Magazine Notices
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MAGAZINE NOTICES.
Blackwood’s Magazine,1 for July, New York, L. Scott & Co.2 79 Fulton street.
We have missed in Maga for some months her bold, unwavering, talented advocacy of her somewhat unpopular political views; but in every other respect she continues to hold her own in the first ranks of the periodical literature of the age. Sir E.B. Lytton’s3 new novel, “What will he do with it?” is continued, and we get some inkling at least of what the author himself intends to do, viz., to make his characters and their adventures subservient to the advocacy of his political opinions. The number also contains an interesting article on Currer Bell, 4 in which Mrs. Gaskell5 is severely taken to task for the amount of gossip and personal slander which disfigure her biographical work. The remaining articles are entitled:—New Seaside Studies; Charles the V; Scenes of Clerical Life; Life of Sir Charles J. Napier; and Representation of the Colonies.
The Knickerbocker,6 for August, New York, Samuel Hueston, 348 Broadway. This number opens by a very interesting description of “An Eastern Betrothal.” From thence to the Editor’s Table Department, which closes the volume, the unflagging interest of the reader will be demanded by its contents. We are glad to observe, appended to a notice of Little Dorrit, a promise on the part of the editor, of a critique from one of the first scholars in the country, on the works and genius of Charles Dickens,7 who, between extravagant eulogy and undue depreciation, had not yet had full justice done him by the literary magazines.
Notes:
1. Blackwood's Magazine, or Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, was a monthly magazine created by William Blackwood in 1817. Though it was published in Scotland it quickly attracted a wide readership in Great Britain and the U.S., especially for its fiction offerings. For more information, see David Finkelstein, The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Age? (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). [back]
2. Leonard Scott & Co. was a New York publishing company created by Leonard Scott (1810–1895) that focused on reprinting British magazines. [back]
3. Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873), was an English writer and politician. His novel The Caxtons: A Family Picture (1849) was a breakout hit at the time. Whitman once accused Lytton of plagiarizing a book titled Zicci, stating it was the exact same as the novel Zanoni. Both novels, however, were written by Lytton. Whitman described the controversy in a number of Aurora editorials. See "The Great Bamboozle!—A Plot Discovered!" (March 28, 1842), and "More Humbug" (April 4, 1842). [back]
4. Currer Bell is the pen name for English writer Charlotte Bronte (1812–1870). [back]
5. Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810–1865), an English author best known for her novels North and South and Wives and Daughters as well as her biography of Charlotte Brontё. [back]
6. \The Knickerbocker was a New York literary magazine established in 1833 by Charles Fenno Hoffman (1806–1884). [back]
7. Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was a famous English novelist, whose impact on anglophone culture during the Victorian age can hardly be overestimated. Whitman was an avid Dickens reader and his own fiction shows a debt to "Boz" that Whitman himself readily acknowledged in his early journalism. For more information, see Vickie L. Taft, "Dickens, Charles (1812–1870)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]