About Jabberwock Magazine

Jabberwock Magazine

Jabberwock was an Edinburgh University literary and political journal that first appeared in the summer of 1945, published by the Edinburgh University Liberal Club. Founded under the editorship of Ian F. Holroyd, known as Fergus Holroyd, it began as a literary and political medley and became, from 1947, a significant vehicle of the Scottish Renaissance, the movement led by Hugh MacDiarmid to renew Scottish literature. It ended in 1959 after its editor Alex Neish devoted a special American issue to work including an extract from William S. Burroughs's then-unpublished Naked Lunch, prompting the withdrawal of the support on which it depended.

The journal's run is preserved in the University of Edinburgh Library's archive description, and its print run of about 500 to 750 copies, priced at sixpence to a shilling, makes it a classic little magazine: tiny in circulation, consequential in content. In fourteen years Jabberwock published Helen B. Cruickshank, Norman MacCaig, Hugh MacDiarmid, Tom Scott, Sydney Goodsir Smith, Neil Gunn and Compton Mackenzie, became the official organ of the Edinburgh University Scottish Renaissance Society, and finally detonated itself over the Beats. Few student journals contain so much of a national literature's history.

Summer 1945: A Liberal Club Medley

Jabberwock first appeared in summer 1945, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, as a literary and political medley published by the Edinburgh University Liberal Club. Its founding editor was Ian F. Holroyd, remembered as Fergus Holroyd, and its origins in a student political club explain its original mixture: poems and stories alongside political argument, produced by young writers for whom literature and the rebuilding of post-war Britain were parts of the same conversation. A university returning to peacetime, filling with ex-service students, was fertile ground for such a journal.

After the third issue, Jabberwock passed from the Liberal Club to an independent editorial committee, a change that freed it to define itself culturally rather than by party. The pivot that followed, towards the Scottish Renaissance, transformed a student medley into a journal of national literary significance. The sequence is instructive about little magazines generally: they begin as the expression of a group, and they matter when an editor with conviction steers them, as Holroyd steered Jabberwock, towards the strongest writing available to them.

The Scottish Renaissance Turn, From 1947

From 1947 Jabberwock published major work by the leading figures of the Scottish Renaissance, Hugh MacDiarmid's movement to create a modern Scottish literature drawing on the Scots language and Scotland's older literary traditions. Its pages carried Helen B. Cruickshank, Norman MacCaig, Hugh MacDiarmid himself, Tom Scott, Sydney Goodsir Smith, Neil Gunn, Compton Mackenzie and the critic and scholar David Daiches. For a student journal to be entrusted with new work by writers of that standing testified to the seriousness with which it was regarded within Scottish letters.

The Renaissance connection gave Jabberwock a mission beyond the university. Scotland's literary renewal was conducted substantially through little magazines, pamphlets and small presses, because the major London publishers were unreliable champions of Scottish writing. A journal printed in Edinburgh, edited by people committed to the movement, publishing MacDiarmid and Goodsir Smith alongside younger university writers, was infrastructure for that renewal. Jabberwock's modest print run is therefore a poor measure of its function: its few hundred copies reached precisely the readers, writers, teachers and activists, through whom a national literature reproduces itself.

Holroyd's Long Stewardship to 1948 and Beyond

Holroyd stood down as editor in May 1948, but he remained central to the journal through the 1950s, a pattern familiar in little magazine history, where a founding editor's taste and contacts constitute the publication long after the title page changes. His decade of involvement spanned Jabberwock's transformation from Liberal Club medley to Renaissance journal, and his continuity helped hold together a publication dependent on student generations that turned over every few years.

Student journals live under a permanent threat of amnesia, as editors graduate and files are lost. Jabberwock survived fourteen years because figures such as Holroyd bridged the cohorts, introducing new editors to the journal's contributors, standards and purpose. The archive record's emphasis on his continuing centrality acknowledges an institutional truth the journal embodied: in small publishing, the institution is usually a person, and the history of the magazine is largely the history of who cared for it, and for how long.

Official Organ of the Scottish Renaissance Society, 1955

In 1955 Jabberwock became the official organ of the Edinburgh University Scottish Renaissance Society, with Hugh MacDiarmid as honorary president of the society. Formal adoption gave the journal an organisational home and a defined constituency within the university, while MacDiarmid's name at its head confirmed its place in the movement he had founded decades earlier. The arrangement joined three generations: MacDiarmid's pioneering Renaissance of the interwar years, the post-war writers Jabberwock had published since 1947, and the students of the 1950s now editing it.

Official status, however, brought official expectations. A society's organ is expected to represent the society, and the freedom a little magazine needs to surprise its readers sits uneasily with the duty to embody a movement. Within a few years that tension would become the journal's undoing, when a young editor used Jabberwock to challenge the Renaissance establishment itself. The 1955 settlement thus contained both the journal's security and its eventual crisis: protected by the movement, it was also answerable to it.

