popular magazines, popular culture: gradations of celebrity in the romantic period

Popular Magazines, Popular Culture: Gradationsof Celebrity in the Romantic Period

Brian Rejack and Mark Schoenfield*Department of English, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA

Abstract

Celebrity and popular culture emerged simultaneously, and synergistically, in part through theagency of the periodical press during the romantic period. As modes of fame multiplied, the audi-ence of celebrity understood itself as a collective—often British, polite, class-oriented—and asindividuals modeled through the individualized celebrity that periodicals could project. This pro-cess—centered on fashion and fame—integrated notions of the popular and the common withthose of the spectacular and the unique. For emerging discourses that consolidated middle-classideals, such as gastronomy, sports, and contemporary etiquette, the popular magazines occupied acrucial position in what Jon Klancher has denominated ‘‘the social text’’ and helped legitimizethemselves by producing their own localized celebrities. Exploring articles from a range of period-icals on a diverse set of topics, this essay shows the reliance of popular magazines on popularculture, understood both in terms of those celebrities of popularity and those commonplacegames, sports, and activities associated with the populace.

The romantic periodicals provide a microcosm not only of the subject matter of the peri-od’s concerns, but of its heterogeneous and cacophonous approaches to those subjects.Reflecting and consolidating various components of the society, the periodicals repre-sented a ground of contest for an array of cultural events and aspirations. The guilt andinnocence of accused criminals, the excellencies of wrestlers, singers, and entomologists,the rights and wrongs of slaves, women, politicians, and monarchs, the flow of products,gold, and money were all debated, encouraged, and ridiculed across the periodicals,which were published in increasing numbers, throughout Great Britain. The research onthis ubiquitous literary form, or better, this ubiquitous generator of multiple literaryforms, is similarly heterogeneous. Jon Klancher’s The Making of the English Reading Publicdemonstrated the extent to which periodicals crafted their audience, and developed thehabits of reading which, in turn, shaped social interactions; as Andrew Piper argues, theculture imagined itself through its books (8–9), and periodicals not only constituted a sig-nificant portion of those books, but through their reviewing mechanisms, disseminatedinterpretations and assessments of the other books, that shaped such imagining. Foremerging discourses, especially those consolidating middle-class ideals, such as gastron-omy, sports, and contemporary etiquette, the periodicals occupied a crucial position inwhat Jon Klancher has denominated ‘‘the social text.’’ The periodical press fixes ‘‘evolv-ing readers’ interpretive frameworks’’ (4), while ‘‘Audiences… define themselves accord-ing to the interpretive mode they possess and the interpretive strategies through whichthat mode somehow allows them to ‘read’ other audiences’’ (46). This cyclical processproduces ‘‘diverging collective interpreters whose ‘readings’ of the social and intellectualworld opened unbridgeable cultural conflicts’’ (5). These conflicts, as Mark Parkerhas observed, were shaped by ‘‘diurnal references and innuendo largely lost to us’’ and,

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in the 1820s, by the ‘‘trade in ‘personalities,’ or rancorous personal attack’’ (4) thatexploited, and helped extend, the culture of celebrity on which earlier periodicalsdepended. Just as recent research on romantic celebrity has relied heavily on periodicalsas part of its archive, investigations into periodicals consistently encounter the mechanismsof celebrity as central to the functions of print culture.

The diversity of information inspired differentiations of magazines by topic (profes-sional periodicals, scientific journals, and sporting magazines all developed from, andcompeted against, the more general reviews and monthlies), by politics (the Whig witof the Edinburgh Review was matched by the Tory sarcasm of the Quarterly Review andBlackwood’s Magazine), and by approach (magazines devoted to famous characters,wondrous events, broad comedy, or illustration all managed audience expectations bytone and graphical presentation). Yet, across this range of journals, fame functioned as anorganizing principle; of particular import to romantic society, celebrity and popularculture emerged simultaneously, and synergistically, through the agency of the periodicalpress. Tom Mole, in Byron’s Romantic Celebrity, points out that periodicals provided ameans for the solidification and dissemination of celebrity, a ‘‘cultural apparatus consistingof three elements: an individual, an industry and an audience’’(1). The ‘‘industry’’ towhich Mole refers is a ‘‘system of distribution that arranges the available technology,labour, and skill in order to produce multiple copies, in large numbers, of a commoditywhich need not refer back to any ‘original’’’ (3); as a consequence, a figure like Byron,awash in replications of himself in a periodical press he despised yet exploited, ‘‘experi-ences the subjective trauma of commodity capitalism in a particularly acute fashion. He isboth a producer of commodities and himself, in a sense, a commodity’’ (4).

The complex interaction between the three components of individual, industry, andaudience destabilizes distinct boundaries between them. An individual was not the basisof identity, but a particular formation of identity modeled on the corporation, the family,and other industrial units. The audience of celebrity understood itself both as a collec-tive—British, polite, class-oriented—and as individuals modeled through the individual-ized celebrity that periodicals could project. This process also produced a discourse fordiscussing it—centered on fashion and fame—that integrated notions of the popular andthe common with those of the spectacular. Willaim Hazlitt analyzed this phenomenon, inwhich he was personally caught, in ‘‘On Living to One’s-Self’’:

[The celebrity exists] in the feverish sense of his own upstart self-importance. By aiming to fix[opinion], he is become the slave of opinion. He is a tool, a part of a machine that never standsstill, and is sick and giddy with the ceaseless motion. He has no satisfaction but in the reflectionof his own image in the public gaze—but in the repetition of his own name in the public ear.He himself is mixed up with, and spoils everything. (Table-Talk 93; our emphasis)

