A British middle-class reader of the 1820s perusing the periodical magazines, the most widely circulating reading material of the day, would have been informed again and again that the decade was characterized by “mediocrity” (Hazlitt 218). Judging from the general tenor of theatre reviews, the reader would have to conclude that the English stage was at a low ebb, and that amusement and instruction were more likely to be found in alternative media – public lectures or visual spectacles such as panoramas and exhibits of exotica. By the mid-1820s, the controversial celebrities who had dominated the Romantic landscape (Napoleon, Staël, Byron) were dead, as were its innovative young poets (Keats, Shelley, Byron). Book reviews assured readers that the copious productions issuing from the press now consisted overwhelmingly of second-rate imitations and immoral trash by “a host of writers, working for their bread on the spur of the occasion, and whose names are not known” (Hazlitt 222). At best, modern literature might be characterized as “a gay Coquette, fluttering, fickle, vain” who “renounces eternal fame for a newspaper puff; trifles with all sorts of arts and sciences [...] glitters, flutters, buzzes, spawns, dies, – and is forgotten!” (Hazlitt 219).
The above quotations from William Hazlitt’s “The Periodical Press,” an essay that appeared in the Edinburgh Review in May 1823, echo the remarkably widespread resignation perpetuated by 1820s print culture about the belated, imitative, mediocre quality of contemporary aesthetic production. Yet Hazlitt deliberately echoes the bad press his age was receiving in order to add an ironic turn: to suggest that a transitional age can actually give rise to a culture of hope. His article turns into an only slightly tongue-in-cheek celebration of periodical literature and its appeal to the reading public:
We exist in the bustle of the world, and cannot escape from the notice of our contemporaries. We must please to live, and therefore should live to please. We must look to the public for support. [...] Therefore, let Reviews flourish – let Magazines increase and multiply – let the Daily and Weekly Newspapers live for ever! We are optimists in literature, and hold, with certain limitations, that, in this respect, whatever is, is right! (Hazlitt 220)
Despite the hyperbolic echoes of divine creation, monarchical ceremony, and Pope’s Essay on Man, Hazlitt has a serious point: critical discussion and medial experimentation are healthy in a period of rapid change. In one of many notably gendered formulations, he implies that a period of splendid and consummate art gives rise to admiration, repose, and “effeminate delicacy” while a struggling and critical period calls forth “masculine boldness and creative vigour” (213). The paradox of Hazlitt’s essay – that a deficient age can actually be superior to a literary golden age insofar as it encourages creative and critical boldness – reflects a far-reaching paradox in the self-image of the 1820s. For despite its self-deprecating rhetoric about mediocrity and cant, the post-Waterloo period in Britain is also an era of economic prosperity, public education, improvement, and progress – conditions encompassed in another phrase that appears constantly in periodical literature: “march of intellect” or “march of mind.” Indeed, journalists often cite the increased number and circulation of periodicals themselves as evidence of the rapid improvement in philosophical, literary, and scientific knowledge. In addition to quantity, the pace at which information is being mobilized astounds readers and writers in the 1820s. Hazlitt marvels at the sheer speed of journalistic production – “The public read the next day at breakfast-time (perhaps), what would make a hundred octavo pages, every word of which has been spoken, written out, and printed within the last twelve or fourteen hours!” (224) – but he also remarks that the quality of “extempore writing” compares favourably with “more laboured compositions”: “what is struck off at a blow, is in many respects better than what is produced on reflection, and at several heats” (222). Time pressure, information overload, the absence of dominant personalities, and the presence of a large anonymous reading public are factors that generate palpable anxiety, but they also call forth creative vigour.
As Hazlitt realizes, the larger and more affluent reading public of the early nineteenth century makes new ventures in writing and publishing possible, but also creates a literary marketplace in which writers “cannot escape from the notice of [...] contemporaries” and “must look to the public for support” (220). The role of the public intellectual thus takes on an increasingly performative quality insofar as “performance” suggests action in the presence of an audience whose demands and responses the performer cannot ignore. But periodical writers also engage in performance in a more specific sense: they draw on forms of communication made popular by the embodied and experiential media that proliferated during the 1820s, from stage performance to public lectures to visual panoramas.
