The success of Blackwood's encouraged the establishment of the first magazine of similar character in London. This was the London Magazine, the initial number of which appeared in January, 1820. Its first editor, John Scott, was apparently given a free hand by the owners; he, in turn, threw open the pages of the London to good writing on almost any subject and paid for it liberally. As a result of this policy the London commanded the pens of original and attractive writers and from the beginning was of interest and high standing. After the death of Scott in a duel, rapid changes in the control of the magazine ensued, the result of which was a swift descent in its fortunes. But it had shown the way to success and had set up a new standard for magazines. The conduct of the New Monthly Magazine illustrates the force of the example set by the London. The New Monthly, which was founded in 1814, during the first seven years of its existence was distinguished in no vital respect from the older miscellanies. In 1820, however, the popularity of the London forced a change of policy: it was placed under the editorship of Campbell, the poet, and inaugurating a new series with the first number for 1821, it became of the new order. Within a few more years many magazines of the older type had disappeared and very much the kind of magazine we know to-day had become definitely established. Probably the most obvious contribution of the modern magazine to the development of the essay was the encouragement to expansion Obligations of the new essay to the modern magazine beyond the former narrow limits, an expansion impossible in the newspapers or in the older magazines, divided as they were into numerous crowded departments. The new magazines, unburdened with the traditions that hampered the old, and thus excluding much of the journalistic matter appearing in their predecessors, were able to provide not merely a page or two for an essay, but six or eight, and on occasion, ten or twelve or twenty pages. They thus made possible the changed content and manner of the essay, which could result only from an enlargement of its physical limits. But increased length and all that goes with it was not the only indebtedness of the new essay to the new magazine. Blackwood's and the London could make a place for themselves only by being different from the long-established magazines, by surpassing them in literary interest and attractiveness; their editors and owners accordingly vied with one another in offering inducements to writers of original power, paying them with hitherto unexampled liberality and leaving them free to write as their own genius might direct. Finally, the very fact that these magazines were new, that they were unfettered by hampering precedents, was in itself a strong incentive to break away from existing conventions and to test new forms and modes. Lamb, Hunt, Hazlitt, Wilson, and De Quincey are chief among the founders of the new essay; though Hunt, the least modern of the group, owed comparatively little to the new magazines, even he departed from his eighteenth-century models for the first time in the Reflector; and Blackwood's produced Wilson's sketches, and the London stimulated Lamb, Hazlitt, and De Quincey to discover their peculiar genius and to give it expression. Extremely significant is the fact that the great body of familiar essays produced within the last century has been written for the modern magazine, the direct successor of Blackwood's and the London. During the period within which the new essay was established Lamb, Hunt, and Hazlitt were the most notable writers — notable for their relations to the older type or for their influence upon the development of the new, as well as for the permanent interest and attractiveness of their writings. Charles Lamb Lamb's first essay, "The Londoner," was printed in the Morning Post for February 1, 1802. "The Londoner" promised to be the first ⚫ of a series, but the promise was not carried out, and Lamb wrote no other essays until the establishment of Leigh Hunt's Reflector. To the four issues of this magazine, which appeared probably in 1811-1812, he contributed a number of short essays as well as two important critical papers. Consequent upon the death of the Reflector was a period of scant productivity, which lasted until the appearance of the London Magazine in 1820. Lamb's first contribution to this magazine, "The South Sea House," appeared in the number for August, 1820; his last, "Stage Illusion," in that for August, 1825. Between these two dates, writing over the pen-name " Elia," which he had appropriated from an Italian fellow clerk of the South Sea House, Lamb published in the London practically all his most characteristic essays. After 1820 he wrote but little except for the London, and after 1826 he practically ceased writing at all, his only considerable papers being three or four for the ephemeral ९९ Englishman's Magazine in 1831. Collections of Lamb's essays were made three times before his death in 1834: his Works (1818) contained most of his earlier pieces, and the Essays of Elia (1823) and the Last Essays of Elia (1833) included most of his contributions to the London as well as a few of both his earlier and his later papers. Lamb's earlier essays were written under the influence of the longestablished models. His first venture, "The Londoner," was obviously imitative, owing much in particular to the first number of the Spectator; and most of his brief papers in the Reflector were considerably indebted to the seventeenth-century "character" or to the Tatler and its successors.1 Moreover, even in the period of Lamb's most thoroughly original work, when Elia was doing much to establish the new type of familiar essay, he at times reverted to the manner of the old: the first part of "Poor Relations" is patterned after the seventeenth-century "character"; the first part of "The Wedding" is wholly in the manner of Steele's sketches of domestic life; and A Vision of Horns," one of the Essays of Elia not reprinted by Lamb, he himself characterized as "resembling the most laboured papers in the Spectator." ९९ But by far the greater