Calumn MacDonald and Alex Neish, 1958

In 1958 the publisher Calumn MacDonald brought in Alex Neish as editor of Jabberwock. Neish, later a local historian, belonged to a younger literary generation for whom the Scottish Renaissance, by then led by elderly figures, could appear less like a liberation than an establishment. His editorship introduced a new axis to the journal: the transatlantic connection to contemporary American writing, and in particular to the Beat generation, whose raw, experimental work represented everything that younger writers felt official Scottish literature was not.

Neish later described his position, in an interview given to RealityStudio, with undiminished clarity about the split his editorship opened. From his perspective, Jabberwock risked becoming a vehicle for older Scottish nationalist poets and very little else. His remedy was to open the journal to America. That editorial programme, pursued in a university society's official organ with MacDiarmid as honorary president, made a confrontation almost inevitable, and the special American issue he prepared for autumn 1959 supplied it.

The American Issue of Autumn 1959

Neish's special American issue of Jabberwock, published in autumn 1959, printed an extract from William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch, which was then unpublished in book form, alongside work by Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. The issue was a deliberate importation of the Beat generation into Scottish literary debate: Ginsberg and Kerouac were the most discussed young American writers of the moment, and Burroughs's novel, notorious in advance of publication, represented the extreme edge of the new writing. For Jabberwock's student readers, the issue was electrifying.

The circumstances added to the sensation. Accounts of the episode record that Burroughs himself had not known that Ginsberg had submitted the extract for publication, and the appearance of part of Naked Lunch in an Edinburgh student journal, ahead of the book's own publication by Olympia Press in Paris that year, was a genuine literary scoop as well as a provocation. Neish had used a journal with a print run of a few hundred copies to publish, in Britain, one of the most controversial texts of the century before almost anyone else could. It was a brilliant editorial act, and an impossible one for the journal's sponsors to accept.

Withdrawal of Support and the End of Jabberwock

The Edinburgh University Scottish Renaissance Society withdrew its support from Jabberwock over the American issue, and the journal ceased. Without its organisational home and backing, a magazine selling 500 to 750 copies at sixpence to a shilling could not continue. Neish used his final editorial in 1959 to state his case against what he saw as the dead hand of nationalist literary orthodoxy on younger Scottish writers, language later quoted by the Scottish Magazines Network in its account of the journal's end and of its successor.

That successor was Sidewalk, founded by Neish in 1960 after his break from Jabberwock, which ran for two issues and pursued the transatlantic, experimental programme freely, without a society to answer to. The sequence, Jabberwock to Sidewalk, is a miniature of how literary generations succeed one another: the younger editor first captures the established journal, is expelled for his pains, and founds his own. Jabberwock's death was therefore not a failure of editing but a transfer of energy, and its final issue remains the most discussed in its history precisely because it cost the journal its life.

Five Hundred Copies: Scale, Price and Survival

Jabberwock was printed in runs of about 500 to 750 copies and sold for sixpence to a shilling across its life. Those numbers describe the economics of post-war student publishing: sales could never fund ambition, so ambition was funded by organisations, the Liberal Club first, an independent committee, and finally the Scottish Renaissance Society. Each change of sponsor in the journal's history corresponds to a change of identity, and the final withdrawal of sponsorship ended the journal outright. Its biography can be written as a history of who paid for it, and why they stopped.

Survival, however, has favoured the journal. The University of Edinburgh Library holds and describes the run in its archives, making Jabberwock accessible to researchers as a complete artefact of Scottish literary life between 1945 and 1959. Scholars of the Scottish Renaissance, of MacDiarmid's later influence, of Norman MacCaig's early publication history and of the Beats' British reception all have reason to consult it. A magazine read by a few hundred students now serves an international research audience, the standard, satisfying reversal in the afterlife of the little magazine.

Jabberwock's Place in Scottish Magazine History

The Scottish Magazines Network, the University of Stirling-based project that documents Scotland's magazine heritage, treats Jabberwock as a key title in the story of post-war Scottish publishing, both for its Renaissance decade and for the countercultural break that ended it. Its history compresses the central drama of twentieth-century Scottish literature: the achievement of MacDiarmid's generation, the institutionalisation of that achievement, and the revolt of the young against the institution their elders built. That the drama played out in a student journal shows where Scottish literature's real decisions were often made.

Jabberwock deserves its place in any directory of British magazines for the company it kept and the risks it took. It published Gunn and Mackenzie, Cruickshank and MacCaig when doing so mattered locally and nationally; it gave MacDiarmid a university platform in his later years; and it closed by publishing Burroughs before Burroughs was publishable. Fourteen years, a few hundred copies an issue, and two literary eras, the Scottish Renaissance and the Beat irruption, meet in its pages, which is more history than many magazines a hundred times its size ever contain.