Acknowledgements

I wish to thank David L. Vander Meulen, Editor, Studies in Bibliography, for his enthusiastic encouragement over the past six years, as I have pursued my research in identifying hitherto anonymous contributors to the Gentleman's Magazine. It is he who presided over the publication of my findings in a six-part series of articles in Studies in Bibliography, and it is he who suggested reissuing those findings, reorganized into a collective list, as an electronic database. I am deeply appreciative of his support for the project. I am also most grateful for the invaluable assistance of David Gants of the Electronic Text Center of the University of Virginia, specifically for his direction of the process of transforming a printed text into an electronic database.

I also wish to thank others who have helped make this publication possible. Roger K. Hux and John M. Summer of the James A. Rogers Library at Francis Marion University together with their associates on the reference staff at Rogers Library provided vital assistance throughout the project, particularly in the essential areas of interlibrary loan and bibliographical searches. Arthur Sherbo, Emeritus Professor of English at Michigan State University, graciously allowed me to make use of several dozen of his own unpublished Gentleman's Magazine finds. J. R. Hall of the Department of English at the University of Mississippi generously gave me leads essential in identifying contributions by Thomas Wright and Joseph Bosworth, and Janet Ing Freeman and Arthur Freeman of London likewise supplied me with information unearthed in the course of their ongoing research toward a biography of John Payne Collier. I am grateful to the many rectors, vicars, parish historians, and county archivists in Great Britain who were kind enough to search their parish records and thus make it possible to identify numerous Gentleman's Magazine writers who used the signature "Clericus" and dated their contributions from rectories and vicarages across England. Any errors in interpretation that have found their way into the following database are of course entirely my own.

I would like to acknowledge the Francis Marion University Sabbatical and Release Time Committee for generously approving my request for release time during the initial phase of my research. Finally I would like to thank my colleague Richard N. Chapman of the Department of History at Francis Marion University for securing the computer support that has been vital for this project, for his ready expertise in solving software application problems, and for his genuine enthusiasm for my Gentleman's Magazine research over the past six years.

Introduction

When James M. Kuist published The Nichols File of The Gentleman's Magazine: Attributions of Authorship and Other Documentation in Editorial Papers at the Folger Library (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1982), he provided scholars of the periodical press with an indispensable resource: the identification of authorship of almost 13,000 hitherto anonymous articles, reviews, poems, and other items appearing in the Gentleman's Magazine from its beginning in 1731 until 1856, when the descendants of the GM's longtime editor, John Nichols, relinquished ownership of the magazine. From its founding by the printer Edward Cave; through its development under the aegis of Samuel Johnson and of Cave's successor, David Henry; to its heyday under John Nichols, printer, antiquary, and guiding spirit of the magazine, the GM was one of the most influential periodicals in Britain. The breadth of its coverage is stunning. The fluctuating prices of grain or coal or Smithfield beef, daily closing quotations for stocks and bonds, mortality figures (conveniently broken down disease by disease) for the city of London, theatre reviews, original poetry, the parliamentary debates (though somewhat fancifully reported), theological disputes, lists of promotions civil and military, Church preferments, and obituaries by the thousands--all crowd the pages of the Gentleman's Magazine. In addition, as an indispensable source of news to its loyal readership1 scattered throughout the towns, villages, country houses, and parsonages of Britain, the Gentleman's Magazine was unsurpassed. There if nowhere else could eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century readers in remote corners of the nation find what was often their first account of the news of the day, whether it be the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755,2 the discoveries at Herculaneum,3 Benjamin Franklin's experiment with the kite and the key,4 Captain Cook's voyage of discovery in the Endeavour,5 the visit of the chief of the Yamacraw Indians to the court of George II,6 the hanging and burning of Phoebe Harris for coining,7 the ambush of General Braddock in the woods near Fort Duquesne,8 the "skirmish" at Lexington and Concord,9 the latest method of cutting for cataracts before anesthesia10 and the ongoing debate over the application of caustics for breast cancer,11 the Gordon Riots of 178012 and the Peterloo Massacre of 1819,13 the guillotining of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette,14 the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone, 15 or the mutiny on the Bounty.16 Certainly for present-day researchers the Gentleman's Magazine constitutes a gold mine of contemporary information concerning virtually every facet of British life and public interest during the first century of the magazine's existence.