number of the Elia essays were no more imitative than they are imitable; they were wholly original and the expression of Lamb's own personality. They were the very perfection of that kind of intimate writing which wins not merely interest for itself but affection for the writer. The content of these essays was varied. A few were playful fantasies, a few were serious musings; a small number presented Lamb's satirical observation and comment upon incongruities of conduct, a larger number, his humorous observation of incident and character; and seven or eight were critical papers on books and the stage. In almost every one of these papers, even those professedly critical, Lamb's personality was warmly reflected, and by far the greater number of his essays were undisguised autobiography and reminiscence, written in the first person. They recorded ingenuously his sympathies and his prejudices, 1 Something of the nature of the relationship between Lamb's early papers and the eighteenth-century periodical essay will appear from an examination of "A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People," which appeared first in the Reflector and was later reprinted with some changes as an Elia essay. presented him and his family and his friends, disclosed his habits, and unveiled his memories. They formed almost a complete record of his life, together with an intimate and candid commentary upon it. In them appeared his tenderness and manliness, his tolerance of everything but pretence and priggishness and complacent stupidity, his intensely social nature, his liking for people with some harmless idiosyncrasy, his keen observation of the unexpected hidden amid the commonplace, his devotion to his old folios, and his half-humorous, half-pathetic attitude toward life. Lamb's most fundamental characteristic was his humor — tender, playful, fantastic, never bitter, usually warming the reader's feeling or flashing a glimpse of a truth hitherto unconsidered. Very frequently the vehicle of this humor was a comparison startlingly unexpected, but perfectly appropriate and owing much of its happiness of effect to a suggestion of incongruity. The illustrative or figurative half of such a comparison was usually drawn from Lamb's familiar acquaintance with English literature of the late sixteenth and the seventeenth century - Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists, Milton and Marvell, Burton and Browne and Fuller, and the Bible. From the same sources came the abundance of allusion that enriched every page, and the choice of word and turn of phrase that gave to his diction its archaic flavor. The result was not the affectation and artificiality that might have been expected, but what Lamb called a "self-pleasing quaintness," a style and manner peculiarly his own and perfectly expressive of his individuality. About two years after the appearance of Lamb's "The Londoner," Leigh Hunt began to contribute his juvenile essays to the Traveller James Henry newspaper (1804-1805), and during the next fifty years, Leigh Hunt amid much ephemeral matter, largely critical or journal(1784-1859) istic, a very considerable body of familiar essays appeared from his pen. Though in the Reflector (1811–1812) he made a notable attempt to found a literary magazine, yet the new type of magazine, when it was actually established, had much slighter effect upon his development than upon that of any of his contemporaries; by far the larger number of his essays were written for newspapers, family miscellanies, and independent sheets patterned somewhat closely after the Tatler. In fact, his most attractive and most characteristic work appeared in periodicals of the kind last mentioned. The most important of these was the earliest, the Indicator, which was issued weekly from October 13, 1819, to March 21, 1821. Similar in character were the Companion (1828) and Leigh Hunt's London Journal (1834-1835). No approximately full collection of Hunt's essays was made before his death, in 1859, nor, indeed, has any been made since. Selections from the Indicator and the Companion were reprinted in 1834; and the Seer (1840-1841), Men, Women, and Books (1847), and Table Talk (1851) contained a good deal of matter that had previously appeared.2 The influence of the earlier types was even more pervasive and persistent in Hunt's work than in Lamb's. Hunt's papers in the Traveller were in avowed imitation of the Connoisseur (1754–1756), itself an imitator of the Tatler and the Spectator. In the Reflector, which he edited, most of his own essays, as well as many from other contributors, were similar in subject and manner to those of Addison and Goldsmith. A third literary venture of his, the Round Table papers in the Examiner (1815-1817), was confessedly designed after the Tatler and the Spectator, and most of Hunt's own writing was strongly suggestive of his reading in the essays of the eighteenth century. The influence of the early models persisted in a large proportion of even his most individual and most nearly original essays, such as those written for the Indicator. His "characters," particularly, a form which he cultivated as long as he wrote, owed much both to the seventeenth-century "characters" and to the more lifelike and dramatic studies of the Tatler and its successors. Hunt's own everyday experiences and his observation of the everyday life about him formed the staple of his essays: he wrote upon books, the stage, clothes, manners and habits, the weather, animal pets, interesting types of character, the life of the London streets, the pleasures and the discomforts of a dweller in the suburbs, the joys and the sorrows of domestic life. Books were his chief interest, and his reading largely colored his observation. His distinctive manner first showed itself in "A Day by the Fire," in the last number of the Reflector-a cheery, familiarly gossiping presentation of a 2 In the list of Hunt's collected essays, one feels tempted to include the Autobiography (1851, 1852, revised 1860); it is much more a series of sketches and reminiscences than a connected account of his life, and it has the chatty, intimate manner of his essays. |