About The Connoisseur

The Connoisseur

The Connoisseur was a London weekly periodical published from 31 January 1754 to 30 September 1756. It appeared every Thursday as a weekly folio, ran to 140 numbers and was later collected in two volumes. It was founded and chiefly run by George Colman the Elder and the parodist Bonnell Thornton, two young writers who had met as students, and it was presented under the persona of Mr Town, Critic and Censor-General.

The paper belonged to the crowded world of the mid-eighteenth-century essay periodical, in which a single essay in each number commented on manners, taste and folly. Its particular position was described as a plebeian counterpart to Edward Moore's The World, a contemporary periodical concerned more with aristocratic interests. Where The World looked at fashionable society from above, The Connoisseur claimed the more ordinary ground of the town, and that contrast helped define its tone and its audience.

Origins in Oxford and Westminster friendships

Colman and Thornton's partnership was formed before London publishing began. Colman, born in Florence in April 1732 where his father was British Resident Minister at the court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, lost his father within a year of his birth. His education was undertaken by William Pulteney, later Lord Bath, whose wife was Colman's mother's sister. After private education in Marylebone he attended Westminster School and then Christ Church, Oxford.

At Oxford Colman made the acquaintance of Bonnell Thornton (1725–1768), who had also been educated at Westminster School and at Christ Church, taking his B.A. in 1747. Thornton was already known as a parodist. Their shared school and university background, and their membership of the circle of Old Westminster men who formed the Nonsense Club — a group that also included William Cowper, Charles Churchill and Robert Lloyd — gave the new paper a ready-made company of wits, contributors and subjects.

Thornton before The Connoisseur

Thornton had tried periodical satire before. In 1752 he founded the Drury Lane Journal, a satirical periodical which lampooned other journals including Samuel Johnson's Rambler, The Gentleman's Magazine and The London Magazine. Twelve issues appeared between January and April 1752. The experiment was brief, but it showed the method Thornton brought to The Connoisseur: imitation, parody and direct mockery of rival literary forms, rather than sustained moral argument.

That background matters because Johnson's verdict on The Connoisseur is so often quoted against it. The younger men had made sport of Johnson's manner, and Johnson in return found their paper wanting in substance. The rivalry was part of a literary culture in which new essay papers defined themselves against the last successful one.

Mr Town, Critic and Censor-General

The paper was issued by Mr Town, a pseudonymous editorial persona whose full style was Critic and Censor-General. The device was conventional in the essay periodical — Addison and Steele and Johnson had all used editorial masks — but the title chosen pointed to the paper's business: to survey the town, judge its tastes and censor its follies. It also allowed contributions from several hands to appear as the work of a single observing character.

A later writer, Leigh Hunt, borrowed a version of the signature for his own early essays, signing himself Mr Town, Junior, Critic and Censor-general, a sign that the persona remained recognisable long after the paper itself had closed. The name, in other words, outlived the 140 numbers that created it.

Format and contents

The Connoisseur was issued as a weekly folio every Thursday. One essay appeared in each issue, aimed, in the description preserved by the historian Walter Graham, at the vices and follies of the community. There was no attempt to build a newspaper of intelligence, a magazine of extracts or a review of books; the single-essay form was the whole product, exactly as in the Rambler and the earlier Tatler and Spectator tradition.

Surviving numbers show the range that a single essay could be made to cover. A bookseller's description of the collected third volume, for example, lists essays touching gambling, duelling and the art of conversation, alongside satire of fashion, literature and politics, often worked through fictional characters who embodied the vices and follies of the time. The method was to invent or sketch a type — the gamester, the duellist, the empty talker — and let the type expose the habit.

Contributors

The contributors were described as discreet, meaning that their names were not paraded in the paper. Those identified in the record are Thomas Warton, William Cowper and Robert Lloyd, in addition to the two principals. Warton brought an Oxford literary connection; Cowper, later famous as a poet and hymn writer, was part of the same Nonsense Club circle as Lloyd, whose career as a poet was closely tied to Colman's.

