About The Literary Gazette

The Literary Gazette

Overview

The Literary Gazette was a British weekly literary magazine established in London in 1817 and published until 1863. Its full title was The Literary Gazette, and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, and it also appeared with the caption title London Literary Gazette. Founded by the publisher Henry Colburn, it was edited from July 1817 by the journalist William Jerdan, who wrote most of its articles, set its character, became a shareholder and eventually its owner, and remained identified with it for more than three decades until his retirement in 1850. At its peak, from the 1820s to the end of the 1840s, the Gazette exercised an influence over the fortunes of new books that contemporaries regarded as unprecedented: a favourable review could make a book, and a mixed one could damage it badly. It was among the earliest weekly papers devoted to literature, science and the arts to obtain real repute and authority.

Foundation by Henry Colburn

Henry Colburn, a publisher of keen business perception whose New Burlington Street shop had become a chief emporium for novels and light literature, brought out the first number of the Literary Gazette on 25 January 1817, priced at one shilling. The department of fine arts was placed under the care of William Paulet Carey, and a clerk in the foreign department of the Post Office, H. E. Lloyd, and a Miss Ross appear to have been the joint editors of the earliest numbers. Colburn was a publisher whose name became chiefly remembered in connection with the magazine and with enterprises such as his editions of Evelyn's Diary in 1818 and Pepys's Diary in 1825, and the Gazette was characteristic of his flair for spotting a gap in the periodical market: in 1817 there was no established weekly paper that treated literature itself as news.

William Jerdan takes over

The decisive change came quickly. After the twenty-sixth number, on 19 July 1817, William Jerdan purchased a third share of the property and became sole editor; Messrs. Longman also purchased a third. Jerdan, a journalist and contributor whom Colburn had appointed editor in July 1817, thereafter wrote most of the articles himself and set the character of the magazine. He remained identified with the enterprise for thirty-three years. In 1842 he became sole proprietor, having long since passed from editor to shareholder to owner. His stated aim as a reviewer was to praise heartily and censure mildly — a policy of generous quotation and temperate judgement that distinguished his paper from the savage reviewing associated with the great quarterlies. Under him the Gazette was rapidly successful, alike in a financial and a literary sense, although at first it proved unremunerative and Jerdan had to supplement his income by contributing largely to the provincial press and even editing provincial and Irish journals from London.

Format of the weekly

The format of the magazine remained essentially the same throughout its life. Each issue consisted of about sixteen pages typeset in three columns, and illustrations were rarely included. A typical number featured several book reviews, with the leading article itself a book review occupying two or three pages. Regular feature sections included "Original Correspondence" and a social column, as well as notices of theatre productions. An "Original Poetry" section consisted of work sent in by the public — the poets being called "Correspondents" — together with some work by staff writers. Advertisements filled the last two pages, which publishers used to publicise their books. Beyond literature, the magazine occasionally carried news of subjects of wider interest: archaeological discoveries, inventions, art exhibitions, architecture and the sciences. William Paulet Carey and Walter Henry Watts acted as its art critics.

Contributors and literary society

Jerdan gathered around him an accomplished band of writers. The Dictionary of National Biography's account lists among them George Crabbe, Barry Cornwall, Dr. Croly, Mary Russell Mitford, Alaric Watts, William Maginn, Felicia Hemans and Thomas Campbell. In February 1820 Letitia Elizabeth Landon, whose father was Jerdan's neighbour at Old Brompton, sent a contribution for the first time; she subsequently became one of the chief writers in the Gazette and an intimate friend of the editor, and the paper was central to her career as "L.E.L." Jerdan himself became a leading figure in literary society from his house at Old Brompton, helped to found the Royal Society of Literature in 1821, and took an active part in the administration of the Royal Literary Fund. John Wilson, writing as Christopher North, regarded the paper in its great decade as unapproachable, because Jerdan was a gentleman assisted by none but gentlemen — a verdict that captures both the Gazette's polish and its clubbable tone.

Power and influence at its peak

For the next ten years after Longmans became part-proprietors and publishers in 1820, the Gazette's position in the literary world was supreme, and its peak ran from the 1820s until the end of the 1840s. Its advantage over rivals was partly one of method. While the reviewers in the influential quarterlies tended to write political tracts rather than describing the book they were supposed to be reviewing, Jerdan, as a professional journalist, had no interest in promoting political ideology, and his practice was to include extensive quotations from the book under review. Readers could therefore sample a work for themselves. The weekly rhythm gave the paper a spontaneity which the monthlies and quarterlies could not acquire, and its price — soon reduced from a shilling to eightpence — was low for what it offered. Circulation reached four thousand copies a week. The commercial consequence was formidable: a favourable review in the Literary Gazette meant almost certain success for writers and publishers, but a mixed review could be disastrous.

Relations with Colburn and the trade

The Gazette's closeness to the publishing trade was both its strength and a standing source of friction. It lived on publishers' advertising — its last two pages were given over to book advertisements — and on its editor's unrivalled knowledge of the literary market. Its founder did not remain a loyal proprietor: on 31 December 1827 Colburn wrote to Jerdan that he had joined the new literary journal the Athenaeum in consequence of the injustice done to his authors generally, who were on the liberal side, by the Literary Gazette. The letter is a reminder that Jerdan's professed neutrality was contested even by the man who had launched the paper, and that the Gazette now faced a direct weekly rival in the Athenaeum, founded in 1828. Even so, the Gazette's supremacy in its field survived the challenge through the 1830s and 1840s, sustained by Jerdan's industry and by the habit authors and publishers had formed of treating its verdict as decisive.

Jerdan's retirement

Jerdan's connection with the paper ended on 28 December 1850. He had been sole proprietor since 1842; by then he was struggling, after his years at Grove House, Old Brompton, in vain to restore the position of the Literary Gazette, and he retired, leaving his account of the enterprise to his Autobiography of 1852–53. His departure removed the paper's defining asset. The price of the Gazette had been reduced to fourpence, and under Jerdan's successor it was brought down further to threepence — reductions that suggest a title chasing a cheaper market rather than commanding the literary world as it once had. The history of the paper after 1850 is one of diminishing authority, as the literary weekly field it had pioneered became crowded with competitors that had learned from its example.

The final years and the Parthenon

A new series, started in 1858, restored the price to fourpence, but the paper was still unsuccessful. In 1862 the Literary Gazette was incorporated with a new venture entitled The Parthenon, and it expired with that enterprise on 30 May 1863. The full run thus closed forty-six years after Colburn's first number: a weekly that had begun at a shilling in the Regency ended, absorbed into another title, in the middle of Victoria's reign. The HathiTrust catalogue records the London Literary Gazette under its successive title forms across that span, and large runs of the paper survive in research libraries — appropriately for a journal whose back numbers constitute a week-by-week chronicle of British literary life between Waterloo and the 1860s.

Legacy

The Literary Gazette's legacy is that it professionalised literary journalism. It demonstrated that a weekly paper, edited by a working journalist rather than by the partisans of a quarterly, could treat books as news: reviewing them promptly, quoting them extensively, mixing reviews with correspondence, theatre notices, poetry sent in by readers and publishers' advertisements, and reaching a mass audience at eightpence a week. It made and damaged reputations for three decades, sustained the career of L.E.L., and employed some of the most popular writers of the age. Its history, told in Jerdan's own Autobiography and in the Dictionary of National Biography's lives of both Colburn and Jerdan, is inseparable from the editor who bought a third share in July 1817 and made the paper his life's work. When literary historians call it the earliest weekly newspaper devoted to literature, science and the arts which obtained repute and authority, they are describing the standard against which every later British literary weekly was measured.