About Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction

Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction

The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction was a British weekly magazine published in London by John Limbird from 1822 to 1847. It was a twopenny weekly of sixteen pages, characterised in its publisher's biography as the first long-lived cheap periodical in Britain, and its publisher John Limbird (1796?–1883) was himself described by an obituarist as the father of cheap periodical writing — rendered in another version of the phrase quoted by Richard Altick as the father of our periodical writing.

From late 1847 the magazine became the Mirror Monthly Magazine; in 1847 it had been published under that name, after the volumes and numbers restarted in 1846 when it became a monthly. From 1849 to 1850 it appeared finally as the London Review, its last volume stating that it would be replaced in 1850 by the London Review — the successor title under which the enterprise ended.

John Limbird

John Limbird was an English stationer, bookseller and publisher. He was christened on 1 May 1796 in the parish of St Nicholas, Glatton, Huntingdonshire, the sixth child of John Limbird and Elizabeth Hitchcock. He married Lucy Glover on 7 April 1817 in Godmanchester, Huntingdonshire, and had two daughters, Elizabeth, born in 1818, and Sally Dolby Limbird, born in 1823, both baptised at the Church of St Anne, Soho, London. He had a shop situated in London's Strand, the street of booksellers and print sellers from which the Mirror was issued from the Mirror Office.

Limbird's career is inseparable from the economics of cheap print. A stationer-bookseller, not a literary editor by training, he identified the market that the Kaleidoscope in Liverpool had opened in 1818 — readers who would pay a few pence weekly for a miscellany — and served it from London at twopence, weekly, for twenty-five years. The scholarly study of his production, Jon Topham's work on Limbird, Thomas Byerley and the production of cheap periodicals in the 1820s, treats the Mirror as a key case in how such periodicals were made.

Price, format and illustration

Cardiff University's guide to illustrated periodicals summarises the formula: date range 1823–1847 in its holdings, first published 1822, weekly, price twopence, sixteen pages, with one half-page engraving on the frontispiece. Individual surviving numbers confirm the description: a typical issue of 1832 was sixteen pages, about 8.5 by 5.5 inches, with one to three engravings, published by J. Limbird at the Mirror Office, London.

Sixteen pages for twopence, every week, with an engraving, was a new kind of value in 1822. The engraving mattered: it gave a cheap paper a visible luxury that justified keeping and binding it, and the volumes were supplied with lists and indexes of engravings so that the pictures, as much as the text, formed part of the collected work.

Contents: the subtitle as a programme

The magazine's full subtitle, preserved on its collected volumes, described its contents in detail: original essays; historical narratives; biographical memoirs; sketches of society; topographical descriptions; novels and tales; anecdotes; selected extracts from new and expensive works; poetry, original and selected; the spirit of the public journals; discoveries in the arts and sciences; and useful domestic hints. Cardiff's summary adds the essential method: sixteen pages of miscellaneous content reprinted from books and other periodicals.

Reprinting was the economic secret of the cheap miscellany. In an age before effective control of such borrowing, a skilled editor could fill a weekly paper with the best parts of expensive books and journals, giving twopenny readers access to works priced far beyond them — extracts, in the subtitle's honest wording, from new and expensive works. The original essays, poetry and domestic hints surrounded the extracts with matter that was the magazine's own.

The editors

The Mirror was edited in succession by Thomas Byerley, John Abraham Heraud, Percy Bolingbroke St John and John Timbs. Byerley, the first editor, was central to establishing the production system that Topham's research examines. Timbs, who appears as editor on the volume covering numbers 232 to 261, from January to July 1827, became one of the most prolific popular-antiquarian writers of the Victorian period, and his early editorship of the Mirror fitted him for that career: topography, anecdote, biography and curiosities of London life were the magazine's daily matter and remained his for life.

Heraud and St John carried the paper through its later years toward the changes of the 1840s. The sequence of four editors across twenty-five years gave the Mirror continuity of method — selection, extract and miscellany — while allowing each editor's interests to shade its contents.