The range of this ‘‘everything’’ is that of the topics of the periodical machinery in whichcelebrities find themselves enmeshed. Hazlitt recognizes that celebrity hinges on a com-petitive aesthetics of popular culture.1 He notes that he has ‘‘seen a celebrated talker ofour own time turn pale and go out of the room when a showy-looking girl has comeinto it, who for a moment divided the attention of his hearers.—Infinite are the mortifi-cations of the bare attempt to emerge from obscurity’’ (125). Dwelling throughouthis career on such mortifications, often personally inflicted on him by rival periodicals,Hazlitt, in ‘‘On Different Sorts of Fame,’’ lamented that the immediate fame of periodicalculture had ‘‘superceded the anticipation of posthumous fame,’’ and consequently, asMark Schoenfield has suggested, for Hazlitt and his fellow writers, by ‘‘supplantingfuture fame, the periodical industry imposes on the writer, as his own self-image,

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the expectation of consumption, of possessing and devouring’’ a public readership (122–3).John Scott, the editor of the London Magazine, recognized a similar dynamic. Hecontended that Walter Scott’s ‘‘name’’—present not on the Waverley novels but in theperiodical commentaries upon them which circulated his anonymity as part of hisfame—‘‘has become national property.’’ Analyzing this relation of the celebrity of printculture and romantic nationalism, Jason Goldsmith argues that the editor’s ‘‘remark illus-trates how celebrity alienates the individual from his or her public image…The celebrityimage becomes one mechanism through which the nation is contested as a publicallyimagined community.’’ Consequently, ‘‘celebrities function’’ within romantic nationalism‘‘metonymically’’ (30). Between the imagined individual and the imagined nation innu-merable gradations of celebrity were interlinked.

The construction of discourses of popular culture provided a hierarchy and sequenceof differences by which celebrity could be identified and identified with; thus, localcelebrity, sports celebrity, and other differentiations of public notice offered a categoricalsystem by which the fame of the poet, the cook, and the boxer could be analogicallyrelated and reinforced. The local fame of the town magistrate could be a shrunken ver-sion of the fame of Lord Byron or the Prince Regent. Aristocracy, monarchy, and earlierformations of social representation tumble into celebrity; scandal and spectacle merge in aprint culture fueled by statistics, gossip, and advertisement. The differentiations of fameallowed for the development of new kinds of celebrity and a calibration of the signs ofthat celebrity in such diverse discourses as physiognomy, fashion, literature, the law, andmedicine. Celebrity emerged as a cultural conception tied to such popular activities assports and fairs in the descriptions of the periodicals, and the periodicals themselves,through increased circulation and their own discourse of self-importance, became part ofpopular culture. The periodicals simultaneously secured their own populace credentialsand highlighted various levels of fame, whether enhancing the celebrity of Wordsworthor Beau Brummell, staking their own claim to prominence as the Edinburgh Revieweror Christopher North, or dragging from local obscurity a cobbler poet, wrestling farmer,or a woman of extraordinary ordinariness.

As an example of the last of these, in the 1797 periodical Gossipiana: Monthly Visitorand Pocket Companion an irregular column was ‘‘Singular Biographical Notices.’’ TheDecember issue presents Mary Wilson (from a village near Keswick) ‘‘in her 84th year’’and ‘‘23 years a widow.’’ Her husband has left her ‘‘a cow, which she sold for fivepounds, but lost two pounds eighteen shillings of it by a bad debt; the remaining twoguineas she has locked up in her box, with a firm determination to save it to defray herfuneral expenses’’ (496). The sketch concludes with the exclamation, partly admonitionto the reader and to the culture of fame: ‘‘How little is absolutely necessary to supportnature!’’ The essay is followed by one about Duncan Robinson, ‘‘now verging on hishundredth year’’; once a soldier, he now tells tales of his war campaigns to visitors andcontinues to exhibit ‘‘an air of martial dignity, which neither age, infirmity, nor poverty,has been able to depress’’ (496–7). Remarkable only for the length of their existence,these figures exemplify the dispersive character of fame, necessary in part so that readers,however invisible in their personal capacity, could articulate their own individuality as aform of fame. The London Magazine notes that ‘‘Some one has remarked (Dr. Johnsonperhaps), that every man may record something interesting, if he will write from his ownobservation and experience;–if this remark will hold good with respect to Mr. Giblettthe poulterer, and Mr. Wigley the hair-dresser,–and Mr. Anybody else, the anything else,how must it must flourish with such a person as Mr. Mathews [famous actor and managerof the English Opera House]’’ (5:28 [1822] 395). Anonymity functions as a variant of

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fame, and the slippage of the owner of the adage—Johnson, perhaps, but certainly theLondon—demonstrates a literary laddering of fame. More extensive tributes, obituaries,and other regularized features heightened this effect, which Byron satirizes in his DonJuan.

Also to have the sacking of a town;A pleasant thing to young men at their years.‘Mongst them were several Englishmen of pith,Sixteen called Thomson, and nineteen named Smith.…

even good Fame may suffer sad contractions,And is extinguished sooner than she ought:Of all our modern battles, I will betYou can’t repeat nine names from each Gazette. (VII:18, 34)