Recent studies in book, theatre, and media history have opened up new contexts for studying the performative strategies adopted by public intellectuals and by the periodical press. As the material and social conditions of early nineteenth-century print communication come into clearer focus, the pace of change in writing practices and in the concomitant evolution of reading publics is becoming ever more evident, as is the profound significance of these changes. Technological improvements such as steam printing and the machine manufacture of paper gradually brought down the price of printed matter over the course of the 1820s and had a demonstrable influence on literary form by making prose fiction and weekly or monthly periodicals more economically viable than they had ever been before.1 The economic prosperity that followed within a few years of the end of the Napoleonic Wars increased the leisure time and disposable income of middle-class readers who turned in ever greater numbers to literary-cultural magazines that promised instruction, amusement, and access to a genteel lifestyle. A more specific account of the dynamics of periodical publishing in early nineteenth-century Britain might begin with the rivalry between the Tory Edinburgh Review (founded in 1802) and the London-based Whig Quarterly Review (founded in 1809) that was disrupted in 1817 by the appearance of the politically conservative but stylistically radical Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Among the many influential innovations of Blackwood’s was its change of format from a standard “review” into a “magazine” containing creative writing and coverage of metropolitan popular culture. Imitators and rivals of Blackwood’s, notably the London Magazine (founded in 1820) and the New Monthly Magazine (relaunched in 1821), dominated the print culture of the following decade with their appeal to a broadly middle-class readership, although the groundwork was simultaneously being laid for the cheaper weekly “penny press” that would bring useful knowledge within reach of the working-class masses by the 1830s.2 These developments in print culture took place against the colourful background provided by the visual and experiential media of metropolitan culture – melodrama, pantomime, panoramas, dioramas, lectures, exhibits, museums, sporting events – all of which played off and on one another. As Simon During has recently observed about Regency culture, “this market was characterized not so much by the specialization of its various sectors as by the interactions between them so as to animate activity across the whole” (346).3
One of the most obvious ways in which early nineteenth-century print culture draws strength from its own proliferation is with the “reviewers reviewed” genre. In addition to reviewing new books, plays, and concerts, by the 1820s periodicals avidly and sometimes obsessively review one another. Hazlitt’s essay on “The Periodical Press” belongs to this genre: after a general overview of the state of the literary field, Hazlitt evaluates a dozen daily, weekly, and monthly publications in terms of their effect on contemporary literature, art, and public opinion. He thus participates in a feedback loop that developed together with the unprecedented expansion of the periodical press around 1820. New periodicals entering the market usually begin with a prospectus that takes stock of the existing field, and many magazines run regular articles that systematically evaluate the state of the periodical press at home and abroad. The European Magazine, for instance, had a recurring feature entitled “The Reviewers Reviewed” that its editor made use of for three consecutive months in 1824 to respond to Hazlitt’s review of the reviews (European Magazine 85:129–38, 229–38, 336–8). Ridiculing and rebutting Hazlitt’s “Periodical Press” essay almost sentence by sentence, the European Magazine argues contra Hazlitt that the age’s proliferating “cant of criticism” (85:129) is not healthy, but instead exerts far too much influence on readers.
Cutting across the dialogue among periodicals is the explicit and implicit feedback between periodical writers and the reading public. Magazines relied for economic survival on their ability to appeal to the tastes of readers and respond nimbly to changes in public demand, and this immediate dependence on popular response is often cited by writers of the 1820s as a defining feature of periodical literature. Hazlitt’s recognition that “We must look to the public for support” (220) becomes a still more prominent and more troubling theme in the contemporaneous survey of “Periodical Literature” by James Mill that appeared in the first issue of the Westminster Review (1824), where Mill tries and fails to reconcile the periodicals’ beholdenness to readers’ opinions and their need for “the applause of the moment” (Mill 207) with the traditional responsibility of literature to educate the public and correct its taste. What complicates the situation further is the unstable distinction between readers and writers. As the “reviewers-reviewed” genre makes evident, periodical writers are periodical readers; conversely, there are many ways for lay readers to become writers. Magazines generally devoted ample space to letters to the editor, and a significant number encouraged or even subsisted on reader contributions.
A more specific dialogue between magazine editors and reader-writers takes place in the “Notes (or Notices) to Contributors” pages at the beginnings or ends of issues – an intriguing, unstudied feature of many early nineteenth-century periodicals. These pages contain private communications between the editor and would-be contributors about the acceptance or rejection of their submissions. In the case of acceptance, the editor’s note may give an indication of when the contribution will appear or encourage the writer to submit further material; in the case of rejection, brief reasons and serious or sarcastic suggestions for improvement are often included. Submissions might be praised as respectable, judicious, curious, clever, ingenious, or humorous; they might be criticized as too tame, too grave, too loosely and carelessly composed; they might be rejected as unsuited for the magazine or simply as “trash.” While this public form of private correspondence is pragmatic, saving editors the time and expense of writing to contributors individually, it simultaneously serves to consolidate the magazine’s editorial policy and advertise the contents of future issues. More elaborate versions of “Notes to Contributors,” such as the editorial pages entitled “The Lion’s Head” in the London Magazine, serve to provide entertainment to the entire readership, in part through the editor’s performance as a witty connoisseur of the metropolis. These pages establish a model of dialogue between editors and reader-writers that can itself be subject to adaptation or parody in upstart magazines such as Knight’s Quarterly (of which more below).
Against this vivid background of print and performance it is now possible to do finer-grained work by studying more experimental, ephemeral, and local phenomena. Short-lived ventures onto the periodical scene abounded during the unsettled 1820s, and magazines that survived for only a few issues can be revealing precisely because of their ephemerality. Taking advantage of opportunities and drawing inspiration from the practices of more-established magazines as well as from contemporary performance genres, these “indie” publications are a valuable gauge of the fashions, demands, communicative practices, and economic realities of the market. As the following examples will show, key figures of high-Romantic culture sought to reach a new public through the media provided by the 1820s marketplace, as did the university students and young entrepreneurs who would become leading public intellectuals of the Victorian era. Their creative productions draw on different types of communication – written and oral, print and performance – and demonstrate how the diversified cultural field of 1820s London builds on itself, generating reviews, imitations, and transmedial experiments that alter the relationship between producers and consumers of culture.
The six-month, six-issue lifespan of The Panoramic Miscellany testifies to the challenge of surviving in the 1820s periodical market, but also to the hope it offered a Romantic-era intellectual that he might reach a new audience of middle-class and even working-class readers. John Thelwall had risen to prominence in the heady climate of the 1790s as a public lecturer, literary figure, and spokesperson for political reform. During the first three decades of the nineteenth century he devoted his attention to elocutionary training and speech therapy – subjects on which he lectured, wrote, and taught at the institute he established in London, where he also maintained close contacts with the city’s scientific and medical institutions. Thelwall was thus one of the Romantic period’s intensely interdisciplinary public intellectuals, a practitioner of interrelated arts and sciences whose strong commitment to public communication is evident in a lifelong career of lecturing at literary and philosophical institutes throughout Britain as well as in his writing and journalism. During the first six months of 1826, Thelwall attempted to harness his considerable experience as periodical writer and editor in order to launch an independent monthly magazine entitled The Panoramic Miscellany. Reflecting the rapid changes that had taken place in print culture since the time he began his journalistic and public-speaking career in the late eighteenth century, The Panoramic Miscellany reveals Thelwall’s partial success but ultimate failure to adapt his long-standing ideological commitments to the new media context of the 1820s.
The Panoramic Miscellany arose out of Thelwall’s traumatic break with the middle-class liberal Monthly Magazine to which he had contributed since its founding in 1796 and of which, in the mid-1820s, he briefly served as editor. When the new owners of the Monthly Magazine fired him in November 1825, Thelwall sought to perpetuate the commitments and ideals of the Monthly in an independent periodical. The Panoramic’s contents accordingly preserve the standard line-up of older monthly miscellanies such as the Monthly Magazine, including an editorial on the “Topic of the Month”; serialized feature articles on literary, scientific, historical, and political topics; original poetry and short fiction; coverage of current events in the scientific institutes, art galleries, theatres, and concert halls; reviews of new book publications; and routine sections containing parliamentary reports, weather statistics, agricultural reports, domestic news items, patents, bankruptcies, and obituaries. But the contents and editorial practice of The Panoramic Miscellany distinguish Thelwall’s intervention into 1820s periodical culture as an attempt to encourage interdisciplinary and international dialogue, to promote public education, and above all to transfer his practice as lecturer and trainer in public speaking – thus, as a distinctive type of performer – into a print medium.
Like most editors of the day, Thelwall launches his periodical by reviewing the current state of print culture. The title of his leading article in the inaugural issue of The Panoramic Miscellany is a virtual thesis statement: “On the Connexion of Periodical Literature with the Moral and Intellectual Progress of Society” (Panoramic 1).4 Thelwall’s lengthy editorial echoes the main goals that publisher Richard Phillips and editor John Aikin had articulated in the editorial preface of the first issue of the Monthly Magazine thirty years earlier. In February 1796, the founders of the Monthly had promised to “open new sources of entertainment and instruction for their readers,” to propagate liberal principles, to provide a forum for the “lighter exertions of learned and ingenious writers,” and to publish genuinely good poetry – none of which was then being offered by other “Periodical Miscellanies” (Monthly Magazine 1:iii–iv). Thelwall’s editorial statement of January 1826 reaffirms these goals while incorporating a retrospective analysis of the way periodicals like the Monthly have revolutionized print culture during the intervening thirty years. His defence of periodical literature links the proliferation of magazines during the 1820s to the “rapid march of mind” and to a notable increase in refinement, morality, intelligence, and taste, especially among the middle classes. By contrast, he claims, in the late eighteenth century middle-class tradesman had eschewed literature and book learning while they deemed card playing and drinking more useful and acceptable recreations, and the only “wretched flimsy and ill written sixpenny magazines” that were then available were read by young women (Panoramic 1). When periodicals such as the Monthly Magazine entered this unenlightened marketplace and addressed a large-scale, middle-class, predominantly male readership, they joined with newly formed public societies, mechanics’ institutes, and middle-class universities in a grand mission of public improvement that, in 1826, still awaits appropriate recognition: “Of the powerful influence of periodical literature in forwarding the progress of general intellect, and the necessity of its agency to the end proposed, there are few, perhaps, who, even yet, have formed a proper estimate” (Panoramic 4). Thelwall refutes the idea that the brief information offered in miscellanies is superficial and displaces more profound scientific publications. Instead, he claims, accessible popular knowledge and serious research reciprocally support one another:
It is the business of the periodical essayist to remove this veil of mystery from science, to translate its revelations into familiar language, and dispense to those who have more of thirst, than leisure, or opportunity for acquisition, so much as they have time to receive, or are prepared to comprehend. Is this a task for superficial minds? (Panoramic 5)
It is already evident from these opening pages of The Panoramic Miscellany why the aging Thelwall felt he had to find a way to continue the original mission of the Monthly Magazine – and why he hoped it was possible to do so in 1826 by founding a magazine of one’s own. The responsibility of disseminating instructive and amusing information along with liberal principles has only gained in importance in the climate of heightened media awareness and optimistic “march of mind” that characterizes the 1820s, a climate that periodical literature itself has helped to form. Magazines are as important an organ for contributing to the improvement of society as the public lecturing and elocutionary training with which The Panoramic Miscellany goes hand in hand.
