Elizabeth Barrett was already a famous poet when she secretly married Robert Browning in 1846 and moved with him to Italy. In the following years, she produced some of her finest works, including Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and the long poem Aurora Leigh (1856). She was an early contributor to Thackeray’s Cornhill Magazine, which was a rival to Dickens’s All the Year Round. Barrett Browning’s ‘A Musical Instrument’, a meditation on the suffering that produces art, appears here with a striking wood engraving after Frederic Leighton. Leighton, later president of the Royal Academy, designed Barrett Browning’s tomb in Florence.
In 1874, when Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd was published in the Cornhill Magazine, readers were shocked at some of the work’s sexually explicit scenes. Although the Cornhill received complaints, Hardy’s work continued to be in demand. The twelve illustrations accompanying the tale were by Helen Paterson Allingham, a watercolourist whose work also appeared in the Graphic. The scene depicted here shows the farmer William Boldwood on the verge of proposing to the novel’s complex heroine, Bathsheba Everdene.
This early issue of the Boy’s Own Paper (1879-1967) offers insights into the range of diverting material that its publisher, the Religious Tract Society, thought suitable for boy readers. In addition to its weekly serial (in this case by the prolific adventure-writer W.H.G. Kingston), the BOP featured puzzles and games, accounts of sporting achievements, and other articles designed to be morally and spiritually improving. The magazine circulated across the British Empire and became known for its patriotic values.
Bentley’s Miscellany (1837-1868) offered an assortment of serial fiction, short stories, historical writing, reviews (musical, culinary, and literary), and other snippets of information. Charles Dickens served as the journal’s inaugural editor, although he soon severed ties with its owner, Richard Bentley, whose interventionist approach to editing infuriated the up-and-coming novelist. This instalment of Dickens’s Oliver Twist features George Cruikshank’s famous illustration of Oliver asking for more. William Harrison Ainsworth succeeded Dickens as editor in 1839, and his serialized novel, Jack Sheppard, was even more successful than Dickens’s classic tale.
The New Monthly Magazine (1814-1884) was an early production of Henry Colburn, one of the century’s most important publishers. Each issue included an engraved portrait of a well-known figure. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge thought the drawing from which this engraving was made ‘the most striking likeness ever taken’ of him. This issue includes ‘Anecdotes of Lord Byron’ by a still unidentified writer, who offers some colourful details (Byron ‘never went to sleep without a pair of pistols and a dagger by his side’). Readers were also treated to the first printing of ‘The Vampyre’, supposedly written by Lord Byron but in fact the work of his doctor and friend, John William Polidori.
On 6 May 1882, the newly-appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and his Under Secretary, Thomas Henry Burke, were stabbed to death in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. The Irish politician Charles Stewart Parnell, released from jail four days previously, denounced the murders, which were committed by a militant separatist group. But Punch represents Parnell as Victor Frankenstein, cowering before his murderous creation, a simian-like Irish caricature. The broadsheet at the monster’s feet reads ‘Capt Moonlight’, a reference to Parnell’s 1881 statement, ‘Ah, if I am arrested Captain Moonlight will take my place’. Although Parnell remained a key figure in Irish politics, the murders were a profound setback to Irish Home Rule.
In 1843, a growing number of Irish citizens called for the repeal of the Acts of Union that combined Ireland and Great Britain. Daniel O’Connell, mayor of Dublin and a leader of the repeal movement, had held a series of rallies, called ‘monster meetings’, at various historical sites. When Prime Minister Robert Peel ordered the cancellation of a pro-repeal rally on 8 October 1843, O’Connell relented and called off the meeting. He was charged with conspiracy and sentenced to prison, and the repeal movement splintered. Punch shows O’Connell losing control of the forces of repeal, here represented in an ethnic stereotype that also takes the ‘monster meeting’ literally.
Poet Thomas Pringle edited the 1829-1833 issues of the popular annual Friendship’s Offering. Early in his editorship, he contacted many of the most popular writers of the day in search of contributions. William Wordsworth and Joanna Baillie politely declined, but the Scottish poet James Hogg sent him several works, including ‘The Minstrel Boy’, which appeared with a suitably sentimental engraving of a young shepherd.
The Crimean War began in 1853, when Tsar Nicholas II invaded the Ottoman-controlled territories of Moldavia and Wallachia. The Ottomans won early victories at Kalafat and Oltenitza (see the article opposite, ‘Heartsease for the Czar’), and Britain and France joined the fray on the side of the Ottomans. John Leech’s image captures a moment when the British public believed that Nicholas’s belligerence was about to backfire on him. The reality was less simple: though the Russians eventually sued for peace in 1856, the British suffered some 40,000 casualties, and the Charge of the Light Brigade ensured that the Crimean War long stood as a symbol of British bungling.
‘The Coming Man’s Arrival’ is one of Dunedin Punch’s better-known images, drawing attention to the arrival of Chinese gold miners in Otago. These miners were invited by the Dunedin Chamber of Commerce in the hope that they would replace those who had been lured by the promise of better and more plentiful gold on the West Coast. Dunedin Punch first appeared on 27 May 1865. On 1 September 1867, it changed its name to the Otago Punch.
The Monthly Magazine (1796-1843) first appeared under the editorship of John Aikin, and it became a favourite among liberal and radical readers. Aikin and his sister, Anna Letitia Barbauld, had collaborated on Evenings at Home (1792-1796), a series of stories for children, and Barbauld occasionally wrote for the Monthly. In the essay on display, she challenges some of Rousseau’s ideas regarding children and education. At the time, most periodicals published articles anonymously or under a pseudonym. However, the London publishing world was a small community, and the identity of regular contributors was often an open secret. Here, a previous owner has added ‘Mrs. Barbauld’ beneath the article’s title.
All the Year Round (1859-1895) was founded by Dickens in response to a quarrel with his publishers, Bradbury & Evans. The new journal was strikingly similar to its predecessor, Household Words. Each issue began with an instalment of a novel, with Dickens effectively self-publishing both A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, since he was both owner and editor of the publication. Authors of serials were now identified by name. Sales were typically around 100,000 copies per week, and contributors included Edward Bulwer Lytton, Frances Trollope, and Edmund Yates.
Vanity Fair was well-known for its chromolithographic caricatures of prominent figures. James Tissot’s image of Charles Darwin appeared in 1871, the year in which The Descent of Man was published. The accompanying article describes Darwin as ‘one of the most accomplished naturalists now in existence’, noting that ‘any theoretical structure that he builds upon his researches must be regarded with great respect’. While Tissot captures Darwin’s physical infirmities (note the pile of cushions, which signify his ongoing ill health), he does so gently, contrasting his subject’s physical frailty with the intense intelligence to be seen in his eyes.
Science-Gossip (1865-1893, 1894-1902) was a popular science magazine, aimed at the educated lay reader. Its first editor was the botanist Mordecai Cubitt Cooke, and the journal purported to be ‘a medium of interchange and gossip’ regarding discoveries, developments, and the scientific world. In 1871, a review of the magazine in the scientific journal Nature noted that Science-Gossip was perceived as a scientific equivalent to Notes and Queries: ‘The two resemble each other, indeed, in many particulars, and in none more than in the very unequal value which attaches to the articles contained in their pages’.