Journals and magazines constructed these localized and broad articulations of celebritythrough a range of approaches. The periodicals had ‘‘modalities’’ that, as Mark Parker hasnoted, varied ‘‘from relative authorial autonomy to collaborations between editors andcontributors’’ (5). An exemplar of authorial control, Cobbett, as a single author, produceshis entire periodical, although the techniques of republishing, elaborate quotation andcitation, and strategic borrowings signal the corporate character of such productions. Atthe other extreme of editorial intervention, editors appropriated the names of authors toproduce work under their signature or projected, through both style and content, a uni-fied editorial collective, such as the Edinburgh Reviewer. Specific individuals, such asFrancis Jeffrey, however, could become metonymies for that corporate identity. Thiscomplexity of identity, hinging on a public conceptualization of the periodical’s ownfame, yields, as Parker has demonstrated, a ‘‘dialectic between the analysis of the culturalwork of magazines and a description of the place of culture in the magazine’’(11); thus,the terms of discussion by which journals argued for a specific cultural topography werelinked to how those journals were conceptualized and received. This had a variety ofimplications for writers; William Hazlitt, in Spirit of the Age, proposes that Charles Lambcould ‘‘ma[k]e his way’’ among periodicals, where he would have failed by ‘‘detachedand independent efforts.’’ Peter Manning details Lamb’s self-construction: Lamb ‘‘drawsout of periodical publishing an identity that disguises the commercial nature of that enter-prise’’ and conceals ‘‘the historical embedding of that identity’’(144). Lamb’s mystification(his pen name ‘‘Elia’’ is an anagram for ‘‘a lie’’ [Lucas 442]) required his self-presentationas a creature of taste, that cultural formation that denotes and evades materiality. Bour-dieu writes:

The ideology of natural taste owes its plausibility and its efficacy to the fact that, like all theideological strategies generated in the everyday class struggle, it naturalizes real differences, con-verting differences in the mode of acquisition of culture into differences of nature. (68)

Lamb presents himself as a natural, even accidental, writer, and yet his choice of TheLondon demonstrates his canny recognition of a periodical space amenable to such natural-ization; as Parker assesses its editorial approach, ‘‘the dialogism of the London…is moreakin to that implicit in many eighteenth-century periodicals in which the ubiquitouscoffee house analogy’’ served to define ‘‘the soul of contributors and readers’’ (65).Put another way, the London and Lamb shared a like-minded view of both what was,or ought to be, popular and who, among the range of readers, ought ideologically toconstitute the populace.



Periodicals developed their own fame through asserting differences from their competi-tors, often articulated through the political affiliations that underscored the magazines’most famous arguments, such as Blackwood’s Tory-based attacks on Leigh Hunt’s liberalExaminer in the series ‘‘On the Cockney School of Poetry.’’ Even before these notoriousarticles, Blackwood’s Magazine published John Lockhart’s pseudonymous ‘‘Remarks on thePeriodical Criticism of England – In a Letter to a Friend – Translated from the Germanof Von Lauerwinkel.’’ As Peter Flynn notes, Lauerwinkel decried the extent to whichthe Quarterly and the Edinburgh dominated periodical reviewing (149). Lauerwinkel asso-ciated the two periodicals with their editors, and so deploys the paradigm of individualcelebrity to the journals. He notes that Gifford:

has raised himself from a low rank in society, by his great and powerful talents; and he stillretains not a little of that coarseness and insensibility in regard to small things, which arealways inseparable from the character of one whose youthful education has been conductedwithout the delicacy and tenderness natural to people of the more refined orders of society.(2: 672)

The Quarterly is Gifford’s own background solidified into print, and, as Flynn shows,Lauerwinkel, like the public at large, bound the Edinburgh tightly to the personality of itseditor, Francis Jeffrey. In the second number of its first volume, the Oriental Herald andColonial Review explores the ‘‘Periodical Literature of the Nineteenth Century,’’ with afootnote, in the first page, claiming that a Hazlitt article ‘‘treats of the English newspapersalmost exclusively’’ (1:225)2; inaccurate, this comment suggests the anxiety of influencein which new periodicals had at once to distinguish themselves from predecessors, yetmark sufficient similarity to be read within the developed habits of the periodical audi-ence. In its inaugural issue, the Westminster Review critiques the periodical industry, begin-ning with a recognition of the dominance of the industry over public opinion andperception. It argues that the sing-song effect of the Quarterly’s disagreements effectivelylimits debate to two nearly indistinguishable positions. By dissolving the differencesbetween the journals, the Westminster intends to sink them into anonymity and creates alack the Westminster could fill.

As a symptom of this desire to claim space in the crowded magazine culture, periodi-cals were a frequent topic for periodical articles. The Anti-Jacobin Review regularly featured‘‘The Reviewers Reviewed’’; Leigh Hunt’s Examiner reproduced articles from a varietyof newspapers; and The Satirist marshaled excerpts from other reviews to ventriloquize itsown perspective as universal. Other journals were collections of the publications of priorarticles: The Spirit of the Public Journals: Being an Impartial Selection of the Most IngeniousEssays and Jeux D’esprit that appear in the Newspapers and Other Publication supplemented itspresentation of prior articles with ‘‘Explanatory Notes, and Anecdotes of Many of thePersons Alluded to,’’ a procedure that added durability to ephemeral magazine produc-tion. Further, the periodical extended its sway within print culture by providing modelsfor other genres. A typical defamiliarization reversed the usual presentation of the travelarticle, by having a foreigner, such as Lockhart’s Lauerwinkel, comment on Britain froma displaced perspective. Felix MacDonogh published his Hermit in London, and in theopening vignette, cites his predecessor, the Spectator. The Monthly Review, noticing it in1822, describes the essays as ‘‘papers not unlike those in the Spectator’’ (97: 365), reem-phasizing the periodical’s priority in such characterizations, and lists the titles of all thevignettes, which include essays exploring the dangers of dancing, flirtation, and feminin-ity. Its success prompted more volumes and a sequel, The Hermit Abroad. In variousmodes, the periodical influences the designs of novels, plays, and poetry, and featured in



their plots and symbolism, thereby perpetuating the medium’s influence as well as that ofindividual periodicals.

