to the military supply store of the same name , to emphasize that his magazine brought together the best of various sources. Cave obtained his material mainly from other periodicals that were not subject to copyright at the time , but mostly identified his sources. The 1710 Statute of Anne only applied to printed books. Although the adoption of other newspaper articles was common at the time, Cave was the first to aggressively advertise not to provide original articles. The Gentleman's Magazine was not supposed to represent its own editorial line or address a specific target group, but rather provide a potpourri of what was interesting at the moment. Another promotional slogan was more variety than any book, no matter what the price.

concept

Cave was the editor and principal investor, and the magazine became very closely associated with himself. However, the chief editorship was with writers like Samuel Johnson or John Hawkesworth . Cave introduced various innovations into the press system of the time: reports from parliament, letter columns and poetry. Reports of military campaigns, including detailed accompanying maps, were another focus. In addition, the magazine covered a wide range of topics, including the natural sciences, antiques, cooking recipes and family history. As the first periodical to present articles on a wide range of subjects, it was widely used throughout the English-speaking world in the 18th and 19th centuries. The success of the magazine was also due to the fact that Cave had a functioning distribution system to booksellers in the province. For a comparatively small amount of money, rural residents were able to get a summary of important events and debates in London once a month.

In the course of its existence, the magazine changed its format and focus frequently. During Cave's active time between 1731 and 1754, five major changes took place, and numerous others followed in the period after his death. As early as 1736, Cave changed the name to The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Chronicle to refer to the extensive chronicle of the previous month.

After the magazine had limited itself in its early days to reprinting texts from other publications, the proportion of its own texts increased in the course of its existence. Cave himself was only occasionally active as an author. The “voice” of the journalists was the pseudonym Sylvanus Urban under which both Cave and some of his employees wrote. Sylvanus Urban was on the cover until 1856, and the name was revived by Editor-in-Chief Joseph Knight during his tenure between 1874 and 1906. Authors who wrote for Gentleman's Magazine include Samuel Taylor Coleridge , RD Blackmore , Charles Dickens , William Hazlitt , Henry Kingsley , Charles Lamb , E. Lynn Linton , John Murray, and John Ruskin .

In the 19th century the magazine usually had around 100 pages. Towards the end of the 19th century, Gentleman's Magazine came under increasing pressure from competition, the penny press . The circulation in 1870 was 10,000 copies, in 1898 only 850. Attempts to counteract the trend by reducing the price and focusing more on lighter topics ultimately helped little and, above all, diluted the profile of the magazine.

reception

The success of Gentleman's Magazine encouraged numerous imitators. In London alone, a total of 18 magazines were founded between 1732 and 1756 , although some of them differed greatly in format from the Gentleman's Magazine. Other imitators in the format called themselves Museum , Miscallenum or Palladium . Major followers of the concept included Monthly Magazine , New Monthly Magazine, and Edinburgh Monthly Magazine . In particular with London Magazine , which had copied the concept of Gentleman's Magazine down to the smallest detail, Sylvanus Urban had a heated argument by accusing London Magazine of treason, piracy, dishonesty and theft of ideas.

The motto E pluribus unum comes from Gentleman's Magazine , which adorns the seal of the United States and the reverse of the dollar bills and has been the de facto motto of the United States for centuries . Cave had chosen this in 1731 to document the composition of the magazine from many sources, just as the title page decorated a hand with a bouquet of different flowers. E pluribus unum remained the magazine's motto until the middle of the 19th century. The Gentleman's Magazin, in turn, had the motto of the Gentleman's Journal , a magazine that the Huguenot Pierre Antoine Motteux published in London from 1691 to 1694.

Remarks

  1. ^ A b Iona Italia: The rise of literary journalism in the eighteenth century: anxious employment Routledge, 2005 ISBN 0415343925 pp. 110-111
  2. a b Patricia Okker: Social stories: the magazine novel in nineteenth-century America University of Virginia Press, 2003 ISBN 0813922402 p. 1
  3. Bob Clarke: From Grub Street to Fleet Street: an illustrated history of English newspapers to 1899 Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2004 ISBN 0754650073 p. 68
  4. a b c Iona Italia: The rise of literary journalism in the eighteenth century: anxious employment Routledge, 2005 ISBN 0415343925 p. 112
  5. a b DHL: Gentleman's Magazine in: Laurel Brake, Marysa Demoor (ed.): Dictionary of nineteenth-century journalism in Great Britain and Ireland Academia Press, 2009 ISBN 9038213409 pp. 245–246
  6. ^ Iona Italia: The rise of literary journalism in the eighteenth century: anxious employment Routledge, 2005 ISBN 0415343925 p. 116
  7. William Conley Harris: E pluribus unum: nineteenth-century American literature & the Constitutional paradox University of Iowa Press, 2005 ISBN 0877459347 pp. 196-197

Web links

Wikisource: The Gentleman's Magazine  - sources and full texts (English)
Commons : The Gentleman's Magazine  - Collection of images, videos and audio files