The publication in 1982 of Kuist's Nichols File, supplying as it did the identification of the authors of thousands of the GM's articles and letters on politics, history, theology, travel, science, inventions, medicine, literature, philology, and antiquarian lore was welcomed as a signal achievement in recent British press history. However, Kuist's Nichols File, though breathtaking in its accomplishment, does not purport to be a complete listing of all the known or decipherable authors of the myriad letters, articles, queries, obituaries, and verse addressed over a century and a quarter to the GM's fictitious and long-lived editor, Sylvanus Urban. In fact, Kuist made a conscious decision to confine his list to those attributions of authorship specifically identified in handwritten marginal annotations by John Nichols's son John Bowyer17 and others in his family in the staff copy of the GM, now housed in the Folger Library. Those marginal attributions of authorship in the GM, put together by the Nichols family in a massive reconstruction of their office files after a destructive fire in 1808, contain perforce a multitude of omissions, some the result of haste or sheer carelessness on the part of the annotators, some because the authorship of certain articles and letters defied all efforts at identification, others conversely because the authors' identities seemed at the time too obvious for anyone to bother writing them down. Fortunately, with the help of the lists of known pseudonyms and sets of initials provided in Kuist's own index, plus a mine of information contained in contemporary literary memoirs and in the GM's invaluable obituaries, as well as determined detective work involving the unscrambling of anagrams and the matching of authors with the towns or even street addresses whence they wrote, literally thousands of the gaps in the record can be filled. All that is required, with apologies to King Harry, is to imitate the action of the ferret.

Attributions of Authorship in the Gentleman's Magazine, 1731-1868: A Supplement to Kuist is designed to integrate and in several instances correct the identifications of authorship I have published in my six-part "Attributions of Authorship in the Gentleman's Magazine, 1731-77: A Supplement to Kuist," Studies in Bibliography 44 (1991): 271-302; "Attributions of Authorship . . . , 1778-92 . . . ," Studies in Bibliography 45 (1992): 158-187; "Attributions of Authorship . . . , 1793-1808 . . . ," Studies in Bibliography 46 (1993): 320-349; "Attributions of Authorship . . . , 1809-26 . . . ," Studies in Bibliography 47 (1994): 164-195; "Attributions of Authorship . . . , 1827-48 . . . ," Studies in Bibliography 49 (1996): 176-207; and "Attributions of Authorship . . . , 1849-68, and Addenda, 1733-1838 . . . ," Studies in Bibliography 50 (1997): forthcoming. Taken collectively my six articles on the Gentleman's Magazine have added approximately 4,000 new or corrected attributions of authorship in the Gentleman's Magazine to the some 13,000 items catalogued by Kuist in The Nichols File. In addition to providing an integrated list, publication of my finds in the form of an electronic database has the further advantage of insuring that the information contained in the list is accessible to scholars through a variety of means including searches by author, title, volume and page, date, source of attribution, and (when applicable) pseudonyms used by contributors.

