About Hood's Magazine and Comic Miscellany

Hood's Magazine and Comic Miscellany

Hood's Magazine and Comic Miscellany was a British monthly journal founded and originally published by the poet and humorist Thomas Hood. A total of 61 issues were published from January 1844 to June 1849. Hood made most of the original material for it himself, writing and editing, by contemporary accounts, from the sickbed from which he never rose; after his death in May 1845, Charles Rowcroft became the editor and carried the magazine on for a further four years.

The magazine was never particularly successful, partly — the record suggests — because of Hood's refusal to take on a publisher. Yet its brief life under its founder coincided with the most famous phase of his career, and it preserved a remarkable gesture of literary friendship: Charles Dickens contributed to its first volume, including his "Threatening Letter to Thomas Hood, from an Ancient Gentleman", printed in the volume for January to June 1844.

Thomas Hood before his magazine

Thomas Hood (1799–1845) was the son of a bookseller and publisher, and he built his reputation across the periodical and annual press of the 1820s and 1830s. His early works included Odes and Addresses to Great People (1825), the two series of Whims and Oddities (1826 and 1827), The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies (1827) — his only collection of serious verse — the verse story of Eugene Aram in the annual called the Gem, and the novel Tylney Hall (1834). From 1830 he produced the Comic Annual, a publication he continued almost unassisted for several years, treating the leading events of the day in caricature without personal malice and with what readers recognised as an undercurrent of sympathy — and an incessant use of puns.

By the time he founded his magazine, Hood had also produced Hood's Own, or, Laughter from Year to Year (1838), prepared during a period in Ostend in Belgium and an instant success, and Up the Rhine (1840). His financial situation, however, had been precarious for years, and in 1841 he became editor of the New Monthly Magazine on the death of its previous editor. He quarrelled with that magazine's publisher and resigned in 1843 — the immediate background to his decision to publish a magazine of his own.

Foundation in January 1844

The first issue of Hood's Magazine and Comic Miscellany appeared in January 1844. The title joined his name to the two halves of his talent: the magazine for the prose and verse miscellany, the comic for the humour on which his popular reputation rested. Early volumes were published in London by H. Renshaw for the proprietors, with an engraved frontispiece portrait of Hood in the first volume — the editor himself was the magazine's identity and its advertisement.

For Hood the venture was a bid for independence after the New Monthly quarrel, undertaken at the worst possible moment in his health. Prolonged illness had already brought him to straitened circumstances. He started a magazine in his own name, secured the assistance of many literary men of reputation, but sustained it mainly by his own activity — and conducted the work from a sickbed from which he never rose.

A magazine made by one man

The defining fact of Hood's Magazine under its founder is that Hood made most of the original material for it. A monthly miscellany ordinarily spread its labour across a stable of contributors; Hood's was, to an unusual degree, a one-man production, filled month by month with his own comic and serious writing in prose and verse. That gave the magazine a unity of voice that readers recognised — the punning, caricaturing Hood of the Comic Annual alongside the Hood of sympathy and pathos — and it made the magazine wholly dependent on a dying man's strength.

The same period produced the poems on which his lasting fame rests. "The Song of the Shirt", written in honour of Mrs Biddell, a widow and seamstress driven to pawn her work and sent to a workhouse, appeared anonymously not in his own magazine but in the Christmas number of Punch in 1843, and was immediately reprinted in The Times and other newspapers across Europe, dramatised by Mark Lemon as The Sempstress, and printed on broadsheets and cotton handkerchiefs. "The Bridge of Sighs" and "The Song of the Labourer" followed shortly before his death — plain, solemn pictures of the conditions of working life, praised by Dickens among others and translated into German by Ferdinand Freiligrath.

Dickens's contributions to the first volume

The most documented contribution by another writer to Hood's Magazine came from Charles Dickens. The first bound volume — volume I, January to June 1844, published by H. Renshaw in London — contains Dickens's "Threatening Letter to Thomas Hood, from an Ancient Gentleman", at pages 409 to 414: a satire on the then-current craze for the midget Tom Thumb, written in the voice of an elderly correspondent alarmed that families were stunting their children's growth to imitate the fashion.

Dickens also contributed extracts from A Christmas Carol to earlier issues of the magazine — more, as the Dictionary of National Biography account quoted by cataloguers puts it, as a favour than anything else, to the ailing Hood. The contributions are a measure of the regard in which Hood was held by the leading novelist of the day, who was also present at Hood's funeral at Kensal Green Cemetery. For a new magazine struggling to establish itself, Dickens's name and copy were valuable support; that they were given as friendship rather than commerce says much about the magazine's position.

Illness, pension and Hood's death in 1845

Hood's last months were shadowed by money as well as sickness. Application was made by his friends to Sir Robert Peel to place Hood's name on the civil list of literary pensions. Peel, an admirer of his work, gave Jane Hood £100 in the last months of Hood's life, without her husband's knowledge, to alleviate the family's debts; the pension his government bestowed on Hood was continued to his wife and family after his death.

Hood died in May 1845, some sixteen months after his magazine began. He had conducted it with, in the words of his biographical tradition, surprising energy from his sickbed, and the magazine he left behind was inseparable from his person: his name on the title, his portrait in the first volume, his own writing in most of its pages. Jane Hood, who had expended tremendous energy tending her husband in his last year, died only eighteen months later.

Charles Rowcroft and the magazine after 1845

After Hood's death, Charles Rowcroft became the editor of Hood's Magazine and Comic Miscellany, and under him the magazine continued for four more years, from 1845 to June 1849. Sixty-one issues were published in total across the whole run, January 1844 to June 1849 — a monthly sequence that outlasted its founder by a full four years.

Continuation under a successor was a test the magazine could only partly pass. It kept Hood's name and its miscellany form, but the original material was no longer Hood's, and the unity of voice that had distinguished it was gone. The magazine was not particularly successful even in its founder's lifetime, and the record attributes that in part to the refusal to take on a publisher — a decision that protected Hood's independence at the price of the distribution, capital and promotion a publishing house would have supplied. Without Hood, and without a publisher's machinery behind it, the title's survival to 1849 is creditable; its closure that June was not surprising.

Closure in June 1849

The final issue of Hood's Magazine and Comic Miscellany appeared in June 1849, closing the run at 61 issues. No successor continued the title. Hood's separately published works — the Comic Annual, Hood's Own, Whimsicalities (1844) and the poems — continued to be reprinted, and his magazine took its place as the last and most personal of his periodical ventures: shorter-lived than the Comic Annual he had sustained through the 1830s, and far more dependent on his own hand.

The dates of the run frame its story precisely. Founded in the January after "The Song of the Shirt" made Hood famous across Europe, edited for sixteen months by a man who never left his sickbed, and continued four years by a successor, it is a case study in the economics of the author-named magazine: the name could launch a title and hold its readers' affection, but it could not supply a publisher's capital, and it could not write the magazine once its author was gone.

Survival and reputation

The magazine's archive is held digitally by HathiTrust, and its first volume survives in the antiquarian record in contemporary cloth bindings with Hood's engraved portrait as frontispiece. Bibliographical listings of fiction in the magazine, such as the Galactic Central record of Hood's Magazine, have helped later researchers trace its contents issue by issue.

For readers of Hood, the magazine matters because it shows the whole writer at work month by month — comic miscellanist and serious poet in the same covers — at the end of his life, supported publicly by Dickens and remembered at his death by the pension his friends secured from Peel's government. As a publishing venture it failed to thrive; as a record of what one ailing writer could still produce, and of the literary friendships that rallied to him, Hood's Magazine and Comic Miscellany retains its interest.