 |
 Cover of the March 1837 issue | |
| Editor | William Harrison Ainsworth (1839–1868) |
|---|---|
| Former editors | Charles "Boz" Dickens (1836–1838) |
| Frequency | Monthly |
| Publisher | Richard Bentley |
| Founder | Richard Bentley |
| First issue | 1836 |
| Final issue | 1868 |
| Country | England |
| Based in | London |
| Language | English |
| ISSN | 1751-8466 |
| OCLC | 889228102 |
Bentley's Miscellany was an English literary magazine started by Richard Bentley. It was published between 1836 and 1868.
Already a successful publisher of novels, Bentley began the journal in 1836 and invited Charles Dickens to be its first editor. [1] Dickens serialised his second novel Oliver Twist , but soon fell out with Bentley over editorial control, calling him a "Burlington Street Brigand". He resigned as editor in 1839 and William Harrison Ainsworth took over. Ainsworth would also only stay in the job for three years, but bought the magazine from Bentley a decade later. In 1868 Ainsworth sold the magazine back to Bentley, who merged it with the Temple Bar Magazine .
Aside from the works of Dickens and Ainsworth other significant authors published in the magazine included: Wilkie Collins, Catharine Sedgwick, Richard Brinsley Peake, Thomas Moore, Thomas Love Peacock, William Mudford, Mrs Henry Wood, Charles Robert Forrester (sometimes under the pseudonym Hal Willis), Frances Minto Elliot, Isabella Frances Romer, The Ingoldsby Legends and some of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories. It published drawings by the caricaturist George Cruikshank, and was the first publication to publish cartoons by John Leech, who became a prominent Punch cartoonist.
Media related to Bentley's Miscellany at Wikimedia Commons
William Wilkie Collins was an English novelist and playwright known especially for The Woman in White (1859), a mystery novel and early "sensation novel", and for The Moonstone (1868), which established many of the ground rules of the modern detective novel and is also perhaps the earliest clear example of the police procedural genre.
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William Harrison Ainsworth was an English historical novelist born at King Street in Manchester. He trained as a lawyer, but the legal profession held no attraction for him. While completing his legal studies in London he met the publisher John Ebers, at that time manager of the King's Theatre, Haymarket. Ebers introduced Ainsworth to literary and dramatic circles, and to his daughter, who became Ainsworth's wife.
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Artist and the Author is a pamphlet written by George Cruikshank in 1872. During the late 1860s, Cruikshank claimed to be the author of works attributed to other writers, including Charles Dickens and William Harrison Ainsworth. After John Forster contradicted Cruikshank's claims to having "originated" Oliver Twist, Cruikshank began a dispute in The Times as being the creator of novels attributed to Ainsworth. After the newspaper stopped carrying the dispute, Cruikshank produced all of his claims in Artist and the Author, where he disputed his relationship to 8 of Ainsworth's novels.
Jack Sheppard is a novel by William Harrison Ainsworth serially published in Bentley's Miscellany from 1839 to 1840, with illustrations by George Cruikshank. It is a historical romance and a Newgate novel based on the real life of the 18th-century criminal Jack Sheppard.
The novel Guy Fawkes first appeared as a serial in Bentley's Miscellany, between January and November 1840. It was subsequently published as a three-volume set in July 1841, with illustrations by George Cruikshank. The first of William Harrison Ainsworth's seven "Lancashire novels", the story is based on the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, an unsuccessful attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Ainsworth relied heavily on historical documents describing the trial and execution of the conspirators, of whom Fawkes was one, but he also embellished the known facts. He invented the character of Viviana Radcliffe, daughter of the prominent Radcliffe family of Ordsall Hall – who becomes Fawkes's wife – and introduced gothic and supernatural elements into the story, such as the ability of the alchemist, John Dee, to raise the spirits of the dead.
Richard Bentley was a 19th-century English publisher born into a publishing family. He started a firm with his brother in 1819. Ten years later, he went into partnership with the publisher Henry Colburn. Although the business was often successful, publishing the famous "Standard Novels" series, they ended their partnership in acrimony three years later. Bentley continued alone profitably in the 1830s and early 1840s, establishing the well-known periodical Bentley's Miscellany. However, the periodical went into decline after its editor, Charles Dickens, left. Bentley's business started to falter after 1843 and he sold many of his copyrights. Only 15 years later did it begin to recover.
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