What an issue looked like

Surviving single issues, preserved in the antiquarian trade, show the range in practice. Number 194 of 1826 led with Camphill Castle in Glamorgan, and included Gothenburg and the Kirghises in Central Asia — British topography and world geography in one sixteen-page number, with the asterisked articles carrying engravings. Number 1018 of 1840 carried the third in a series on the Celestial Empire, on Peking or Beijing, with sections on streets, common people, shops, auctions, barbers, police and funerals — popular ethnography in weekly instalments.

News, of a kind, also appeared. In July 1830 the Mirror marked the death of King George IV across three numbers: number 437 announced the King's death, number 438 was a sixteen-page supplement on it, and number 439 carried a further supplement. A weekly miscellany that could turn itself into a supplement-bearing record of a national event shows how far the cheap periodical had moved towards the functions of an illustrated newspaper, a decade before the Illustrated London News.

The 1827 volume (volume 9, numbers 232–261) shows the collected form: a frontispiece of George IV, 448 pages with an index, fifty-two engravings, and a large folded engraving of the funeral procession of the late Duke of York as a supplementary attraction — the bound Mirror as a household illustrated library for the year.

The first long-lived cheap periodical

The claim that the Mirror was the first long-lived cheap periodical in Britain, quoted from Altick's The English Common Reader, rests on the combination of price and longevity. Cheaper or earlier papers existed, and Smith's Kaleidoscope (1818–1831) had pioneered the cheap weekly miscellany in Liverpool; but a twopenny London weekly sustained from 1822 to 1847 — over 1,000 numbers in its first sequence alone, reaching number 1018 by 1840 — had no precedent. It proved that a mass readership for print existed and could be held, a proof on which the Penny Magazine (1832), Chambers's Edinburgh Journal (1832) and the whole cheap press of the 1830s built.

Limbird's obituary description as a father of periodical writing, quoted by Altick, is the trade's own acknowledgment of that priority.

Restarts, the monthly Mirror and the London Review

The magazine's later history was one of managed decline and transformation, recorded in the Online Books Page's serial archive at the University of Pennsylvania. The volumes and numbers restarted in 1842, and again in 1846, when the magazine became a monthly. In 1847 it was published as the Mirror Monthly Magazine, and ran under that name until 1849, when it ended; the last volume mentioned that the magazine would be replaced in 1850 by the London Review. Limbird's biography gives the same sequence in compressed form: late in 1847 it became the Mirror Monthly Magazine, and from 1849 to 1850 appeared finally as the London Review.

The batch description for this directory dates the Mirror 1822 to 1847, which is correct for the title in its weekly form; readers should understand 1847 as the end of the Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction under its full name, with its monthly successor and the London Review carrying the enterprise to 1850.

Survival and study

The Mirror survives in bound volumes in research libraries, in the British Periodicals collections through which it is now read online, in university special collections such as Cardiff's, and in large numbers of disbound single issues in the antiquarian trade — itself evidence of how many copies were printed and kept. The University of Pennsylvania's Online Books Page maintains a serial archive listing for it, and the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism carries its publishing history.

For historians of reading, it is a principal source for what the new cheap-press public actually read in the 1820s and 1830s: topography, biography, tales, poetry, science and domestic hints, extracted from expensive books and re-served at twopence a week.

Assessment

The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction was not original in the way a literary review is original, and it never pretended to be: its subtitle advertised extracts, selections and the spirit of other journals as its stock. Its originality was commercial and social. Limbird and his editors built the first durable machine for giving a mass British readership a weekly illustrated miscellany, and they kept it running for twenty-five years.

That is why the magazine, rather than any single essay in it, is the achievement. Between the Liverpool Kaleidoscope of 1818 and the penny press of the 1830s stands Limbird's twopenny Mirror — the first long-lived cheap periodical in Britain, published from the Strand by a stationer whom his obituarist called a father of the form.