New Publications
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NEW PUBLICATIONS.
Blackwood1 for August has been received from the American publishers, Leonard Scott & Co.2 It is an interesting number. The first article is a review of Gladstone's3 "Homer and the Homeric Age." It is an able and rather severe critique, and concluded with a recommendation to the the learned Member for the University of Oxford not to transfer those talents which render him so eminent in the House of Commons, to a chair of philosophy and historical criticism. Papers follow on the Circulation of the Blood;" on White's "Eighteen Centuries;" on "London Exhibitions and London Critics." Bulwer Lytton's4 novel—"What will he do with it?" is continued. Perhaps the most entertaining article, to our taste, is that entitled the "Byways of Literature." We extract from it a graphic paragraph concerning the "Answers to Correspondence," which in English and American cheap weekly papers forms such a peculiar feature:
One cannot but admire and wonder at the aspect of this diffusion of intelligence which is made visible by the lively flutter of pens and flow of correspondence excited by our little group of Magazines for the people; each of these periodicals has some score or two of letters to answer, and devotes its last page to that interesting necessity. The questions asked are of every possible descriptions, from homely applications for recipes up to delicate petitions for advice, all of which, or almost all of which, the patient and benign oracle amiably replies to. We are bound to confess that a large amount of these interrogatories refer to love-matters, in which the Penny Press seems an infallible referee; but there is not lack of consultations less sentimental. Many anxious correspondents beg to know what Mr. Editor thinks of their handwriting? Some are curious in pronunciation—many concerned about etiquette—there are applications about law and applications about business—there are questions in history and in natural history—and a miscellaneous crowd besiege the secret and universal adviser, desiring to know how they are to cure their wants, to make their hair curl, to manufacture ink, and to use pomade divine! Newer was oracle so overwhelmed; and where the proprietors of these periodicals find persons of information so universal, seems little short of miraculous. Good advice is not such a rare commodity—most people dispense that con amore; but the man who shall write you a legal opinion one moment, tell you the date of Pliny's death the next, and wind up by particular instructions about the care of your complexion, must be indeed worthy of his confidential position. Talk of the admirable Crichton! half-a-dozen Crichtons much more admirable than he must be at this present writing, benignly pouring forth from their oceans of knowledge a hundred little streams of personal information to make glad the heart of Amelia and Eliza, David Copperfield and Coriolanus, A. B. and Y. Z., and all the other letters of the alphabet in the correspondence columns of the Penny Press.
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. William Gladstone (1809–1898) was a British writer and future Prime Minister. [back]
4. 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]