In accordance with the journalistic practice of the time, most of the articles in The Panoramic Miscellany are unsigned or signed with obvious pseudonyms. But Thelwall’s deviations from this convention begin to demarcate his idiosyncratic use of the periodical medium, specifically the ways in which he adapts the magazine to accommodate his accustomed role as lecturer and the elements of performance involved in that role. Clear exceptions to the custom of anonymity are the lectures on elocution that form a centrepiece for most of the issues, each of which is identified in the title as “Mr Thelwall’s Lecture.” A good number of the articles contributed by other writers are conspicuously framed by headnotes and footnotes signed “Editor” or (occasionally) “J. Thelwall.” Some of the “Original Poetry” is signed by Thelwall himself, and some of the regular pseudonyms used in the poetry department (“Ausonia,” for instance) seem to belong to him as well. Other pieces that, judging by content and tone, are likely written by Thelwall are an enthusiastic multipart series on “The London University” (founded in 1826 as the first secular university in England), reports on public societies and educational institutions, articles on political economy, the three-part “Tour thro North Wales,” some of the regular features including the agricultural reports, and the literary-critical articles. Foremost among his acknowledged contributions are the editorials that begin each issue, which are signed either with Thelwall’s name or with a coded symbol consisting of a triangle followed by three dots in the shape of a second triangle (Δ ∴).5
A hallmark of The Panoramic Miscellany is the strong editorial presence with its sometimes personal, sometimes pedantic or patronizing tone. Like many magazine editors, Thelwall addresses contributors directly in the “Notices to Correspondents” pages at the end of each issue – apologizing, for instance, for having to print the article “On the Egyptian Zodiac” in “such small type” (Panoramic 146), welcoming submissions of poetry in Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian (298), or responding cordially to “our Correspondent T. P.” who “hints” that Thelwall should include lighter and more humorous material (442). But he also carries on a running dialogue with contributors and readers throughout the Panoramic – for instance, by using headnotes to single out certain articles as outstanding or, conversely, by adding critical footnotes to distance himself from the claims made in other pieces. Thelwall treats his editorial role as a sustained conversation with contributors and readers, albeit one in which he claims the dominant voice. The dialogic tone of his editorial interventions suggests that he places the periodical miscellany on a continuum with oral media of communication such as public lectures, elocutionary training, and the educational institutions and debating clubs whose activities receive so much coverage in his magazine.
Several kinds and levels of dialogue take place in the pages of the Panoramic. One forum for dialogue is international, beginning with a steady partnership with the French Revue Encyclopédique that distributed Thelwall’s magazine through its Paris office and from which the Panoramic draws several articles, reprinting them in English translation. In addition, the Panoramic pays special attention to the literature and science of Italy; reviews literature from across Europe; features articles on Spanish history and culture, Danish superstitions, the climate of France, and new developments in engineering and statistical surveys throughout the world; and devotes regular attention to India and Burma (presumably due to the ongoing Anglo-Burmese war). Interestingly, though, the Panoramic does not assume any knowledge of foreign languages on the part of its readers but conscientiously provides English translations of every non-English text or phrase, however brief, that appears in its pages. Insofar as this practice indicates a dedication to accessibility and a target audience among male middle- and working-class readers who are not expected to have an education in either modern or classical languages, it is a policy that subtly reveals how a magazine both selects and accommodates itself to a readership.
More than other magazines of the 1820s, though, The Panoramic Miscellany privileges the public lecture as a form of communication. In addition to Thelwall’s own lectures on elocution, the Panoramic prints long excerpts from lectures delivered at scientific institutions, and the “Proceedings of Learned Societies” section contains eyewitness reports and précis of further lectures. Some of Thelwall’s articles, particularly his continuing series on “The London University,” include remarks on the practice of lecturing itself: “A lecturer should be plain, perspicuous and diffuse. The performance may be masterly, and throw great lustre upon the character of the lecturer [...]” (Panoramic 505). Indeed, the fundamental rhetorical orientation of The Panoramic Miscellany seems best described as the pedagogical mode of lecture-discussion. Thelwall as editor persistently gestures towards conversational exchange with contributors, correspondents, and readers, yet he maintains a controlling role in these conversations, initiating topics and framing the contributions of others by claiming the last word. His own articles often take the form of rebuttals to other men’s lectures or speeches. In the May and June issues, for instance, Thelwall prints long excerpts from “Mr Jacob’s Report to the House of Commons, on the Trade in Foreign Corn” and develops his own counterposition in a passage-by-passage commentary. Similarly, February’s leading article is a running commentary on a lecture recently delivered by Mr Banks at the City and Western Institutions, and in March, Thelwall follows the same practice with a lecture on “Geological Phenomena” that was delivered by Professor Brande at the Royal Institution. These editorials become dialogues between Thelwall and other public speakers who are thereby pulled, as it were, into the space of the magazine and challenged by Thelwall as if on the floor of the House or in the lecture hall. Their opinions are framed by Thelwall’s commentary in much the same way that the articles by voluntary contributors are framed by his editorial interventions in footnotes or endnotes.
Thelwall resorts to a variety of tactics for trying to engage readers in intellectual debate. He includes brief queries on etymological questions – asking about the origin of the terms “Grub Street” or “John Bull,” for instance – that solicit involvement from readers. Sometimes the interpolated questions are more philosophical: “What is eloquence?”; “What are metaphysics?”; “What is time?” (Panoramic 315, 374, 306). Another variant on the lecture-discussion mode, and another way in which The Panoramic Miscellany sets itself apart from rival magazines, appears in Thelwall’s literary criticism and reviewing. The individual book reviews in the Panoramic’s notably long “Review of Literature” department are completely unsystematic, vary dramatically in length, and reflect Thelwall’s personal interests in such topics as grammar and metrics. In contrast to the reviewing style that was nearly ubiquitous in periodicals from the Edinburgh Review to the European Magazine, where reviews included lengthy quotations from the book under discussion, Thelwall quotes minimally and instead offers his own evaluation. Also interesting is the gendered perspective of Thelwall’s reviewing and literary criticism. Among the books he singles out for unusually lengthy treatment are publications by prominent women writers: Letitia Landon’s The Troubadour (Panoramic 74–82); Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (Panoramic 380–6); and Joanna Baillie’s The Martyr (Panoramic 665–8). In addition to his characteristic mode of biased dialogue with male contributors, lecturers, or treatise-writers, Thelwall adopts a more hierarchical mentoring stance in relation to younger female writers, whom he nevertheless treats with notable seriousness and respect.
If Thelwall’s editorial practice suggests an attempt to transfer his role as public speaker and educator into a print medium, the title of his magazine perhaps signals most vividly his awareness of the changing media field. The term “miscellany” has a well-established eighteenth-century genealogy, although it takes on a new currency in the mid-1820s when major publishers begin to market affordably priced “miscellanies” or anthologies in order to bring new and reprinted literature to a wide readership; the influential Constable’s Miscellany, for instance, was in preparation at exactly this time. “Panoramic,” on the other hand, is a brand-new nineteenth-century adjective, first recorded by the OED in 1813, that did not gain its abstract meaning of “universal” until after Thelwall’s lifetime. In the minds of his readers in the 1820s, it might have conjured up recollections of another recently defunct publication, the Literary Panorama (1806–19), but its most immediate associations are with innovative visual media. Like other literary-cultural magazines, The Panoramic Miscellany contains reports about the new visual entertainments in London, including the Diorama (252, 396–7), the Cosmorama, and the proto-cinematic Poecilorama at the Egyptian Hall (397, 445). The link between these spectacles and the title of Thelwall’s magazine is made explicit in the April issue when a correspondent writes in as “John Bull” expressing appreciation for the Poecilorama but ridiculing its pretentious Greek name. “John Bull” notes that Thelwall himself appears to share the “Greek mania” that led him to use the “scrap of every day Greek ‘Panoramic’” on his title page rather than calling his journal, in plain English, “Thelwall’s Monthly Magazine” (486). In a good-natured response, Thelwall concedes the point: booksellers, publishers, and readers will have no trouble recognizing that the Panoramic is Thelwall’s magazine. Yet the title’s significant gesture towards a new medium of visual representation seems indicative of Thelwall’s awareness of technological innovation and his engagement with experiential media – above all with public speaking, which continues to stand at the centre of his commitment to rational communication and the march of mind.6
Another sort of optimism about the potential of periodical culture in the 1820s is exemplified by Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, six issues of which appeared in 1823–4. While The Panoramic Miscellany, as the 62-year-old Thelwall’s first venture into independent editorship, seems at once enterprising and elegiac, Knight’s Quarterly, as the product of a group of Cambridge scholars and young lawyers at the outset of their careers, points forward to the sociocultural work of the mid-nineteenth century. The magazine’s leading lights were the future Victorian writers and politicians Thomas Babington Macaulay and Winthrop Mackworth Praed. Among their collaborators were Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s son Derwent and his nephew Henry Nelson Coleridge, Thomas de Quincey, Edward Bulwer, William Maginn, and the barrister and Victorian penal reformer Matthew Davenport Hill. Principally, however, Knight’s Quarterly was one of the earliest publishing and editorial ventures of Charles Knight, a key figure in nineteenth-century print culture and educational reform. Knight would soon take a central role in running the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge; in 1832 he would launch the Society’s weekly Penny Magazine, the most important of the early Victorian periodicals that brought the “march of intellect” within reach of a mass middle- and working-class readership. Playful, performative, and experimental, Knight’s Quarterly Magazine constitutes an ironic training ground in public communication and self-presentation for some of the key public intellectuals of the Victorian period.
