Description
Blackwood's was conceived as a rival to the Whig-supporting Edinburgh Review. Compared to the rather staid tone of 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 romanticism such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as well as early feminist essays by American John Neal. [1] Through Wilson the magazine was a keen supporter of William Wordsworth, parodied the Byronmania common in Europe and angered John Keats, Leigh Hunt and William Hazlitt by referring to their works as the "Cockney School of Poetry". The controversial style of the magazine got it into trouble when, in 1821, John Scott, the editor of the London Magazine , fought a duel with Jonathan Henry Christie over 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 horror fiction and this is regarded as an important influence on later Victorian writers such as Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters, and Edgar Allan Poe; Poe even satirised the magazine's obsessions in "Loss of Breath: A Tale A La Blackwood," and "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: George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, John Buchan, George Tomkyns Chesney, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Felicia Hemans, James Hogg, Charles Neaves, 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 Dorothy Sayers's detective novel Five Red Herrings (1931) the Scottish 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.
Vera Brittain lists "numerous copies of Blackwood's Magazine" among her literary possessions in her description of her time as V.A.D. nurse in Malta in her memoir, Testament of Youth .
In George Orwell's Burmese Days , the main protagonist, James Flory, associates the magazine with mediocre crassness as he thinks about the other British at the European Club: "Dull boozing witless porkers! Was it possible that they could go on week after week, year after year, repeating word for word the same evil-minded drivel, like a parody of a fifth-rate story in Blackwood's? Would none of them ever think of anything new to say? Oh, what a place, what people! What a civilization is this of ours—this godless civilization founded on whisky, Blackwood's and the Bonzo pictures!" [9]
In Part Four of the Doctor Who story 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]
William Blackwood was a Scottish publisher who founded the firm of William Blackwood and Sons.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1849.
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1843.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1825.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1829.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1827.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1823.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1818.
John Neal was an American writer, critic, editor, lecturer, and activist. Considered both eccentric and influential, he delivered speeches and published essays, novels, poems, and short stories between the 1810s and 1870s in the United States and Great Britain, championing American literary nationalism and regionalism in their earliest stages. Neal advanced the development of American art, fought for women's rights, advocated the end of slavery and racial prejudice, and helped establish the American gymnastics movement.
John Pierpont was an American poet, who was also successively a teacher, lawyer, merchant, and Unitarian minister. His poem The Airs of Palestine made him one of the best-known poets in the U.S. in his day. He was the grandfather of J. P. Morgan.
Edward Coote Pinkney was an American poet, lawyer, sailor, professor, and editor. Born in London in 1802 when his father was serving as ambassador to the Court of St. James, Pinkney returned with his family to the United States when he was eight. They returned to Maryland, where he was privately schooled.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
"Tamerlane" is a poem by Edgar Allan Poe that follows a fictionalized accounting of the life of a Turco-Mongol conqueror historically known as Tamerlane. The poem was first published in the 1827 collection Tamerlane and Other Poems. That collection, with only 50 copies printed, was not credited with the author's real name but by "A Bostonian". The poem's original version was 403 lines but trimmed down to 223 lines for its inclusion in Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems.
Charles Whibley was an English literary journalist and author. In literature and the arts, his views were progressive. He supported James Abbott McNeill Whistler. He also recommended T. S. Eliot to Geoffrey Faber, which resulted in Eliot's being appointed as an editor at Faber and Gwyer. Eliot's essay Charles Whibley (1931) was contained within his Selected Essays, 1917-1932. Whibley's style was described by Matthew as "often acerbic high Tory commentary".
William Blackwood and Sons was a Scottish publishing house and printer founded by William Blackwood in 1804. It played a key role in literary history, publishing many important authors, for example John Buchan, George Tomkyns Chesney, Joseph Conrad, George Eliot, E. M. Forster, John Galt, John Neal, Thomas De Quincey, Charles Reade, Margaret Oliphant, John Hanning Speke and Anthony Trollope, both in books and in the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine.
The bibliography of American writer John Neal (1793–1876) spans more than sixty years from the War of 1812 through Reconstruction and includes novels, short stories, poetry, articles, plays, lectures, and translations published in newspapers, magazines, literary journals, gift books, pamphlets, and books. Favorite topics included women's rights, feminism, gender, race, slavery, children, education, law, politics, art, architecture, literature, drama, religion, gymnastics, civics, American history, science, phrenology, travel, language, political economy, and temperance.
The Yankee was one of the first cultural publications in the United States, founded and edited by John Neal (1793–1876), and published in Portland, Maine as a weekly periodical and later converted to a longer, monthly format. Its two-year run concluded at the end of 1829. The magazine is considered unique for its independent journalism at the time.
Seventy-Six is a historical fiction novel by American writer John Neal. Published in Baltimore in 1823, it is the fourth novel written about the American Revolutionary War. Historically distinguished for its pioneering use of colloquial language, Yankee dialect, battle scene realism, high characterization, stream of consciousness narrative, profanity, and depictions of sex and romance, the novel foreshadowed and influenced later American writers. The narrative prose resembles spoken American English more than any other literature of its period. It was the first work of American fiction to use the phrase son-of-a-bitch.
Logan, a Family History is a Gothic novel of historical fiction by American writer John Neal. Published anonymously in Baltimore in 1822, the book is loosely inspired by the true story of Mingo leader Logan the Orator, while weaving a highly fictionalized story of interactions between Anglo-American colonists and Indigenous peoples on the western frontier of colonial Virginia. Set just before the Revolutionary War, it depicts the genocide of Native Americans as the heart of the American story and follows a long cast of characters connected to each other in a complex web of overlapping love interests, family relations, rape, and sexual activity.