The juxtaposition of popular activities and political hierarchies of fame served both ear-nest and satirical purposes, while also suggesting a more broad connection between howmagazines produce their own fame through political debate. The Calcutta Magazine (Oct,1822) describes a series of chess matches, presided over by the former Chancellor of theExchequer. The first, between L—d L-nd—y (i.e., the recently deceased Castlereagh)and Mr. C-n—g, translates their political personalities onto the board, so Castlereaghexhibits an ‘‘odd compound of dullness and intrepidity’’ that ‘‘delight[s] chiefly in sacri-fices,’’ and he summarily defeats Canning. The final game, between ‘‘L—d L—v—l’’ andLord Eldon ends after L—v—l plays out his king pawn on the first move, and, after anhour’s contemplation, Eldon resolves to ‘‘take down the position, and study it at homeat his leisure’’ (‘‘A Cabinet of Chess Players’’ 472). While a clear reference to Eldon’slegendary slowness in his judicial decisions, his need to record a position that has onlyone move signals his myopia. Like many visual prints, the written press counterpoised thepopularity of various sports, games, and rituals to political and governmental struggles.The magazines play out their exaggerated political positions through these elements ofpopular culture, all the while sculpting their own privileged place in that culture.

Like conjoining chess and politics, as metaphor, analogy, satire, or other rhetoricalfigure, the games and events of popular culture were amenable to both analysis anddeployment within periodical culture. The Literary Journal and General Miscellany of Science,Art, History, Politics, Morals, Manners, Fashion, and Amusements was characterized by briefarticles that juxtaposed the various discourses listed in its name. In 1819, it published(silently reprinting from a 1795 volume, based on a 1765 review of A Treatise on the Artof Dancing), ‘‘Logic and Dancing,’’ which argued that ‘‘As logic is termed the art ofthinking, so dancing might be called the art of gestures,’’ and just as logic is a tool forthe arrangement of thought, ‘‘the art of dancing is even more necessary to gesticulation.’’Its function within the ‘‘imitative arts,’’ which is ‘‘alone the province of genius,’’ is to‘‘copy those ideas of gracefulness and harmony, which we borrow from nature’’ (2:44).In a pun-rich response, a correspondent declares the author’s ‘‘jigging in and out withnature, and genius, and art, has defied his logic, or any one’s else, to follow him’’ andgoes on to complain about dancing with ‘‘tortuous attitudes, like performing the alpha-bet, or imitating the diagrams of Euclid, with the body.’’ While these two articles seemin disagreement, their shared, chiastic approach to language—the first using the structuresof logic to define dance, and the second using references to dance to articulate a logic ofgenius—characterize a continuity typical of journals. Similarly, the London, in introducingthe new season for the English Opera House, notes that the ‘‘public look with as muchanxiety for the annual opening of Mr. Mathew’s budget, as for the bringing forward ofMr. Vansittart’s [Chancellor of the Exchequer]; and they are quite as sure of suffering intheir pockets from the one as the other,’’ but Mr. Mathews’s taxes, they pay ‘‘with alltheir hearts, for he is Thalia’s minister;–while Mr. Vansittart, we fear, is but the financierof Melpomene’’ (5:28 [1822] 395). Theater and economics are entwined, until the prior-ity of the opera stage and the political one is obscured, with Mathews now a ‘‘minister,’’and the Lord Chancellor demoted to a ‘‘financier,’’ while both answer to a muse, thoughonly one, Mathews, is aware of being thus circumstanced.

The development of romantic discourses of knowledge, through interrelated develop-ments in science, economics, and other professionalizing discourses, enabled the freneticblending of politics, celebrity, and popular culture that characterizes the periodicals. JohnFoster’s Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance, published in 1820 and reviewed by at least



six journals and referenced more widely, asserted the utility of an informed populaceas consumers of products, producers of national wealth, and stabilizers of religion. TheEdinburgh Monthly Review opens its review by decrying the ‘‘melancholy and degradingfact that, in the actual stage of social existence,…it should still be necessary to argue thequestion as to the benefits of intellectual improvement, and of the general progress ofknowledge among the people’’ (4: 353). Declaring that a ‘‘spirit has gone forth’’ to‘‘rescue the mass of the English people from the state of deplorable ignorance to whichthey had been consigned,’’ the article asserts that ‘‘the progress of knowledge of somekind—be it noxious or salutary—is inevitable; the facilities for imparting it, whether eitheraccident or genius has developed, can never again be closed’’ except for a ‘‘terrible andsweeping irruption of barbarism.’’ The argument of this inevitable advancement is tied tothe economic conditions of knowledge: the ‘‘multiple relations of society, created andsustained by reciprocal wants,…appear to guarantee the advancement of knowledge’’(355). Such inevitability, the review argues, does not insure improvement, for while‘‘Knowledge, as Hobbes remarked long ago, is power,’’ the ‘‘mere development of intel-lect,’’ without a corresponding moral guidance, can lead to ‘‘a malignant agency, so far asconcerns the true happiness of the species’’ (356). The 1803 advent of the EdinburghReview, according to the Oriental Herald (1823), was when ‘‘the literary world first appearto have discovered what they must long have felt unconsciously, namely, the want ofsome means, constantly ready at hand, of putting forth to the public the ideas that mightoccur to them, and the knowledge they might acquire, on a vast variety of subjects.’’These two modalities—the dissemination of ideas that occur to the EdinburghReviewer(s) and the acquisition of knowledge of a vast variety of subjects—functionsynergistically as a kind of machine between fact and speculation, practice and theory, dataand system. In aesthetic terms, the Edinburgh transcribes public sentiment into knowledge:it showed ‘‘the literary world, what it long felt, but did not till then know.’’ This represen-tation of knowledge was a method of constructing an audience as a self-aware and sustain-ing system: ‘‘in less than twelve months after its establishment, not to know what theEdinburgh Review had to say on any subject, which had come before it, ‘argued yourselfunknown’’’ (1:228–9) This structuring of knowledge is connected to the structure of fame,as it becomes the domain of the celebrity, the known. The article ends by opining that‘‘Mr Wordsworth writes on; but having a natural horror of periodical works, is content tobe his own reader.’’ Only Byron has solved the conundrum by imitation: ‘‘the popularityof Lord Byron himself has become almost a dead letter; and after letting the Liberal dropfor lack of his assistance, he has been reduced to the necessity of starting a periodicalfor himself, to be continued occasionally to the end of time, entitled Don Juan!’’ (235).