The youth of the enterprise was striking. Graham noted that Colman was twenty-two and Thornton thirty when the paper was running — Thornton's recorded birth in 1725 would in fact make him slightly younger than thirty for most of the run — and attributed both the paper's faults and its energy to that inexperience and to a youthful predilection for satire.

The comparison with The World

The description of The Connoisseur as a plebeian counterpart to The World deserves attention, because the two papers ran at about the same time and Johnson judged them together. James Boswell recorded in his Life of Johnson that he mentioned The Connoisseur to Johnson, who said it wanted matter. Boswell himself added, in Johnson's defence and in the paper's, that it did not have the deep thinking of Johnson's writings, but that it had just views of the surface of life and a very sprightly manner. Boswell added that Johnson's opinion of The World was not much higher than his opinion of The Connoisseur.

The exchange captures the paper's reputation precisely: light, observant and lively on surfaces, rather than weighty. For a weekly essay aimed at manners, that was not necessarily a failure of purpose, even if it fell short of the standard Johnson had set in the Rambler, which had closed in March 1752, less than two years before The Connoisseur began.

Criticism and style

Graham's assessment in English Literary Periodicals was that the paper was often in poor style and lacking in substance. That judgement has tended to stick, partly because Johnson's shorter verdict is so quotable. Yet the facts of publication complicate it: a paper that wanted matter entirely might be expected to die quickly, whereas The Connoisseur sustained a weekly folio for more than two and a half years and reached its 140th number, a respectable run for an essay periodical written mainly by two men in their twenties.

The collected edition also suggests a contemporary market beyond the weekly sale. The complete work was reissued in book form, with a second edition appearing in four volumes dated 1755 and 1757 and published in London by R. Baldwin, while Alexander Chalmers supplied a historical and biographical preface to The Connoisseur in volume 30 of The British Essayists in 1817 — evidence that, sixty years on, editors of the classic essay tradition still thought the paper belonged in the canon they were preserving.

Colman's later career

For Colman, the periodical was a beginning rather than a destination. He left Oxford after taking his degree in 1755, was entered at Lincoln's Inn and was called to the bar in 1757, practising out of respect for Lord Bath's wishes until Bath's death. His friendship with David Garrick did not advance his legal career, but Colman became a successful dramatist — the author of more than thirty dramatic pieces, including The Jealous Wife (1761) and The Clandestine Marriage (1766) — a translator of Terence and Horace, an editor of Beaumont and Fletcher and Ben Jonson, and a theatre owner and manager. He died on 14 August 1794 and is distinguished as Colman the Elder from his son, George Colman the Younger.

Read against that later career, The Connoisseur looks like an apprenticeship in exactly the skills Colman would use on stage: observation of social types, dialogue, fashionable London settings and the exposure of folly through character rather than argument.

Thornton's later life and the end of the paper

Thornton remained a frequent contributor to The Gentleman's Magazine and a poet, essayist and critic, but he did not found another periodical of the same scale. He married Sylvia Braithwaite, sister of Major-General Sir John Braithwaite, and they had three children. He died in 1768, twelve years after The Connoisseur closed. No successor paper by the two men followed; the last number was dated 30 September 1756, and the partnership's periodical work ended there.

The reasons for closure are not recorded in the surviving summaries beyond the run itself. What is clear is that both founders had other paths opening — Colman towards the law and then the theatre, Thornton towards miscellaneous literary work — and that a two-man weekly essay, sustained for 140 Thursdays, had already lasted longer than many better-remembered rivals.

Place in the essay-periodical tradition

The Connoisseur is therefore best understood as a minor but instructive example of a major eighteenth-century form. It had the classic elements: a fictional editor, a weekly day, a single essay, a circle of discreet contributors and a declared war on vice and folly. It lacked, by contemporary verdict, the intellectual weight of Johnson, but it offered, by Boswell's verdict, accurate observation of the surface of life in a sprightly manner.

Its historical value lies partly in that ordinariness. The great essay papers are exceptional; The Connoisseur shows what the form looked like in the hands of clever, connected, very young London writers in 1754 — satirical, social, theatrical in instinct, and aimed not at aristocratic readers of The World but at the broader town that Mr Town claimed to criticise and censor.