Researchers using Kuist's Nichols File and my Attributions of Authorship in the Gentleman's Magazine, 1731-1868: A Supplement to Kuist should be aware of what both lists exclude. Other scholars of the English periodical press, working before and after Kuist's publication of The Nichols File, have compiled valuable sets of attributions of authorship in the Gentleman's Magazine, some containing hundreds of attributions and others providing a mere handful. My Attributions of Authorship in the Gentleman's Magazine, like Kuist's Nichols File, does not duplicate those findings. Hence it does not incorporate lists of the authors of poetry appearing in the early volumes of the GM compiled by C. Lennart Carlson (The First Magazine: A History of The Gentleman's Magazine [Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1938]), Donald F. Bond ("The Gentleman's Magazine," Modern Philology 38 [1940]: 85-100), and Albert Pailler (Edward Cave et le Gentleman's Magazine [1731-1754] [2 vols.; Lille: Atelier Reproduction des Thèses, 1975]). Neither does it incorporate Arthur Sherbo's finds in "From the Gentleman's Magazine: Graves, Shenstone, Swift, Warton, Prior, Byron, Beckford," Studies in Bibliography 35 (1982): 285-305, nor the substantial supplementary attributions of authorship published by Sherbo in his "Additions to the Nichols File of the Gentleman's Magazine," Studies in Bibliography 37 (1984): 228-233; "More from the Gentleman's Magazine: Graves, Mainwaring, Wren, Sterne, Pope, Bubb Dodington, Goldsmith, Hill, Herrick, Cowper, Chatterton," Studies in Bibliography 40 (1987): 164-174; and "Further Additions to the Nichols File of the Gentleman's Magazine," Studies in Bibliography 42 (1989): 249-254. Neither does my Attributions of Authorship in the Gentleman's Magazine duplicate the various (and sometimes conflicting) lists of Samuel Johnson's contributions to the GM or seek to resolve the tortured question of which of the parliamentary debates (appearing in the GM's pages as "The Debates of the Senate of Lilliput") were Johnson's work. Neither does it incorporate a small number of miscellaneous finds scattered through several additional publications by Kuist, Robert D. Pepper, Donald H. Reiman, and James E. Tierney,18 among others. By the same token I have deliberately excluded John Lawrence Abbott's listing (in John Hawkesworth: Eighteenth-Century Man of Letters [Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1982]) of a number of John Hawkesworth's GM contributions with the exception of twenty reviews cited by Abbott and signed "X.," which were among approximately 300 reviews bearing the signature "X." that appeared from April 1767 through March 1773 and which have been proven the work of John Hawkesworth.19 The complete "X." list had never appeared in print before its inclusion in my "Attributions of Authorship . . . , 1731-77 . . . ," Studies in Bibliography 44 (1991): 271-302. Accordingly I deliberately chose to incorporate into my article (as well as the electronic database) the twenty "X." reviews mentioned by Abbott in an effort to make the list of Hawkesworth's "X." contributions as comprehensive as possible.20

The database does include several dozen unpublished attributions used by permission from the authors, notably thirty-five attributions from Professor Sherbo's ongoing research which he graciously allowed me to incorporate into my "Attributions of Authorship . . . , 1778-92 . . . ," Studies in Bibliography 45 (1992): 158-187. Those thirty-five items consist of four contributions by the Rev. Samuel Badcock, twenty-one by the Rev. Thomas Martyn, six by Thomas Holt White,21 and four (signed "Q." and dated from Wigan, Lancs.) by the Rev. John Kynaston. Each of the thirty-five Sherbo items is set apart in the Chronological Listing by means of an asterisk, and each carries the notation "Sherbo" as the authority for the attribution. Seventeen additional items by Thomas Holt White which Professor Sherbo and I located independently are likewise so designated. The database as well as my printed articles also take advantage of three valuable pieces of information unearthed but not capitalized upon by Professor Sherbo in his own updatings of Kuist: the identification of signatures used by Richard Paget ("D.T." and "R.P.," the latter in Gothic letters), Matthew Harrison ("M.H.F.S.A."), and the Rev. Thomas Harwood ("Clio."). 22 Readers making use of Attributions of Authorship in the Gentleman's Magazine, 1731-1868: A Supplement to Kuist will immediately notice that the number of additional identifiable attributions increases dramatically after 1777. The reason for that increase lies in a combination of John Nichols's editorial innovations and Kuist's guidelines for admitting evidence. After Nichols became a principal proprietor of the GM in 1778, and especially after he assumed the bulk of the editorial duties of the magazine in the early 1780s, Nichols placed his own distinctive stamp upon the format, content, and style of the GM. He doubled the size of the magazine, which grew from a 600-page annual volume to a two-part, 1,200-page annual publication beginning in 1783. In addition, with Nichols's sway over the GM came a marked increase in the incidence of contributions signed with distinctive pseudonyms or sets of initials and in many cases dated from (or referring to) specific cities or villages. As many of the GM's contributors chose in occasional bursts of candor to forego the anonymity of initials and sign their full names, it is possible to search forward and backward through the pages of the GM, identifying with reasonable certainty a number of previously unassigned contributions by means of pairing sets of initials with place-names. "J.H.," a common enough signature, is for example safely identifiable as that of John Holt when it happens to appear in letters dated from Walton, near Liverpool.