Knight’s Quarterly is a miscellany of prose and poetry that includes literary criticism, creative writing, and essays both serious and humorous. As Thelwall’s Panoramic Miscellany adopted the format of the predecessor Monthly Magazine, Knight’s Quarterly just as clearly models itself on Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, seeking to capitalize on the innovative style and tone of that recent and notorious entry into the literary market. Knight’s offers its own versions of the pseudonymous editorial personalities made popular by Blackwood’s, importing this format from the Edinburgh literary scene into the London one and taking it further in the direction of self-reflexive play with the boundaries of reality and fiction. Although other periodicals (including Blackwood’s)7 paid tribute to the quality of the writing in Knight’s, the magazine folded within a year and a half due to a small readership, editorial conflicts, and the economic crisis of 1825–6. This short-lived periodical nevertheless deserves attention for its self-conscious performance of the process of editing a literary magazine. While the performative dimension of Hazlitt’s journalism involves a heightened awareness of public response and that of Thelwall’s Panoramic Miscellany entails the rhetorical gestures of a lecturer addressing an audience, in the case of Knight’s Quarterly performance takes the form of ironic self-spectatorship: the writers and editors of Knight’s are perpetually watching themselves act as writers and editors. Especially in the “Castle Vernon” scenes at the beginning of the 1823 issues, the recurring features entitled “The Editor” and “What You Will,” and the miscellany “The Anniversary” that makes up most of the August 1824 issue, the magazine’s writers theatricalize their own editorial activity, effectively staging the act of writing, assembling, and publishing each issue while they are actually doing so.
Thus “Castle Vernon, No. 1” – the piece that opens the first volume – performs the founding of the magazine by a group of young people in the drawing room of Lady Mary Vernon, fictional sister of Charles Knight’s fictional editorial persona “Frederic Vernon.” The scene is, on one level, a realistic depiction of the upper-middle-class social life of the magazine’s actual writers, and the prose is thick with allusions to the real-life literary scene of 1820s London. On another level, the writers appear as caricatures of themselves, thereby introducing the pseudonymous personae they will adopt throughout the magazine’s run. Yet another level of theatricality is added by the representation of the entire scene as a medieval court ruled by Lady Mary – a shared pretence that parodies Romantic medievalism and plays off the name of the magazine and its founder, Charles Knight. Within this multilayered scene of conviviality, the gentlemen critique the currently available literary magazines, resolve to launch “the most entertaining publication of the day” (Knight’s 1:5),8 and petition Lady Mary to be its patron. Lady Mary accepts, but only after holding a mock trial of the young men’s sincerity and qualifications. As the medieval court morphs into a “high court of judicature” (1:4) for Lady Mary’s investigation, the part-narrative, part-dialogue genre of “Castle Vernon” incorporates a plethora of text types: a formal pledge of devotion by the founders of Knight’s Quarterly to Lady Mary (to add to the irony, it is a pledge to which they subscribe their pseudonyms), a declaration by which Lady Mary accepts the “rule and sovereignty” (1:12) of the magazine and appoints her brother Frederic its editor, and a formal account of the proceedings of the court signed by their duly elected secretary, “Peregrine Courtenay” (a.k.a. Winthrop Mackworth Praed).
Self-consciously layering real-life contexts and fictional allegories, mixing text types, and playing with actual, pseudonymous, and legal identities, the first instalment of “Castle Vernon” takes the place of the serious prospectus with which a new magazine normally entered the market. More precisely, “Castle Vernon” functions as an alternative, dramatized, ironic version of such a prospectus, foreshadowing the magazine’s ironic tone and its often metafictional contents, incorporating a review of the existing periodical field, and showing potential readers what they themselves might look like: an elegant, literate, flirtatious, clever, and fun-loving group of young men and women. Thanks to a dense web of in-jokes and allusions to the clichéd contents of other periodicals, “Castle Vernon” also fulfils the function of the expected “review of the reviews” and thereby situates itself within the literary field.
Interspersing them with essays, book reviews, fiction, and poetry, Knight’s Quarterly continues to include pieces that perform the usual contents and practices of a literary magazine. Charles Knight’s recurring articles under the title “The Editor” are humorous dramatizations of the day-to-day realities of publishing the periodical. In the first instalment of “The Editor” (1:13–16), contributors keep proofs for too long or promise a “magnificent Essay” but deliver only an “Epigram”; star contributor “Vyvyan Joyeuse” fails to deliver anything at all; “Gerard Montgomery” has written something too risqué; other members of the coterie have submitted articles unacceptably coloured by political invective. Critiquing everything that his contributors have sent him and thereby sending up the regular contents of other literary magazines, the Editor produces a theatricalized version of the routine “Notes to Contributors” page. In later instalments the Editor appeals directly to “My dear Public” (2:1–11, 2:243–56) – a term that, by invoking a performative rather than conversational context and an anonymous “Public” rather than an intimate audience, contrasts interestingly with the more common address of 1820s journalists to the “(dear) reader.” Asking the public to sympathize with his labours, he inserts the letters and notes his delinquent contributors have purportedly sent him in order to demonstrate what he as editor has to put up with in order to get the magazine into the public’s hands.
At the end of each of the first four issues of Knight’s Quarterly, a section entitled “What You Will” dramatizes the last-minute scramble to fill up pages and deliver the magazine to the printer. These sections foreground above all the improvised nature of periodical writing. In the October 1823 “What You Will” (1:443–57), a crisis caused by a delinquent contributor who doesn’t even have anything in the “literary drawer, ready made” is resolved in deus-ex-machina style when a package from “Vyvyan Joyeuse” arrives with a few poems and riddles that can be strung together with interspersed commentary and ironic asides about the literary scene to complete the issue in the nick of time. In the January 1824 instalment (2:227–39), harried Sub-Editor “Paterson Aymer” (another of Charles Knight’s pseudonymous personalities) finds himself with two blank pages left even after inserting all the poems and small pieces he has been handed by the regular contributors. He desperately fills the oppressive white space with an improvised review of the newly published novel he happens to be reading (Scott’s St Ronan’s Well) and an additional “extempore song” before signing off on 30 December at three o’clock in the morning.
Knight’s Quarterly intervenes in the contemporary literary scene in a way that both enacts and parodies the determining factors of that scene. It uses wild experimentation with the boundaries of reality and fiction to foreground the improvised and haphazard nature of periodical literature. As in the more famous Blackwood’s, its writers adopt pseudonymous personalities. Like the 1820s fiction of Scott and other contemporaries, Knight’s layers heteroglossic text types and makes use of metafictional devices such as pseudo-editorial frames, found manuscripts, and “authentic” letters that are patently fake. Anxiety not just over the increasing speed and time pressure of writing for periodicals but about the resulting commodification of periodical literature is a running theme in most magazines of the 1820s, and Knight’s Quarterly parodies these conditions in a characteristically metafictional item entitled “New Depository for Literary Manufactures” (1:96–103). This article takes the form of a letter to the editor of Knight’s Quarterly from the proprietor of an establishment called “Paperstain and Co.” “Paperstain” has discovered a business opportunity in the volatile periodical market by establishing “a factory for the exhibition and sale of original manuscripts, from the sermon to the sonnet” (1:96), and the company’s letter quickly reveals itself to be an advertising flyer offering Knight’s Quarterly the choice of its stock. By commenting on which genres are selling well, which periodicals are buying what, and what kinds of manuscripts are overstocked or remaindered, the “Paperstain” letter performs a send-up of the commodified contents of 1820s periodicals. Paperstain’s sole sample in the category “Criticism in the Fine Arts” is from a “very impartial, and, if necessary, growling critic” who advertises his credentials to review panoramas as follows:
ON PANORAMAS. – Experienced as I have been, during the last thirty years, in every thing that pertains to Literature, Science, and Art; – honoured as I am by the acquaintance, by the patronage, by the friendship of so many distinguished persons in those branches; – having contributed in various ways to the illustration, to the decoration, and to the classification of many subjects of literary and artistical research; – being myself a member of several eminent societies in this metropolis; and holding an extensive correspondence in various parts of the United Kingdom, of Europe, of the world – I think myself qualified to write on Panoramas. (1:101)
Part of Knight’s parody of the contemporary art scene lies in the fact that “On Panoramas” is the only manuscript Paperstain and Co. offer in the field of visual arts, as if to emphasize the clichéd fashionability of the new medium that has apparently displaced high art. The item’s delineation of the qualifications and networks claimed by a typical writer and critic of the older generation (“during the last thirty years”) is also incisive. While surely no specific reflection on John Thelwall is intended,9 the parodic self-advertisement would not be an inaccurate description of Thelwall’s activities as a Romantic-era public intellectual – one that sets the stage for his soon-to-be-launched Panoramic Miscellany.
Knight’s Quarterly Magazine memorably blends commentary on the contemporary media context and self-reflection on the processes of editing and publishing with clever creative writing. Making adept use of literary devices such as characterization, caricature, and irony, Knight’s turns the periodical scene itself into literature. Thelwall’s Panoramic Miscellany, on the contrary, draws largely on the models of communication familiar to a Romantic-era public intellectual conversant with literary and scientific institutions: lecturing, teaching, and the all-round perspective emblematized by the panorama. Both enterprises exemplify the ironically qualified optimism that Hazlitt, in his essay on “The Periodical Press,” associates with a transitional age. Knight’s Quarterly Magazine and The Panoramic Miscellany are neither commercial successes nor unacknowledged masterpieces. Insofar as both of them folded after six issues and have rarely been noticed since, they seem instead to affirm the accuracy of Hazlitt’s observation that the literary production of the 1820s “glitters, flutters, buzzes, spawns, dies, – and is forgotten!”. Yet Hazlitt’s suggestion that even the ephemeral publications of the 1820s manage to “spawn” is borne out by Knight’s Quarterly, which merits notice as an unexpected training ground in public communication for leading Victorian journalists and intellectuals.