Alongside a dispersal of general knowledge was a trend toward specialized expertise, thequasi-celebrity of the leaders of a field. Frank Sitwell writes to the Farmer’s Magazine abouthis ‘‘anxious wish that every information, however trifling, relative to the diseases in sheepor cattle, should be communicated to the public for further trial and improvement’’; he‘‘cannot find a better mode of accomplishing it than through the medium of your excel-lent Magazine.’’ The editors append a concluding note of thanks, adding: ‘‘Were gentle-men of experience and observation disposed to favour the public with the results ofexperiments…, it is impossible to calculate the advantages which necessarily would follow.What is now called an art, might then be gradually improved into a science’’ (7:27 [1806]286–7). The logic is that the accumulation of experience, organized through the reproduc-tive potentials of the magazines, transforms observations into statistics and systems.

As purveyors of systemic knowledge, periodicals reflect on other material practicesvying for similar ‘‘scientific knowledge,’’ such as sport and cooking. The London Magazine



carried frequent notices of boxing, the most championed of sports with Peirce Egan’sBoxiana and various celebrities who could trace their associations to the Prince Regentand Lord Byron. From 1819 to 1822 Blackwood’s published nine articles in a series aboutboxing, inspired by Egan (and also titled ‘‘Boxiana’’). No. VIII presents a history of pugi-lism in Britain by dividing it into ‘‘Five Great Schools of Pugilism.’’ The magazine’s sys-tematizing impulse appears in the accretion of schools. The ‘‘First Great School’’ breaksdown further into twelve sub-schools (including ‘‘the Lake School of Pugilism, foundedon the basis of the boxing in ordinary life’’). Each school is also assigned its ideal histo-rian; Jeffrey, for example, is given the ‘‘School of Queen Anne.’’ By classing aspects ofculture into schools, the periodicals offer a specific mode of knowledge productiondependent upon famous individuals. Attributing to Coleridge the dictum ‘‘that a greatpoet must create the taste capable of enjoying his works,’’ the article suggests that thestatement’s ‘‘truth is most apparent in poetry, pugilism, and cookery.’’ In pugilism,Broughton’s ‘‘noble blows were thrown away upon an ungrateful people.’’ Likewise,cookbook writers toil in obscurity, seeing only the ‘‘first symptoms’’ of an ‘‘incipienttaste’’ that will posthumously allow their works to be appreciated ‘‘with such greedygusto.’’ Thus, ‘‘the fame of Mrs Glasse and Mrs McIver did not spring up like a mush-room,’’ and ‘‘the latter died of a broken heart at her contemporaries’ base neglect of hergreat haggis-receipt’’ (8: 61–2). In all these cases, the production of specific systems ofknowledge relies on the creation of an audience, which the periodicals help to establish.Fame functions in materialist genres (boxing and cooking) through the same logic thatproduces literary fame.

The Blackwood’s review of The Cook’s Oracle, by William Kitchiner, a leading gastrono-mer, fits into the magazine’s larger attempt to define English taste, and exemplifies theconnections of fame, systemic knowledge and popular culture. By classing Kitchiner inthe ‘‘Leg of Mutton School of Prose,’’ the reviewer (John Gibson Lockhart) referencesboth the Cockney School attacks and his earlier article, ‘‘The Leg of Mutton School ofPoetry,’’ (June 1821). The ‘‘Poetry’’ article classes Edward Walker, author of Fleurs, intothe newly established school since ‘‘the fashion of the present day’’ is ‘‘to arrange poetsinto schools’’; this is at once ‘‘fashion’’ and the categorizing procedure that constituted acentral mode of representing knowledge. Walker ‘‘wants the noble simplicity of imagina-tion’’ associated with the Lake School, and, for various reasons, fits into no other existingschool, so Lockhart creates a new category. The school’s characteristic quality is writingfawningly to a patron ‘‘who keeps a good table,’’ in the hopes of ‘‘dining five times aweek on hock and venison’’ (9: 346). Walker’s imagination serves bodily desires: ‘‘As hewrites, the ghosts of digested haunches, in all their pristine obesity, arise in his prolificfancy’’ (347). Maga, as Blackwood’s was known to its inner circle, asserts its control inshaping poetic schools within the ‘‘baptismal font of this our Magazine’’ (346; punningemphasis ours). The assessment of Kitchiner (in the later ‘‘Leg of Mutton Schoolof Prose’’) corresponds to Maga’s role in constructing the bases for judging poetic taste.The review’s context in the December, 1821 issue reinforces the connection betweengastronomic judgments and Blackwood’s investment in literary taste. The fictional editor,Christopher North, organizes the issue around the theme of inter-periodical dispute. Theissue’s opening poem, ‘‘Christmas Chit-Chat,’’ casts Maga’s rise as a cure for nationalignorance. It reminisces about Blackwood’s battle with ‘‘A Serpent’’ that had ‘‘charm[ed]the land,’’ the Edinburgh Review. A range of magazines receive ignominious mention: ‘‘Allother periodicals absurd shall look, when out we sally primely dress’d ⁄ In Wisdom’sgreat-coat, richly caped and furr’d… ⁄ And Criticism’s stiff rattan in our hand’’ (10: 500).This boasting emphasizes the magazine’s general efforts to define the boundaries of public



discourse. In the review of Kitchiner’s text, gastronomy functions as another arena inwhich Blackwood’s can wield its power. Immediately preceding the review of The Cook’sOracle is a poem by Blaise Fitztravesty, Esq,’’ the preface of which reinforces the issue’sstructural argument. A dedicatory letter to North, whom Fitztravesty deems ‘‘Prince ofPeriodicals, and Monarch of Magazinists’’ (10: 557), credits North with establishing thefashion of classing writers into schools: ‘‘All the world knows that you have indeliblyfixed the name of The Cockney School upon a certain captious breed of sentimentalistsin the Strand’’ (558). The ‘‘same sort of wit’’ is responsible for ‘‘classing others as belong-ing to the Leg of Mutton School’’ (558).

Such attacks underscore Blackwood’s discomfort with seemingly unregulated engines offame, and illustrate a means of regulating by systematizing the known. While Kitchiner‘‘unit[es] the stomach of a horse to the nobler attributes of man’’ (10: 563) and so can‘‘appreciate with perfect accuracy the merits or defects of any give dish of beef and cab-bage’’—marked as unsophisticated English fare—Lockhart insists that ‘‘to that exquisiteand transcendental ‘gout’’’ Kitchiner is ‘‘an utter stranger’’ (563). With the pun on ‘‘gout’’as both taste and illness, Lockhart simultaneously invokes the finery of French cuisine andthe older model of the aristocratic fashionable invalid. Kitchiner, by contrast, is perceivedas a professional man writing to lower-level workers, all too healthy in the managementof his own palate and fame.3 Lockhart ends the review by simultaneously recognizingKitchiner’s success and condemning those who champion it: ‘‘[I]t has excited many smilesamong the nymphs of the scullery, and even in the more enlightened society of thehousekeeper’s room. To the beau monde of these regions, therefore, we consign it.’’(569). Emblematic of Blackwood’s procedures for a range of discourses, Lockhart’s con-signment of Kitchiner to these regions insists on a calibration of fame, and infamy, againsta standard of taste.

If the cliche that there was no disputing taste circulated widely, it was often used as arhetorical set up for just such disputes, in which the body, notions of pleasure, and aes-thetic judgment were entwined.4 These intersections occur frequently and frantically inthe imagined dinner scenes captured in Noctes Ambrosianae, fictional conversations heldbetween writers of Blackwood’s at Ambrose’s Tavern. In Noctes XII (October 1823), thefigures of Christopher North, Timothy Tickler, the Ettrick Shepherd, and a few otherBlackwood’s regulars, register this interweaving of food and literary culture. The discus-sions of gustatory and literary taste occur simultaneously, calibrated by reference to a hier-archy of famous romantic writers. Just as the Blackwood’s interlocutors outline theirpositions on Romantic poetics, they articulate theories of the aesthetics of eating. Thescene begins with North and Ambrose discussing the night’s menu and moves from DeQuincey’s Confessions (‘‘yon bit Opium Tract’’) to the Lake Poets (‘‘Great yegotists’’)to the ‘‘classical learning’’ of Knight’s Quarterly’s editorial staff (‘‘Are you not Etonians,Wykeamists, Oxonians, and Cantabs?’’). These witticisms ricochet to attacking the Cock-ney School’s Hazlitt, the Hunts, and finally Byron, who ‘‘is driven to degradation’’ bypublishing with the Hunts. Tickler substantiates his claim by quoting a poem fromKnight’s that proclaims ‘‘The Examiner’s grown dull as well as dirty, ⁄ The Indicator’ssick, the Liberal dead— ⁄ I hear its readers were some six-and-thirty’’ (488), a sure mea-sure of periodical irrelevance and lost fame. North chimes in with Byron’s stanza aboutKeats in Don Juan that concludes, ‘‘Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, ⁄ Shouldlet itself be snuff’d out by an article’’ (489). While structurally the dinner bell interruptsthis discussion, the dinner scene reiterates Blackwood’s shaping of literary discourse by‘schooling’ it. Carving the goose, Tickler compares ‘‘vulgar souls who prefer barn-doorfowl to pheasants, mutton to venison, and cider to champagne,’’ to those ‘‘who prefer



curduroy [sic] to cassimere breeches, and the ‘Blue and Yellow’ to green-gowned Maga’’(491), that is the Whig Edinburgh to the Tory Blackwood’s. Taste for food shifts to tastefor clothing, and to the ‘‘clothing’’ of the Edinburgh and Blackwood’s. Returning predict-ably to the Cockney School, North asks Tickler, ‘‘what sort of an eater do you supposeBarry Cornwall?’’ The response paints the typical portrait of a Cockney as effete: ‘‘Themerry-thought of a chick—three teaspoonfuls of peas, the eighth part of a French roll, asprig of cauliflower, and an almost imperceptible dew of parsley and butter’’ (491). Corn-wall’s fare pales in comparison to the massive goose (‘‘a ten-pounder’’ [490]) that theNoctes members devour. Reinforcing the difference in taste between Blackwood’s and theCockney School, the continual gorging contrasts with the description of ethereal eating.5

Like food, fashion served as a linking discourse, a distinct formation but one malleableenough to be connected analogically to a wide variety of institutions and discourseswithin the press. If the rituals of monarchy and seasonal dress were the most overtly citedfeatures of fashion, the term wound its way into an array of topics (Fig. 1). To conclude,we would like to glimpse briefly at one of the odder contraptions of fashion, thevelocipede. In March 1819, in one of his long journal letters to his brother George, Keatswrites of the latest ‘‘nothing of the day’’ (205): the velocipede, a predecessor of themodern bicycle (Fig. 2). Its success in England owed to a veteran coach-maker, DenisJohnson, who patented his version in December 1818. By the following spring, Johnstonwas producing twenty velocipedes per week (Herlihy 35). Like his observation that ‘‘Wewith our bodily eyes see but the fashion and Manners of one country for one age—andthen we die’’ (Keats 174), Keats’s description of the velocipede captures the immediacyand transience of fashion. As people used the strange machine, periodical writers helpedto shape the perception of that fashion. The Gentleman’s Magazine writes of its potential

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1790–1800 1800–1810 1810–1820 1820–1830

Ratio of "fashion" to total articles

Ration of "fashion" to total fiction/poetry

Decade Total articles Articles w/ "fashion" in title

Total fiction andpoetry

Fiction/poetry with "fashion" in title

1790–1800 117905 170 12702 22 1800–1810 131235 799 16030 48 1810–1820 150443 856 16533 63 1820–1830 209955 984 22642 35

Fig. 1. In the British Periodical Database, the word fashion, and its variants ‘‘fashionable’’ and ‘‘fashions,’’ occurredin the title of articles 2669 (although this includes some repetition when journals republished the works of others).Nonetheless, as this chart suggests, the term had a heyday from 1800 to 1820 for both the articles and the poetryand fiction of the journals. Based on searches of the Chadwick Healey British Periodicals Database; this database isnot complete, but extensive enough to suggest trends.



‘‘benefit’’ to ‘‘Tradesmen, who go out to work at distances in the country,’’ ‘‘gentleman’sservants who go on messages and errands,’’ to police in ‘‘pursuit of thieves,’’ and ‘‘espe-cially in families which cannot afford to keep horses.’’ Yet despite the writer’s magnani-mous aims, he feels compelled to deny any role in the production of fashion; ‘‘[though] Iappear as a friend or puffer of the Inventor, or Patentee;… I solemnly assure you I haveno acquaintance with either; or any other feeling than that of public bearing’’ (89: 422–3). Other accounts of the velocipede tended toward the satirical register. In an earliernotice, The Gentleman’s Magazine observed that ‘‘it contributes to the amusement of pas-sengers in the streets in the shape of caricatures in the print-shops’’ (271). Representationsof the machine, as opposed to the machine itself, afford ‘‘amusement.’’ A slew of printsdocumented the velocipede’s brief summer of fame. These include multiple prints depict-ing the Duke of York riding his dandy-horse,6 three of the Regent, accompanied bycurrent mistress, on an improvised tandem velocipede,7 and several mocking the device’simpracticality,8 its adoption by effete dandies,9 and the impropriety of female riders.10 Bythe fall, the prints and the machines no longer amused, and the velocipede largely disap-peared. The Monthly Magazine, which in March printed a description of Johnson’s patent,by November notes that ‘‘it has been found by experience, that the peculiar actionattending its frequent use, causes ruptures and inflammations of certain muscles of thethighs and legs; and it has in consequence been laid aside’’ (48: 289).

Fig. 2. ‘‘Johnson’s Pedestrian Hobby-Horse Riding School.’’ The velocipede was invented in 1818 by Karl von Drais,and in 1819 improved by Denis Johnson, who held exhibitions such as this one, to help increase its popularity.Reproduced with permission from The Science Museum, London.



In the ‘‘Cockney School No. VI,’’ Blackwood’s unites the fashion of popular culturewith literary taste through the velocipede. Ostensibly reviewing Leigh Hunt’s volume,Foliage, and meanwhile announcing Hunt’s death, Lockhart concludes by lambasting the‘‘posthumous’’ volume’s several sonnets, including three addressed to Keats. Lockhartidentifies Hunt’s sonnet-writing practices as constitutive of Cockney poetics: ‘‘This fash-ion of firing off sonnets at each other was prevalent in the metropolis a short time sinceamong the bardlings.’’ Lockhart dismisses Cockney poetry precisely by aligning it withfashion and its temporary fads and trends. He suggests that the sonnet-writing trend ‘‘waseven more annoying than the detonating balls’’ (a small firework popular a few yearsbefore).11 Lockhart traces the disappearance of such sonnets to the ‘‘death’’ of Hunt, whoat the time ‘‘was at the top of the fashion.’’ Since Hunt’s death occurs only in Black-wood’s, this formulation implies that Maga claims responsibility for quashing ‘‘nuisances ofthis kind.’’ But total control escapes its grasp: ‘‘sometimes even yet a stray sonneteer is tobe found cantering along on his velocipede’’ (6: 76). By October 1819, the velocipedehad already fallen out of fashion, so the practice of Cockney sonnet-writing appearsequally outmoded. The magazine simultaneously registers and produces what constitutesfashionable tastes, tastes that derive from the play of celebrity and knowledge.

Short Biographies

Brian Rejack recently completed his PhD at Vanderbilt University, where he is currentlyLecturer in English. His dissertation, Gluttons and Gourmands: British Romanticism and theAesthetics of Gastronomy, explores, in part, the contributions of the periodical industry tothe discourse of gastronomy and the use that periodicals made of gastronomy in theirexplorations and exploitations of taste; small portions of the dissertation have been incor-porated into this article. Mark Schoenfield, Associate Professor at Vanderbilt, is the authorof The Professional Wordsworth: Law, Literature, and the Poet’s Contract (Georgia, 1996) andBritish Periodicals and Romantic Identity: The ‘‘Literary Lower Empire’’ (Palgrave, 2009).

Notes

* Correspondence: Department of English, Benson 327, Nashville, TN 37235, USA. E-mail: [email protected].

1 Kim Wheatley has demonstrated how this competition, inflected by politics, transmogrified into a ‘‘paranoidrhetoric’’ that pervaded periodical reviewing. Such paranoia was exacerbated by anonymous publication, and onoccasion, erupted in genuine violence, such as when disputes over tone and politics resulted in the deaths of editorsJohn Scott and Alexander Boswell at the hands of journalistic rivals in duels (on Scott’s death, see Parker 21–27; onBoswell’s dual with Stuart, see Stuart, Trial of James Stuart).2 Hazlitt, writing for the Edinburgh, had declared that his time is a ‘‘Critical age,’’ and that ‘‘periodical criticism isfavourable–to periodical criticism’’ (ER 16: 212). Charles Mahoney argues that, for Hazlitt, this self-validation both‘‘suits’’ and ‘‘advances’’ the ‘‘spirit of the times’’ (‘‘Periodical Indigestion: Hazlitt’s Unpalatable Politics’’).3 Denise Gigante situates Kitchiner’s work—and, specifically how he embraces moderation and health in hisversion of gourmandism—alongside the excessive consumption emblematized by George IV (166–8).4 For an overview of recent work on food, taste and Romanticism, see Samantha Webb’s ‘‘Diet Studies in theRomantic Period.’’5 The monthly London Magazine dinners, actual meals hosted by editor John Taylor, serve as a corollary to theBlackwood’s imaginary meals. Regular guests included Charles Lamb, John Clare, William Hazlitt, John HamiltonReynolds, and Barry Cornwall, who presumably ate more than ‘‘three tea-spoonfulls of peas.’’ In his memoir ofLamb, Cornwall recalls the ‘‘excellent dinners’’ having the express purpose of arranging matters for the welfare ofthe magazine. He recognizes that not much business happened, but the dinners accomplished another goal: ‘‘Thehearts of the contributors were opened, and with the expansion of the heart the intellect widened also… All therestraints and fences of authorship were cast off, and the natural human being was disclosed’’ (187). The conviviality



created by the dinners strips away the individual egotism of each author, and in the process, the dinner makes possi-ble collective authorship under the designation of the magazine.6 ‘‘Making Most of £10,000 pen ann. By Saving Travelling Expences’’ and ‘‘Economy—or a Duke of Ten Thou-sand, Taking a Monthly Journey’’7 ‘‘A P****e, Driving his Hobby, in Herdford!!!’’, ‘‘Accidents in High Life or, Royal Hobby’s broke down! Dedi-cated to the Society for the Suppression of Vice’’ and ‘‘R***L Hobby’s!!!’’8 ‘‘The Pedestrian Hobbies, or the Difference in Going Up and Down Hill’’9 ‘‘The Hobby Horse Dealer’’ and ‘‘Modern Pegasus, or Dandy Hobbies in Full Speed’’10 ‘‘The Female Race! or Dandy Chargers Running into Maidenhead!’’11 In late 1814, ‘‘detonating balls’’ caused a minor stir when a debate arose over whether they counted as ‘‘fire-works,’’ which were illegal. The New Monthly Magazine, Edinburgh Annual Register, and Monthly Magazine publishletters regarding the debate.

Works Cited

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA:Harvard UP, 1984.

Cornwall, Barry. Charles Lamb: A Memoir. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1866.Flynn, Philip. ‘Beginning Blackwood’s : The Right Mix of Dulce and Utile’. Victorian Periodicals Review 39:2(2006):

136–57.Gigante, Denise. Taste: A Literary History. New Haven: Yale, 2005.Goldsmith, Jason. ‘Celebrity and the Spectacle of Nation’. Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–1850. Ed. Tom

Mole. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 21–40.Hazlitt, William. Spirit of the Age; Or, Contemporary Portraits. London: Colburn, 1825.——. On Different Sorts of Fame 1816. The Round Table. Ed. W. Carew Hazlitt. London: Bell and Daldy, 1871,

132–9.——. Table Talk, or Original Essays on Men and Manners. Collected Works of William Hazlitt. Eds. A.R. Waller,

and Arnold Glover. London: J.M. Dent, 1903. 1821–2.Herlihy, David. Bicycle: The History. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004.Kitchiner, William. The Cook’s Oracle; Containing Receipts for Plain Cookery on the Most Economical Plan for Private

Families: also the Art of Composing the Most Simple, and Most Highly Finished Broths, Gravies, Soups, Sauces, StoreSauces, and Flavouring Essences: The Quantity of Each Article is Accurately Stated by Weight and Measure; the WholeBeing the Result of Actual Experiments Instituted in the Kitchen of a Physician, 4th ed. London: A. Constable & Co.,1822.

Keats, John. Selected Letters of John Keats. 2nd ed. Ed. Robert Gittings and Jon Mee. New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2002.

Klancher, Jon. The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.Lucas, E. V. The Life of Charles Lamb. 1905. London: Methuen, 1907.Mahoney, Charles. ‘Periodical Indigestion: Hazlitt’s Unpalatable Politics’. Romanticism and Conspiracy. Ed. O. Wang.

Romantic Circles Praxis Series August, 1997. 31 Mar. 2010 <http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis>.Manning, Peter. ‘Detaching Lamb’s Thoughts’. Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism, 25 (2002) 137–46.MacDonogh, Felix. The Hermit in London; or, Sketches of English Manners. London: Colburn, 1819.Mole, Thomas. Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy. New York: Palgrave,

2007.Parker, Mark. Literary Magazines and British Romanticism. New York: Cambridge UP, 2000.Piper, Andrew. Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age. Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 2009.Schoenfield, Mark. British Periodicals and Romantic Identity: The ‘Literary Lower Empire’. New York: Palgrave, 2009.Stuart, James. Trial of James Stuart for the Murder of Sir Alexander Boswell. Edinburgh: Dick and Co., 1822.Webb, Samantha. ‘Diet Studies in the Romantic Period’. Literature Compass 6:5 (2009) 989–96.Wheatley, Kim. Shelley and His Readers: Beyond Paranoid Politics. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press,

1999.



popular magazines, popular culture: gradations of celebrity in the romantic period

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