Conservation on copies of Blackwoods magazine

Via the  Bronte Parsonage Museum

We have the lovely Oonagh with us today, helping with our ongoing conservation on our copies of Blackwoods magazine, which was a great favourite of all of the Brontë family.

The inspiration and imagination of the Brontes. What did the Bronte children read?

The periodicals that Patrick Brontë subscribed to were a mine of information for his children. The Leeds Intelligencer, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, conservative and well written, but better than the Quarterly Review that defended the same political ideas whilst addressing a less refined readership, (the reason why Mr Brontë did not read it);^[33] were exploited in every detail, and Blackwood's Magazine in particular, was not only the source of their knowledge of world affairs, but a map of Africa published in it in July 1831, interested them immediately because it confirmed their world of Glass Town which they had situated in West Africa.^[34] Their knowledge of geography was completed by Goldsmith's Grammar of General Geography of which there was a copy at the parsonage.^[35]

Blackwood's was conceived as a rival to the Whig-supporting Edinburgh Review. 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 of 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 contributors John Gibson Lockhart and William Maginn. 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 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 controversial style of the magazine got it into trouble when, in 1821, John Scott, the editor of theLondon Magazine, fought a duel with Jonathan Henry Christie over libellous statements in the magazine. John Scott was shot and killed.^[1]

By the mid-1820s Lockhart and Maginn had departed to London, the former to edit the Quarterly and the latter to write for a range of journals, though principally for Fraser's Magazine. After this, 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; Poe even satirised the magazine's obsessions in "Loss of Breath: A Tale A La Blackwood," and "How to Write a Blackwood Article." The magazine never regained its early success but it still held a dedicated readership throughout the British Empireamongst those in the Colonial Service. One late nineteenth century triumph was the first publication of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in the February, March, and April 1899 issues of the magazine.
Blackwood's_Magazine
Quarterly+Review

Blackwood's Magazine

De kinderen Bronte waren op dit tijdschrift geabonneerd en lazen het met veel plezier. Veel van hun kennis werd hier uitgehaald.
Blackwood's Magazine was een Brits tijdschrift dat in 1817 als maandelijks verschijnend blad werd opgericht door William Blackwood, een uitgever uit Edinburgh. Blackwood begon het op de Tory's gerichte tijdschrift als tegenhanger van The Edinburgh Review, dat politiek gezien vooral was geörienteerd op de Whigs.

Het blad verscheen oorspronkelijk onder de titel 'Edinburgh Monthly Magazine' en kende aanvankelijk weinig succes, maar toen het zich onder de nieuwe redacteur John Gibson Lockhart en John Wilson onder de titel 'Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine' ging richten op sensatie, satire en scherpe essays nam het aantal lezers snel toe. Onder de vele fans stond het blad destijds bekend als Maga.
Er ontstond in 1821 een hevige controverse met het rivaliserende blad The London Magazine. Redacteur John Scott van dat blad beschuldigde Blackwood's Magazine van laster, wat zelfs leidde tot een duel, dat zou worden beslecht in Hampstead. Uitdager Lockhart verscheen echter niet tijdig ter plaatse en diens secondant Jonathan Christie ging ten slotte het duel aan. Scott raakte hierbij ernstig gewond en overleed aan de gevolgen.

Hoewel het blad rechts-geörienteerd was, publiceerde het wel het werk van vrijgevochten dichters als Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats en Samuel Taylor Coleridge. De laatste twee werden eerder in het blad overigens hevig bekritiseerd. Ook Thomas de Quincey leverde regelmatig bijdragen.

Het blad hield op te bestaan in 1980.
---------------------------------------

The House of Blackwood was a family run business, the headship of the firm and its magazine being passed on from generation to generation, until the two became almost indistinguishable. This family tradition was at first its greatest asset, but later proved more problematic, as 20th century innovations in publishing techniques, and changes in fiction, public taste and markets became insurmountable difficulties for the firm's directors. Despite the best efforts of its editors, the famed Blackwood's Magazine folded in 1980, and the firm followed soon after.
Blackwood's Magazine But the firm's literary legacy survived, for when people talk of the great authors of the English language in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, names that spring to mind include Walter Scott, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope and Joseph Conrad. Likewise, literary histories of Scottish literature inevitably include the likes of James Hogg, Thomas de Quincey, Susan Ferrier, Margaret Oliphant, and Hugh MacDiarmid. All of these authors had one thing in common: at one point or other in their literary careers, they were published by the Edinburgh based publishers William Blackwood & Sons. And many of these made their literary debuts in the world famous, monthly Blackwood's Magazine. Started in 1817, it became the flagship of the firm, a source of pride and at the same time a sampler of authors and ideas the editors believed were of importance to the reading public.