Of far more importance in explaining the plethora of attributions that do not appear in Kuist's list are his own guidelines for admitting evidence. Kuist set out with the stated intent of including only those articles specifically attributed in handwritten marginal annotations by members of the Nichols family, chiefly John Nichols's son John Bowyer. The Nichols family carelessly skipped over numerous items--obviously identifiable signatures of "D.H." (Richard Gough) or "Crito" (John Duncombe), for example, or of "Scrutator" and "Academicus" (pseudonyms used habitually by both John Loveday the Elder and the Younger). In other cases the annotators recorded attributions for most but not all of the articles in a series. For instance, the Nichols File assigned (as Kuist notes) numbers 1-8 of a 1786 series entitled "The Trifler" to a "Mr. Fush" of Pembroke College, Oxford, when in actuality Edmund Fushe also wrote numbers 9-12 of the series23 before poisoning himself with arsenic at the age of 17. In still other cases, where several poems signed with the identical pseudonym or initials appear on a single page, the annotator inscribed the author's name once. Kuist's list prints only the specific poem against which the annotator happened to write the name, thus excluding evidence that can be used to add a wealth of new attributions to The Nichols File.

In some cases, inevitably, the annotations in the Nichols File are patently wrong, and Kuist, by reproducing the annotations exactly as they appear in the marginal notations in the staff copy of the GM, unavoidably reproduces those errors. A major case in point consists of Kuist's identification of the person who used the signature "L.E." as Samuel Pegge the Younger. When the Nichols family members reconstructed their file of annotations of GM articles in the wake of the disastrous fire in 1808 that had destroyed their previous records, they assumed that the signature "L.E." appearing from 1788 through 1795 was that of Pegge the Younger. Thus Kuist lists it for forty-two items included in The Nichols File. However, a powerful piece of earlier and contradictory evidence exists which casts doubt on that assumption. Immediately following the death of Samuel Pegge the Elder the GM published a three-part unsigned memoir of Pegge by his son, Samuel Pegge the Younger,24 subjoining to it a comprehensive listing of virtually all of Pegge's writings published in the GM and elsewhere.25 The 1796 list categorically attributes the "L.E." articles in question to Pegge the Elder, and its assignment seems convincing. In the first place, the "L.E." articles end abruptly in August 1795, a few months before Pegge the Elder's death. Second, if the GM's comprehensive Pegge list had erroneously attributed dozens of items to Pegge the Elder, Pegge the Younger presumably would have written to the GM to correct the historial record. There is no evidence that he did so. Furthermore, according to Nichols himself, Pegge the Younger's contributions to the GM were few in number. "To Mr. Pegge we are indebted for the . . . Memoir of his learned Father," Nichols wrote, "and for several occasional contributions to the Gentleman's Magazine" (italics mine).26 The electronic database accordingly assigns all "L.E." contributions to Pegge the Elder and reassigns to him the "L.E." items incorrectly attributed in The Nichols File to his son.

Just as the number of additional identifiable attributions increases dramatically during the epoch of John Nichols's stewardship of the Gentleman's Magazine, so in some respects opportunities for supplying missing attributions decline after his death in 1826. With changing times and customs fewer contributors indulged in the literary game of signing letters with reversed initials, Classical pseudonyms, or artfully crafted anagrams. With altered editorial policies and the commencement of new series in 1834 and 1856 less and less space was allotted to letters to the editor from the GM's far-flung readership. The thousands of letters to Sylvanus Urban, by turns whimsical or argumentative or recondite, that had been the mainstay of the magazine in John Nichols's day dwindled in the decades after his death to a trickle, relegated increasingly to the Minor Correspondence page or to the filler rounding out each monthly number. Mr. Urban in his mid-nineteenth-century incarnation was clearly less interested in the topics and passions that had preoccupied his eighteenth-century readers: the interpretation of a troublesome passage in Juvenal;27 details of a newly discovered Roman coin;28 helpful methods for destroying black beetles in London kitchens;29 the elucidation of the origins of the phrase "to run amuck";30 the minute description of "a curious, and . . . non-descript . . . caterpillar . . . [,] uncommonly large and beautiful," found in a potato field in Kent.31 Under the direction of Nichols's son, John Bowyer, and the latter's editor, the Rev. John Mitford, longer articles and reviews, written by a staff of paid contributors, replaced the myriad short items and letters on a vast variety of subjects that had formerly crowded Mr. Urban's pages.32 In addition, contributions tended more and more to be signed, as authors ceased to bother with maintaining the pretense of anonymity.

