Life
Fraser's background was an Inverness family, and he carried on business at 215 Regent Street, London. Fraser published many books, among them Thomas Carlyle's Hero Worship . The story of the dealings between the author and "the infatuated Fraser, with his dog's-meat tart of a magazine", was told in J. A. Froude's biography of Carlyle. [1]
Fraser had one illegitimate son with a woman named Mary West. James Fitzjames Fraser West was born in 1833. He received medical tuition and practiced as a surgeon at Queen's Hospital, Birmingham. [2]
On 3 August 1836 Grantley Berkeley assaulted Fraser, after the publication of criticism of his novel Berkeley Castle. Cross actions were tried on 3 December, on the part of Fraser for assault, and Berkeley for libel. The damages for the assault were £100, for the libel £2. [1]
Fraser died 2 October 1841 at Argyll Street, London, after a lingering illness. [1]
Fraser's Magazine
Fraser published Fraser's Magazine from February 1830, so-called in fact after the barrister Hugh Fraser who had founded it with William Maginn; Fraser himself referred to it as "The Town and Country". [1]
Among the contributors to the magazine were Thomas Carlyle, William Makepeace Thackeray, James Hogg, [3] Francis Sylvester Mahony, Thomas Love Peacock, J. A. Froude, William Allingham, and other well-known writers. After Fraser's death it fell to his successor, G. W. Nickisson, whose name first appeared on it in 1842. Five years later it was transferred to John William Parker, and it continued under the same name to October 1882, when it was superseded by Longman's Magazine . [1]
The Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters came out in Fraser's Magazine between 1830 and 1838, comprising 81 portraits, mainly by Daniel Maclise, with text by Maginn. In 1833 a quarto volume containing 34 of the portraits was issued, and in 1874 the complete gallery was republished for the first time. The portraits were reduced in size and the literary matter increased in The Maclise Portrait Gallery, by William Bates, with 85 portraits, London, 1883. [1]
Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish essayist, historian, and philosopher from the Scottish Lowlands. A leading writer of the Victorian era, he exerted a profound influence on 19th-century art, literature, and philosophy.
James Anthony Froude was an English historian, novelist, biographer, and editor of Fraser's Magazine. From his upbringing amidst the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement, Froude intended to become a clergyman, but doubts about the doctrines of the Anglican church, published in his scandalous 1849 novel The Nemesis of Faith, drove him to abandon his religious career. Froude turned to writing history, becoming one of the best-known historians of his time for his History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada.
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Daniel Maclise was an Irish history painter, literary and portrait painter, and illustrator, who worked for most of his life in London, England.
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Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country was a general and literary journal published in London from 1830 to 1882, which initially took a strong Tory line in politics. It was founded by Hugh Fraser and William Maginn in 1830 and loosely directed by Maginn under the name Oliver Yorke, until about 1840. It circulated until 1882, when it was renamed Longman's Magazine.
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This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain : Stephen, Leslie; Lee, Sidney, eds. (1891). "Fraser, James (d.1841)". Dictionary of National Biography . Vol. 26. London: Smith, Elder & Co.