Abstract
By 1825, William Blackwood’s fortunes had been enhanced by his magazine, but he was distressed by the steady drip of charges that Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine was immoral, ungenteel, too personal, too partisan. More importantly, he knew that for Maga to continue to prosper, it had to change with the times. It is in this context that the idea of the ‘Preface’ that opened volume 19 in January 1826 was conceived. By the time it appeared, however, two of Blackwood’s key contributors had begun working for John Murray, and it thus marks the end of the magazine’s first phase, even as it adamantly defends Maga’s prior excesses. The ‘Preface’, mostly written by William Maginn, is a postscript to the ‘personalities’ he loved and a prelude to the Maga of the Victorian era.
Ye ken what ye hae gotten by your personalities.
(’Hogg’ to ‘Odoherty’)1
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Notes
William Maginn, ‘Noctes Ambrosianae. No. IX’, BEM, 13 (June 1823), 716–723.
John Blair, ‘Memorandum of Facts Relative to Mr Douglas of Glasgow’, Caledonian Mercury, 26 October 1818, p. 3.
Macvey Napier and James Graham, Hypocrisy Unveiled, 4th edn (Edinburgh: Francis Pillans, 1818), pp. 5–6.
A. L. Strout, ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Wilson in Blackwood’s Magazine’, PMLA, 48.1 (1933), 100–128.
Robert Mudie, The Modern Athens: A Dissection and Demonstration of Men and Things in the Scotch Capital, 2nd ed. (London: Knight and Lacey, 1825), pp. 246–247.
Ann Kersey Cooke, Maginn- Blackwood Correspondence, 2 vols (unpublished MA thesis, Texas Technological College, 1955) I, 119.
Brian Murray, ‘The Authorship of Some Unidentified or Disputed Articles in Blackwood’s Magazine’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 4 (1967), 144–154.
Samuel Smiles, A Publisher and his Friends. Memoir and Correspondence of the Late John Murray, with an Account of the Origin and Progress of the House, 1768–1843, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1891), I, 186.
Charles C. Nickerson, ‘Disraeli, Lockhart, and Murray: An Episode in the History of the Quarterly Review’ Victorian Studies, 15 (March, 1972), 279–306.
Benjamin Disraeli, Letters, ed. by John Matthews et al., 8 vols to date (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982-), I, 49.
William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli: Earl of Beaconsfield. New and rev. ed., 2 vols (New York: Macmillan, 1929), I, 72.
John Wilson, John Galt, David Robinson, and William Maginn, ‘Preface’, BEM, 19 (January 1826), i–xxxii.
John Wilson, ‘Noctes Ambrosianae. No. II’, BEM, 11 (April 1822), 474–489.
David Robinson, ‘South America’, BEM, 15 (February 1824), 133–144.
John Wilson, ‘Some Observations on the “Biographia Literaria” of S. T. Coleridge, Esq. - 1817’, BEM, 2 (October 1817), 3–18.
J. H. Alexander, ‘Blackwood’s: Magazine as Romantic Form’, The Wordsworth Circle, 15 (1984), 57–68.
John Wilson, ‘Birds’, BEM, 19 (February 1826), 105–112.
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© 2013 David E. Latané, Jr.
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Latané, D.E. (2013). William Maginn and the Blackwood’s ‘Preface’ of 1826. In: Morrison, R., Roberts, D.S. (eds) Romanticism and Blackwood’s Magazine. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303851_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303851_18
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