The decades of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s do, however, offer new opportunities for identification of contributors from an entirely different quarter--the thousands of manuscript articles and unprinted letters dating mainly from that period which form a separate part of the Nichols File at the Folger and which Kuist lists in his Catalogue II. With the help of information contained in Catalogue II it is possible to arrive at hundreds of additional attributions of authorship, though the use of Catalogue II requires caution. Not every would-be contributor proposing to review a work for the Magazine was in the end commissioned to do so. In addition, as Catalogue II demonstrates, in various instances several writers sent letters to Bowyer Nichols and his staff offering to review the same publication. As a result all attributions of authorship based on offers from would-be contributors to supply book reviews, memoirs, and the like have been assigned a question mark wherever they appear in the electronic database, unless the evidence makes it certain that the proffered material was actually accepted.

Clearly the Gentleman's Magazine in its mid-nineteenth-century format was quite a different animal from the periodical that had appeared under Edward Cave's direction a century and a quarter before. The subtle changes in style and content that had begun with the passing of John Nichols's régime intensified in early 1850, when contributions signed with initials and pseudonyms virtually disappeared except for the Minor Correspondence section. In the mid 1860s the pace of change became precipitous. The Nichols family had already sold the magazine in 1856, and J. H. Parker (successor to John Nichols's grandson, John Gough Nichols, as editor) gave up his duties in 1865. The latest publishers (Bradbury, Evans, and Co.) launched a second new series (commencing with Vol. 220 for January-June 1866) with the sanguine promise that the GM would maintain its strength in antiquarian matters, cover a more diverse array of subjects in book reviews, reserve considerably more space for contemporary literature, and do an even better job in recording births, marriages, obituaries, and appointments. Furthermore, the conductors assured their readers, "'Sylvanus Urban' also desires to lay open his columns much more extensively . . . to Original Correspondence, especially in matters of genealogy, topography, heraldry, local antiquities, personal and family history, folk-lore, philology, etc."33

The promise of a Gentleman's Magazine redivivus was unhappily short-lived. After a five-volume run, the second new series came to an end and with it any attempt to restore the magazine to even a semblance of its old character. Vol. 225 (June-November 1868) ushered in a third new series, under the direction of a different editor (Joseph Hatton) and at the reduced price of 1s. in place of half a crown. Calling the GM "one of the institutions of the country,"34 the new management in its "Preface" to readers gamely tried to evoke the mystique of Samuel Johnson and Edward Cave and capitalize on the magazine's venerable past, a past of which it was clearly in awe. True, the "Preface" acknowledged, the Gentleman's Magazine would be abandoning any further attempt to provide comprehensive coverage of "Politics, Science, Art," the parliamentary debates, literary criticism, or the activities of the learned societies, as "[i]t is no longer desirable, it is indeed scarcely possible, for a monthly magazine to comprise the features" to which the GM's old audience had been accustomed.35 Readers, however, could be assured that, as always, the staff would accept unsolicited contributions and attempt to find a place for them in the GM's pages. "The new number . . . is another link in the long chain that reaches back to 'Edward Cave at St. John's Gate,'" Hatton asserted. "We give up no jot of the Urbanian Succesion. . . ."36 But to anyone familiar with the magazine in its heyday the new management's attempt to affect the persona of Sylvanus Urban seems self-conscious, awkward, and uncomfortably anachronistic, as if the GM's mid-Victorian editor had unsuccessfully dressed himself in borrowed robes. In the course of the following two volumes (226-227) Hatton dropped all pretense of emulating the gracious old magazine in which eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century readers had delighted, abruptly withdrawing the welcome he had extended to unsolicited letters and articles (those mainstays of the old GM) and jettisoning the obituaries for once and for all. Clearly with the commencement of the third new series in mid 1868 the Gentleman's Magazine became an entirely different entity, a thing that Edward Cave, Samuel Johnson, David Henry, John Hawkesworth, Richard Gough, John Nichols, John Bowyer Nichols, and their readers and contributors would not even have recognized. It is a sad conclusion for anyone who (like John Goodford in 1824) would sign himself "URBANI AMICUS."37

Attributions of Authorship in the Gentleman's Magazine, 1731-1868: A Supplement to Kuist utilizes the same format adopted in my six-part series of articles. Finds are cross-listed, allowing researchers to look up an article by means of both a chronological table of attributions and a synopsis of attributions by contributor. Each item in the Chronological Listing bears one of the following designations: