About Imperial Magazine

Imperial Magazine

The Imperial Magazine was a British monthly magazine published from March 1819 to 1834, edited by Samuel Drew. Its full title in its later catalogue form was The Imperial Magazine; and Monthly Record, and its stated embrace was literature, science and art. It was printed at the Caxton Press by H. Fisher — in Liverpool first, and then in London after fire destroyed the Liverpool buildings — and it ran to sixteen volumes, the first series to December 1830 and a second series, in four volumes, from January 1831 to December 1834.

The magazine is remembered chiefly through its editor. Drew (1765–1833), the Cornish shoemaker turned Methodist preacher and self-taught metaphysician, edited the Imperial Magazine from its foundation until the year before his death, and the absorbing London work of editing it and superintending the Caxton Press, the Dictionary of National Biography records, tried his health and disappointed his hopes of providing for a retirement in Cornwall.

Samuel Drew before the magazine

Samuel Drew was born on 6 March 1765 near St Austell, Cornwall, the son of Joseph Drew, who made a hard living by streaming for tin and a little small farming and who had been impressed by a sermon from Whitefield and was one of the early Cornish Methodists. Samuel was put to work in the fields at seven, his parents receiving twopence a day for his labour. His mother died in 1774, and he was apprenticed to a shoemaker at St Blazey between the ages of ten and eleven.

After a wild youth — he joined in smuggling adventures, ran away from his master and was brought back, and was nearly drowned in a later smuggling adventure while working at Millbrook, Plymouth — he settled as a journeyman shoemaker at St Austell in January 1785. The death of an elder, studious brother and the funeral sermon preached by Adam Clarke had a great effect on his mind, and he joined the Wesleyan society in June 1785. He became a class-leader and local preacher in 1788, set up in business for himself in 1787, and married Honour Hills on 17 April 1791. He kept a notebook beside his tools and wrote with his bellows for a desk.

The Cornish metaphysician

Drew's first publication, Remarks upon Paine's Age of Reason in 1799, was favourably noticed in the Anti-Jacobin Review. Encouraged by the antiquary John Whitaker, he published by subscription in 1802 his Essay on the Immateriality and Immortality of the Soul, which had much success: he sold the copyright to a Bristol bookseller for £20, and after four editions in England and two in America brought out a fifth, with additions, in 1831, which he sold for £250. He became famous as the Cornish metaphysician, was elected in 1804 a member of the Manchester Philological Society through Adam Clarke's influence, and wrote books for the Wesleyan leader Thomas Coke that appeared under Coke's name from Coke's notes, though Drew was the chief author.

His Essay on the Identity and Resurrection of the Body appeared in 1809 and reached a second edition in 1822. In 1814 he undertook a history of Cornwall begun by F. Hitchins; though described only as editor, Drew wrote the greatest part of it. It was through Clarke's recommendation, again, that in 1819 he moved to Liverpool for the work that defines his later life.

Foundation at Liverpool in March 1819

The Imperial Magazine was started in March 1819. Drew moved to Liverpool to edit it and to superintend the business of the Caxton Press, the publishing house of H. Fisher which printed it. The pairing of editorship with business superintendence was characteristic of smaller publishing houses: the editor was also a manager, responsible for the press whose product he edited.

A fire destroyed the buildings at Liverpool, and the business was transferred to London, where Drew settled. Here, the DNB records, he was employed in absorbing work which seems to have tried his health. The magazine therefore had two homes — Liverpool at its birth, London for most of its life — although its catalogue imprints present it simply as a London publication, printed at the Caxton Press by H. Fisher and others, in sixteen volumes of about 22 centimetres, illustrated with plates and portraits and including a folded map.

What the magazine contained

The magazine's subtitle promised literature, science and art, with a monthly record besides, and the surviving catalogue of its articles, preserved in a modern bibliography of its contents, shows a miscellany weighted towards history, antiquities and reviewing. In its first year it carried an analysis and review of John Hughes's Horae Britannicae, or Studies in Ancient British History, in May 1819 — a review that continued in parts, returning in February and March 1820 — and in July 1819 a long account of the history, description and newly discovered antiquities of Agricola's Rampart, Hadrian's Mound and Severus's Stone Wall, with profiles drawn to their proper heights and dimensions and a scale of feet.

In September 1819 it reviewed The History of Dublin, setting out the contents of each volume and praising the work for its accuracy and useful information. In February 1820 it carried a singular piece of history concerning Richard Plantagenet, by tradition the natural son of Richard III, discussing events in both men's lives. In July 1821 it published observations on the study of history. The pattern is clear: ancient British and Roman antiquities, national history and the reviewing of historical books were staple matter, presented with engraved profiles, plates and portraits for a general monthly readership.

Form and publishing history

The first series ran from March 1819 to December 1830, in twelve volumes. A second series followed, in four volumes, from January 1831 to December 1834, bringing the whole to the sixteen volumes of the library catalogues. Subtitles varied during the run, and the HathiTrust records preserve the variants: The Imperial Magazine; and Monthly Record, and The Imperial Magazine, or Compendium of — titles that stress, in turn, record-keeping and comprehensiveness.

Complete runs survive in major libraries — the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, Harvard and the New York Public Library among them — and the issues from 1819 to 1834 are available online as part of the British Periodicals database. That survival in volume form reflects how such monthlies were consumed: bound annually, kept, and treated as a compendium, as one of its titles claimed, rather than as ephemera.

Drew's last years

Drew's hopes of making a provision for retirement to Cornwall were disappointed by pecuniary losses. He made short visits to Cornwall, during one of which his wife died at Helston on 19 August 1828, at the house of a son-in-law. Drew rapidly declined in strength after this blow. He returned to his work in London, but died at Helston on 29 March 1833, while staying with his son-in-law. He had seven children, of whom six survived him.

The magazine continued into 1834, a year beyond its founding editor's death, closing with the fourth volume of its second series in December 1834. The record does not name a successor editor for those final numbers in the sources used here; the title's identity had been Drew's for fifteen years, and its ending so soon after his death is consistent with a magazine that depended on one man's absorbing, health-consuming work.

Assessment of Drew and his magazine

The DNB judged Drew's writings interesting as those of a self-taught metaphysician who seems to have read nothing on his first publication except Locke and Watts, and concluded that his arguments show a strong mind quite unversed in the literature of the subject, while he appeared a very honourable and independent man, strongly attached to his family and energetic as a preacher and writer. His life was written by his eldest son, in a second edition of 1835, with his autobiographical sketch, and his story was taken up in Samuel Smiles's Self-Help as an exemplar of self-education.

The Imperial Magazine belongs to that story. A monthly embracing literature, science and art, edited from a press office first in Liverpool and then in London by a former shoemaker who had taught himself metaphysics with a notebook beside his tools, is a distinctively early nineteenth-century production — the world of Methodist self-improvement and commercial publishing joined in a single title.

Place among early nineteenth-century monthlies

Launched in the same year as the Christian Remembrancer and Leigh Hunt's Indicator, and a year after The Kaleidoscope, the Imperial Magazine was part of the dense undergrowth of post-war British periodicals from which the better-known Victorian monthlies grew. It outlasted many of them, running fifteen years and sixteen volumes.

Its modern traces are bibliographical — library runs, the British Periodicals digitisation, and a modern article-by-article bibliography that lets its contents be studied — and biographical, in the life of Drew. Together they preserve a magazine that was, for its editor, not a sideline but the absorbing work of his final fourteen years.