Above all, the speculative and volatile climate of the 1820s provided scope for writers to experiment, to manifest the “creative vigour” (213) that Hazlitt dared to hope was possible in an era that was finding its way towards new forms of communication and expression. The relationship between writers and readers takes on a new urgency at a time when engaging a readership is a condition for the periodical’s survival as well as for the fulfilment of its writers’ ambitions to contribute to cultural critique and creative expression (in the case of Knight’s) or to the march of intellect among the middle and working classes (in the case of the Panoramic). Thelwall’s direct addresses to readers, contributors, politicians, public lecturers, and writers whose books he is reviewing constitute a late but optimistic attempt to disseminate reformist principles shaped during the 1790s and practiced in the course of a public-speaking career via a new medium of the 1820s, the independently published monthly miscellany. Meanwhile Charles Knight, Macaulay, the younger Coleridges, and others of their cohort seize on the timely model of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in order to craft a youthful, playful, and insightful self-reflection on the London literary scene and thereby negotiate their places within it as public intellectuals of the rising generation. The effects of an evolving communicative context are evident in the extent to which these magazines draw on the conventions of performative media from public lectures and conversation to dramatic scenes, party games, courtroom trials, and advertising. If the coterie performances of the Knight’s Quarterly group and the lecture-discussion mode of Thelwall’s Panoramic Miscellany proved equally ephemeral, the very possibility of making these ventures shows that the periodical culture of the 1820s provided forward-looking (and hopeful) writers and thinkers with new opportunities to engage public opinion.
1 Among the most relevant studies of these developments and the resulting climate of “information overload” are Altick, English; Erickson; and Siskin. For indicative surveys of production and circulation figures for periodicals, see Appendix C (391–6) of Altick, English; and Appendix 8 (572–7) of St Clair. For discussions of the ways in which other forms and transformations of media can have an effect on reading and the public, see Daniel Coleman’s chapter in this volume on wampum as a communications medium.
2 For further interpretation of the developments alluded to in this very brief overview, see Klancher, Parker, Schoenfield, and Stewart.
3 During’s essay on “Regency Culture” in the Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature provides a vivid survey of 1810s and 1820s life in London. See also Altick’s classic study The Shows of London, to which recent research into late-Georgian theatre history is adding ever richer detail.
4 Since the single six-issue volume of The Panoramic Miscellany uses consecutive page numbering throughout, references in the present essay are given by page numbers only.
5 As elucidated in Thelwall’s lecture on “Elements of Prosody” in the May issue, these two signs represent the “Thesis and Arsis of human speech” (Panoramic 636): a long/stressed syllable followed by a short/unstressed one. Rhythmically (as a trochaic foot) as well as phonetically (THesis + Arsis), they stand for “Thelwall.”
6 For a more extensive discussion of the Panoramic, see Esterhammer, “John Thelwall’s Panoramic Miscellany” (originally published electronically on the University of Maryland’s Romantic Circles Website).
7 Characteristically, Blackwood’s expresses its approval of Knight’s Quarterly with an ironic touch by introducing “Vyvyan Joyeuse,” the fictional star writer of Knight’s, into the convivial company of Blackwoods’ fictional editorial coterie in No. 14 of the “Noctes Ambrosianae” series (Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 14 [July–December 1823]: 485–90).
8 References to Knight’s Quarterly Magazine are given by volume and page number; pages are numbered consecutively in each of the three volumes, each of which comprises two quarterly issues.
9 On the contrary, David Stewart, who also remarks on the significance of the “New Depository for Literary Manufactures” piece, suggests that the intended target of the “Fine Arts” notice is “the brazen self-promotion engaged in by B. R. Haydon” (72).
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Altick, Richard D. The Shows of London. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1978. Print.
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 14 (July–December 1823). Print.
During, Simon. “Regency London.” The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature. Ed. James Chandler. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 335–54. Print. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521790079.016.
Erickson, Lee. The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Print.
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Hazlitt, William. “The Periodical Press.” The Complete Works of William Hazlitt. Ed. P.P. Howe. Vol. 16: Contributions to the Edinburgh Review. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1931. 211–39. Print.
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Knight’s Quarterly Magazine 1 (June and October 1823), 2 (January and April 1824), and 3 (August and November 1824). Print.
Mill, James. “Periodical Literature.” Westminster Review 1 (1824): 206–49. Print.
The Monthly Magazine and British Register 1 (February–July 1796). Print.
The Panoramic Miscellany 1 (January–June 1826). Print.
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