Blackwood's Magazine

Encyclopedia : B : BL : BLA : Blackwood's Magazine

Blackwood's Magazine was a British magazine and miscellany printed between 1817 and 1980. It was founded by the publisher William Blackwood and was originally called Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, although it soon adopted the shorter name or often simply Maga. The title page bore the image of George Buchanan, 16th century Scottish historian.

It was conceived as a rival to the Whig supporting Edinburgh Review but 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 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 contributor John Gibson Lockhart. 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 dangerous radicals of British romanticism such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 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 controversy causing 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.

John Wilson was by far the most important writer for the magazine and gave it much of its tone, popularity and notoriety. 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 who satirised the magazines obsessions in [How to Write a Blackwood Article]. The magazine never regained its early success but it still held a dedicated readership throughout the British Empire amongst those in colonial service. It finally ended in 1980, remaining in the Blackwood family its entire history.

Important contributors included: George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, John Buchan, James Hogg, Charles Neaves, Thomas de Quincey, Elizabeth Clementine Stedman, and Margaret Oliphant.

External links

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.