Blackwood's Magazine

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Blackwood's Magazine
ISSN
0006-436X

Blackwood's Magazine was a British

George Buchanan
, a 16th-century Scottish historian, religious and political thinker.

Description

Blackwood's was conceived as a rival to the

The Quarterly Review, the other main Tory work, Maga was ferocious and combative. This is due primarily to the work of its principal writer John Wilson, who wrote under the pseudonym of Christopher North. Never trusted with the editorship, he nevertheless wrote much of the magazine along with the other major contributors John Gibson Lockhart and William Maginn
. Their mixture of satire, reviews and criticism both barbed and insightful was extremely popular and the magazine quickly gained a large audience.

For all its conservative credentials the magazine published the works of radicals of British

libellous statements in the magazine. John Scott was shot and killed.[2]

By the mid-1820s Lockhart and Maginn had departed to London, the former to edit the Quarterly and the latter to write for a range of journals, though principally for Fraser's Magazine. After this, John Wilson was by far the most important writer for the magazine and gave it much of its tone, popularity and notoriety. In this period Blackwood's became the first British literary journal to publish work by an American with an 1824 essay by John Neal that got reprinted across Europe.[3] Over the following year and a half the magazine published Neal's "American Writers" series, which is the first written history of American literature.[4] Blackwood's relationship with Neal eroded after publishing Neal's novel Brother Jonathan at a great financial loss in 1825.[5][6]

By the 1840s when Wilson was contributing less, its circulation declined. Aside from essays it also printed a good deal of

How to Write a Blackwood Article." The four surviving Brontë siblings were avid readers and mimicked the style and content in their Young Men's Magazine and other writings in their childhood paracosm, including Glass Town
and Angria.

The magazine never regained its early success but it still held a dedicated readership throughout the British Empire amongst those in the Colonial Service. One late nineteenth century triumph was the first publication of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in the February, March, and April 1899 issues of the magazine.

Important contributors included:

Thomas de Quincey, Elizabeth Clementine Stedman, William Mudford, Margaret Oliphant, Hugh Clifford, Mary Margaret Busk and Frank Swettenham. Robert Macnish contributed under the epithet, Modern Pythagorean. It was an open secret that Charles Whibley contributed anonymously his Musings without Methods to the Magazine for over twenty-five years. T. S. Eliot described them as "the best sustained piece of literary journalism that I know of in recent times".[7]

The magazine finally ceased publication in 1980, having remained for its entire history in the Blackwood family. Mike Blackwood was the last family member to manage the firm and now enjoys retirement in England with his wife Jayne.

The Blackwood's name lives on in the name of the bar at the Nira Caledonia Hotel in Gloucester Place, Edinburgh, the former home of John Wilson from 1827 until his death in 1854.

Cultural references

Edgar Allan Poe published a short story entitled How to Write a Blackwood Article in November 1838 as a companion piece to A Predicament.[8]

In

Procurator-Fiscal working with Lord Peter Wimsey
is mentioned as "reading the latest number of Blackwood to wile away the time" as they spend several boring night hours while waiting for the murderer to reveal himself.

V.A.D. nurse in Malta in her memoir, Testament of Youth
.

In

Bonzo pictures!"[9]

In Part Four of the

The Talons of Weng Chiang
, Professor Litefoot is seen reading the February 1892 issue.

In Larry McMurtry's novel Lonesome Dove, Clara, who lived a frontier life in Ogallala, Nebraska during the 1870s but dreamed of a literary life, "would have to wait for two or three months for her Blackwood's, wondering all the time what was happening to the people in the stories."[10]

See also

Notes

  1. ISBN 080-5-7723-08
    .
  2. ^ "Newspapers and publishers at dawn of 19th century". www.georgianindex.net. Archived from the original on 7 July 2015. Retrieved 22 January 2009.
  3. ISBN 080-5-7723-08
    .
  4. OCLC 464953146
    .
  5. ISBN 0-8057-7230-8
    .
  6. ISBN 978-0-226-46969-0
    .
  7. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press
    , September 2004
  8. ^ Sova, Dawn B. Edgar Allan Poe: A to Z. New York: Checkmark Books, 2001. p. 200
  9. ^ Orwell, George. Burmese Days. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace & Co. p. 33.
  10. ^ Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove, Kindle 1985 loc 10631.

List of publications

Further reading

External links

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