Literary Gossip
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LITERARY GOSSIP.—
We learn that the New Boston Magazine so long in contemplation, will appear on the 1st of November next. It is to be called “The Atlantic Monthly.”1 The name of the editor has not been made public; but it is understood that Mr. Phillips, the senior member of the firm of Phillips, Sampson & Co., who are to publish the magazine, will assume that post. A very attractive list of contributors is presented, among whom are Prescott,2 Emerson,3 Hawthorne,4 Motley,5 Longfellow,6 Lowell,7 Whittier,8 Edmund Quincy,9 Mrs. Stowe,10 Mrs. Gaskell,11 Ruffini12 and Shirley Brooke.13
MR. THACKERAY’S NEW NOVEL.—The Southern Literary Messenger, in some comments on a work upon which Mr. Thackeray,14 it is understood, is engaged, entitled “The Virginian,” says it has reason to believe that this work will have no reference to the Virginia of our day, which Mr. Thackeray saw in part, on both his visits to America, but that it will be a sequel to the History of Colonel Edmond, in which the two sons of that personage will be represented as involved in the Revolutionary struggle, one a patriot and the other a loyalist. “Such a story,” observes the Messenger, “would possess a vivid interest for readers in the United States, while, from the abundant sources of information at the author’s command in the State Paper office and the British Museum, as to the social aspects of the Virginia Colony, we should have a right to look for a picture of the grand old days of our grandfathers, of rare fidelity and value.”
Notes:
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2. William Hickling Prescott (1796–1859) was an early American scientific historian. [back]
3. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) was an American poet and transcendentalist. [back]
4. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) was an American novelist and short story writer. He is the author of the novels The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851), among many other works. Hawthorne joined Brook Farm, a transcendentalist and utopian community in the early 1840s, and in 1842 he married the illustrator and writer Sophia Peabody (1809#8211;1871). [back]
5. John Lothrop Motley (1814–1877) was a historian and diplomat best known for his histories of the Netherlands. [back]
6. Henry W. Longfellow (1807–1882) was an American educator and notable poet known for his 1855 work The Song of Hiawatha and the 1860 poem "Paul Revere's Ride." For more information, see Julie A. Rechel-White, "Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (1807–1882)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
7. James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) was a fireside poet, group of American poets who rivaled the British poets of the same period. [back]
8. John Greenleaf Whitttier (1807–1892), best known for his advocacy in the abolition of slavery in the United States, was also a fireside poet. [back]
9. Edmund Qunicy V (1808–1877) was an American abolitionist editor and author. [back]
10. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) is best known for Uncle Tom's Cabin which was published in 1852. [back]
11. 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]
12. Giovanni Ruffini (1807–1881) was an Italian writer. [back]
13. Shirley Brooke (1816–1874) was an English editor and novelist. [back]
14. William Thackeray (1811–1863) was an English satirical author and illustrator. Whitman summarized his assessment of Thackery when asked by Horace Traubel late in life as follows: "I have read Vanity Fair and liked it: it seemed to me a considerable story of its kind—to have its own peculiar value. But Thackeray as a whole did not cast his sinker very deep though he's none the worse for that" (With Walt Whitman in Camden, Monday, October 29, 1888). [back]