Abstract
Scholarship of the Gentleman’s Magazine associates it with a genteel readership: variously the nobility and gentry, and the middling sort and bourgeoisie. For the latter two groups Carlson describes it as a significant, liberating and modernizing influence, part of a ‘democratic movement’.1 However, there is no detailed empirical work on the magazine’s readers and contributors, and the ways in which they read it, to support these claims. This chapter examines the contemporary evidence for the Gentleman’s Magazine readership, setting this in the wider contexts of literacy, geography, gender and reading practices.
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Notes
C. Lennart Carlson, The First Magazine: A History of the Gentleman’s Magazine (Providence, RI, 1938), p. 239.
Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago, 1957), p. 49.
For a survey of methodologies, see David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 42–61.
Alvin B. Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters and Samuel Johnson (Princeton, 1987), pp. 60–1; John Feather, The Provincial Book Trade in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1985); William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2004); Jeremy Black, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century (1991 reprint, 1st published London, 1987), p. 14; and G.A. Cranfield, The Development of the Provincial Newspaper, 1700–60 (Oxford, 1962), pp. 19–21.
James Raven, Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750–1800 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 35–6.
Donald F. McKenzie and John C. Ross, A Ledger of Charles Ackers (London, 1968), p. 11.
Paul Romney, ed., The Diary of Charles Fothergill 1805: An Itinerary to York, Flamborough and the North-Western Dales of Yorkshire (Leeds, 1984), pp. 203, 222. The articles appeared in GM, 12.1787, p. 1059 and 7.1790, p. 617.
Robert J. Griffin, ed., The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 1–18.
James M. Kuist, The Nichols File of the Gentleman’s Magazine: Attributions of Authorship and Other Documentation in Editorial Papers at the Folger Library (Madison, WI, 1982), p. 20.
Helen Berry, Gender, Society and Print Culture in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural World of the Athenian Mercury (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 71–4.
See Henry R. French, ‘The Search for the “Middle Sort of People” in England, 1600–1800’, Historical Journal, 43 (2000), pp. 277–93.
Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (London, 2007), p. 23.
Jean Paul Bignon, The Adventures of Abdallah (London, 1729), pp. iii–iv, discussed in Barker, ‘Edward Cave, Samuel Johnson’, p. 23.
Anon., The Economist: Shewing in a Variety of Estimates, from Fourscore Pounds a Year to upwards of 800l., How a Family May Live with Frugality, for a Little Money (15th edition, London, 1781).
Jonathan Rose, ‘Rereading the English Common Reader: A Preface to a History of Audiences’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 53 (1992), pp. 47–70.
Tim Hitchcock, Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London (London, 2004), p. 53.
Calvin Daniel Yost, Poetry of the Gentleman’s Magazine: A Study in Eighteenth– Century Literary Taste (Philadelphia, 1936), pp. 87–107.
C. John Sommerville, The News Revolution in England: Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information (Oxford, 1996), pp. 156–60.
Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989), p. 131, and Cranfield, Provincial Newspaper, pp. 190–206.
For PO development, see Whyman, Pen and the People, pp. 46–71; for newspapers arriving with the post, William Cowper, The Task (facsimile edition 1973, 1st published London, 1785), Book IV, pp. 137–9; for transport, M.J. Daunton, Progress and Poverty: An Economic and Social History of Britain 1700–1850 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 285–318.
Robert Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (London, 1990), p. 157.
Brendan Dooley and Sabrina Baron, eds., The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (New York, 2001), p. 7.
See also Nicola Phillips, The Profligate Son: or, A True Story of Family Conflict, Fashionable Vice, and Financial Ruin in Regency Britain (Oxford, 2013).
E.E. Reynolds, ed., The Mawhood Diary: Selections from the Diary Note-books of William Mawhood, Woollen-draper of London, for the Years 1764–90 (London, 1956).
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© 2016 Gillian Williamson
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Williamson, G. (2016). Readers and Contributors. In: British Masculinity in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1731 to 1815. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137542335_4
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