"A sort of bird's eye view of the British land of letters": The monthly magazine and its reviewers, 1796-1811

Studies in Bibliography

Volumn 52, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 169-177

  Chandler, David ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0033448967     PISSN: 00817600     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. The Watchman, ed. Lewis Patton, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 2 (London and Princeton, 1970), 374-375.
2. Memoirs of the Public and Private Life of Sir Richd. Phillips (London, 1808), 68; hereafter cited as Phillips. Despite a claim on the title-page that this was "Impartially compiled from Authentic Documents, By a Citizen of London, and Assistants," it was apparently "written under the eye of" Phillips himself: see A. Boyle, "Portraiture in Lavengro II: The Publisher - Sir Richard Phillips," Notes and Queries 196 (1951), 361-366 (p. 362); hereafter cited as Boyle.
3. Memoirs of the Public and Private Life of Sir Richd. Phillips (London, 1808), 68; hereafter cited as Phillips. Despite a claim on the title-page that this was "Impartially compiled from Authentic Documents, By a Citizen of London, and Assistants," it was apparently "written under the eye of" Phillips himself: see A. Boyle, "Portraiture in Lavengro II: The Publisher - Sir Richard Phillips," Notes and Queries 196 (1951), 361-366 (p. 362); hereafter cited as Boyle.
4. MM, I, iii; subsequent references to the MM in text.
5. Sales figure for the London periodicals in 1797 show that the MM and the Monthly Review both sold 5000 copies, comfortably ahead of other monthly publications: C. H. Timperly, Encyclopedia of Literary and Typographical Anecdote (London, 1842), 795.
6. John Warden Robberds, Memoir of the Life and Writings of the Late William Taylor of Norwich, 2 vols (London, 1843), II, 394; hereafter cited as Robberds.
7. The Romantic Reviewers 1802-1824 (London, 1969), 58.
8. "The Monthly Magazine" in British Literary Magazines: The Romantic Age, 1789-1836, ed. Alvin Sullivan (Westport, 1983), 314-319 (p. 314); hereafter cited as Curry.
9. Lucy Aikin, Memoir of John Aikin, M.D., 2 vols (London, 1823), I, 188; hereafter cited as Aikin. Kenneth Curry confuses this evidence, claiming that Phillips was the "literary editor" (Curry, 314).
10. MC 175/3, 237 (manuscript has pagination); hereafter cited as Norgate. Extracts from this manuscript are published by kind permission of the Norfolk Record Office.
11. First positively identified as Enfield's by Lewis Patton: "Coleridge and the 'Enquirer' Series," Review of English Studies 16 (1940), 188-189.
12. A brief but useful account of Enfield as a writer and reviewer is given in Derek Roper, Reviewing before the Edinburgh (London, 1978), 256-257.
13. In Norgate's first "Retrospect" occurs the satement "Dr. Hunter's 'Outlines of Agriculture' we remember to have read twenty years ago in his Georgical Essays" (IV, 513). Given Norgate's age, this was clearly either cribbed from another review, or (probably more likely) represents a note made by Enfield.
14. John Aikin's description in his obituary of Enfield in the MM (IV, 401).
15. The final instalment of the letters is signed "T. S. Norgate" (XV, 15). A manuscript of the letters is in the Norfolk Record Office (MS. 4690), where it is entitled "Letters Written to my Wife during an Excursion Through France to Geneva in 1801-1802"; this, however, does not consist of the letters as posted, but is rather a copy of them as they were prepared for publication.
16. Norgate's other contributions can be found at: I, 116-117; II, 572-530; IV, 354; VII, 105-107; VII, 277-283; XI, 201-202; XIII, 440-445. All these are signed "T. S. N."; the writer signing "T. N." is not Norgate (see MM, IV, 105). As Phillips' system of assessing the length of part pages is not known, I have counted them in both quarters and thirds, depending on which was most accurate. (I have assumed that Phillips would not count a fraction smaller than a quarter.) Thus part pages have been counted as 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, 2/3, or 3/4 pages, the length being rounded down when there was any ambiguity. For the possibility that Phillips did not count part pages at all, see note 17 below.
17. Charles Dickens wrote to William Pickersgill on 3 April 1844, "A Magazine Sheet is sixteen pages. . . . When I say that a Magazine Sheet is sixteen pages, I mean sixteen pages of the Magazine, of course": The Letters of Charles Dickens: Volume Four 1844-1846, ed. Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford, 1977), 94. When the Monthly Review increased its length to 120 pages in 1790, advertisements in various newspapers claimed that it would consist of "seven Sheets and an Half." Finally, in writing to Phillip Bliss on 5 November 1806 about the Athenæum, John Aikin stated, "I suppose we shall be able to allow full a half sheet (8 pages) to the analyses & extracts of curious books" (British Library Add. MS. 34,567, f.7-7v). I labour this point to emphasise that there can be no ambiguity over what Norgate means by a "sheet." At least one scholar has read literally some clearly misunderstood evidence that would make a "sheet" in the MM equal to 42 pages (Dorothy Coldicutt, "Was Coleridge the Author of the 'Enquirer' Series in the Monthly Magazine, 1796-9?," Review of English Studies 15 [1939], 45-60); Robberds, William Taylor's biographer, made the original mistake (Robberds, I, 394-395), clearly reading the figures on a statement of a retrospective "raise" that Phillips had allowed Taylor on some articles as the total sums that Taylor had been paid for those articles.
18. Charles Dickens wrote to William Pickersgill on 3 April 1844, "A Magazine Sheet is sixteen pages. . . . When I say that a Magazine Sheet is sixteen pages, I mean sixteen pages of the Magazine, of course": The Letters of Charles Dickens: Volume Four 1844-1846, ed. Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford, 1977), 94. When the Monthly Review increased its length to 120 pages in 1790, advertisements in various newspapers claimed that it would consist of "seven Sheets and an Half." Finally, in writing to Phillip Bliss on 5 November 1806 about the Athenæum, John Aikin stated, "I suppose we shall be able to allow full a half sheet (8 pages) to the analyses & extracts of curious books" (British Library Add. MS. 34,567, f.7-7v). I labour this point to emphasise that there can be no ambiguity over what Norgate means by a "sheet." At least one scholar has read literally some clearly misunderstood evidence that would make a "sheet" in the MM equal to 42 pages (Dorothy Coldicutt, "Was Coleridge the Author of the 'Enquirer' Series in the Monthly Magazine, 1796-9?," Review of English Studies 15 [1939], 45-60); Robberds, William Taylor's biographer, made the original mistake (Robberds, I, 394-395), clearly reading the figures on a statement of a retrospective "raise" that Phillips had allowed Taylor on some articles as the total sums that Taylor had been paid for those articles.
19. Boyle, 362-363, 366. One possibility is that in assessing the length of each article or "Retrospect" Phillips only counted whole pages. By my calculation this would mean that after sixteen "Retrospects" Norgate would have been paid for 62 pages at 5 guineas a sheet, and 497 pages at 6 guineas a sheet. This would make his total earnings 205 guineas, 16 shillings, just 17 shillings short of the amount he said he had earned.
20. Due to some unfortunate investments made by his father, Talyor began to be financially anxious at this juncture. See the fourt part of my article "William Taylor of Norwich," The George Borrow Bulletin, No. 12 (1996), 4-22 (p. 9).
21. For a full discussion see my article, "The Foundation of 'Philosophical Criticism': William Talyor's Connection with the Monthly Review, 1792-93," Studies in Bibliography, 50 (1997), 359-371.
22. See in particular Hazlitt's comment, The Spirit of the Age (London, 1825), 308.