The Gentleman's Magazine

Front page of The Gentleman's Magazine, May 1759

The Gentleman's Magazine was founded in London, England, by Edward Cave in January 1731. It ran uninterrupted for almost 200 years, until 1922. It was the first to use the term "magazine" (from the Arabic maḫāzin, meaning "storehouse") for a periodical. Samuel Johnson's first regular employment as a writer was with The Gentleman's Magazine.

History

The original complete title was The Gentleman's Magazine: or, Trader's monthly intelligencer. Cave's innovation was to create a monthly digest of news and commentary on any topic the educated public might be interested in, from commodity prices to Latin poetry. It carried original content from a stable of regular contributors, as well as extensive quotes and extracts from other periodicals and books. Cave, who edited The Gentleman's Magazine under the pen name "Sylvanus Urban", was the first to use the term "magazine" (meaning "storehouse") for a periodical. Contributions to the magazine frequently took the form of letters, addressed to "Mr. Urban". The iconic illustration of St John's Gate on the front of each issue (occasionally updated over the years) depicted Cave's home, in effect, the magazine's "office".

Before the founding of The Gentleman's Magazine, there were specialized journals, but no such wide-ranging publication (although there had been attempts, such as The Gentleman's Journal, which was edited by Peter Motteux and ran from 1692 to 1694).

Samuel Johnson's first regular employment as a writer was with The Gentleman's Magazine. During a time when parliamentary reporting was banned, Johnson regularly contributed parliamentary reports as "Debates of the Senate of Magna Lilliputia". Though they reflected the positions of the participants, the words of the debates were mostly Johnson's own. The name Columbia, a poetic name for America coined by Johnson, first appears in a 1738 weekly publication of the debates of the British Parliament in the Magazine.

Cave, a skilled businessman, developed an extensive distribution system for The Gentleman's Magazine. It was read throughout the English-speaking world, and continued to flourish through the eighteenth century and much of the nineteenth, under a series of different editors and publishers. It went into decline in the later nineteenth century, and finally ceased general publication in September 1907. However, issues consisting of four pages each were printed in very small editions between late 1907 and 1922 in order to keep the title formally "in print".

Series

• 1731–1735 The Gentleman's Magazine or Monthly Intelligencer
• 1736–1833 The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Chronicle
• 1834–1856 (June) New Series: The Gentleman's Magazine
• 1856 (July)–1868 (May) New Series: The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Review
• 1868 (June)–1922 Entirely New Series: The Gentleman's Magazine

See also

• Philip Thicknesse

Further reading

• Kuist, James M. (1982). The Nichols File of the Gentleman's Magazine: Attributions of Authorship and Other Documentation in Editorial Papers at the Folger Library. University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, Wis.). ISBN 0299084809. 
• Two supplements to Kuist were originally published in Vols. 44, 45, 46, 47, and 49 of Studies in Bibliography, The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia
  • de Montluzin, Emily Lorraine (1996). "Attributions of Authorship The Gentleman's Magazine, 1731-1868 A supplement to Kuist". http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/bsuva/gm/gm1.html. 
  • de Montluzin, Emily Lorraine (1997). "Attributions of Authorship in the Gentleman's Magazine, 1731-1868: A Synthesis of Finds Appearing Neither in Kuist's Nichols File nor in de Montluzin's Supplement to Kuist". http://etext.virginia.edu/bsuva/gm/gm2.html. 
• de Montluzin, Emily Lorraine. "Attributions of Authorship in the Gentleman's Magazine (Kuist's Nichols File and Its Conversion into an Electronic Database)". http://etext.virginia.edu/bsuva/gm/intro.html. 

External links

• The Gentleman's Magazine, archives at Internet Archive.
• The Gentleman's Magazine, archives at Google Books.
• Bodleian Internet Library of Early Journals: A digital library of 18th and 19th Century journals including The Gentleman's Magazine, (on-line text search)
• "An Electronic Version of James M. Kuist's The Nichols File of the Gentleman's Magazine". Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia Library. 21 April 2008. http://etext.virginia.edu/bsuva/gm/.