Fraser's
Magazine was a general interest magazine published in
London in the 19th century. It began in 1830 as
"Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country". A new series
began in 1870. In 1882, it was succeeded by Longman's
Magazine.
It was
founded by Hugh Fraser and William Maginn in 1830 and
loosely directed by Maginn (and later Francis Mahony)
under the name Oliver Yorke until about 1840. It
circulated until 1882.
In its early years the publisher James Fraser (no
relation to Hugh) played a role in soliciting
contributors and preparing the magazine for the press.
After James Fraser's death in 1841 the magazine was
acquired by George William Nickisson, and in 1847 by
John William Parker. Its last notable editor was James
Anthony Froude (1860–1874).
Sharing
the Tory politics of Blackwood's Magazine, Fraser's
Magazine for Town and Country was founded in 1830 by
Hugh Fraser and William Maginn, and edited by the latter
until his death in 1842. Like the Athenaeum, Fraser's
had no direct links with a publishing house and was
aimed a general middle-class audience. Establishing a
reputation for its wit and confrontational style, it
attacked the laissez-faire policies of the Whig
government and was outspoken in support of the Tory
paternalist campaign for factory reform. It was an
important channel of German thought, and published
Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus in 1833-34. Other
contributors included William Thackeray, who contributed
a series of critical articles on art, 'Strictures on
Pictures', during 1839-1845, and Charles Kingsley, whose
novel, Yeast, was published in serial form during 1848.
The Christian Socialist, J. W. Parker, became editor in
1847. Ruskin 's series of essays on political economy,
Munera Pulveris, began publication in 1862, but was
terminated because of Ruskin's opposition to current
economic theory, just as Unto This Last had been brought
to an abrupt end by the Cornhill Magazine in 1860. (See
also Graham, English Literary Periodicals, Gross, Rise
and Fall of the Man of Letters, Houghton, Wellesley
Index to Victorian Periodicals, Thrall, Rebellious
Frasers.)
You can
download copies of this magazine from the Internet
archive at:
https://archive.org/search.php?query=fraser%27s%20magazine%20AND%20mediatype%3Atexts&page=1
1830-1882: HathiTrust has
volumes 1-24, 26-48, and 50-80 of the first series, and
1-26 of the second series. Access to volumes
published after 1874 may be restricted outside the
United States. See below for the volumes not in this
set.
1841:
Google Books has
volume 24 of the first series, covering July-December
1841.
1842: Google Books has
volume 25 of the first series, covering January-June
1842.
1854: Google Books has
volume 49 of the first series, covering January-June
1854.
You can
read the first volume where they outline their hopes and
intentions for the magazine at:
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951000742898r;view=1up;seq=16
Here is a
wee story from one of the issues...
ADAM
MELDRUM was a man who could not have been bred out of
Scotland. In almost every other country the common
people are illiterate: they have no familiarity even
with the literature of their own country. Many copies of
the popular works published in England during the
seventeenth century are still to be met with; but the
books printed in Scotland at that time have been read
out of existence.
Since my boyhood I have made acquaintance, more or less
intimate, with many of the old royal or baronial burghs
that are planted along the eastern seaboard, and in each
of them I have found at least one man of the artisan
class wl\o was in the best sense of the word a learned
man—a man with a true instinct for, and an absolute
devotion to, science or letters or philosophy. One was a
watchmaker, who busked the most seductive flies, and
knew every salmon cast in the river; another, who acted
as letter-carrier to the community, was learned in the
ecclesiastical controversies of the early Church, and in
the precise distinctions between the king 'de facto’ and
the king de jure; there was a tailor who was versed in
moths and butterflies, and a shoemaker who had formed an
exquisite collection of the rarer sea-weeds. In like
manner, Adam Meldrum, who in his working hours mended
old boats, was the naturalist of Peelboro’, and knew by
heart the plays of Shakespeare and the 'Pseudodoxia
Epidemica’ of Sir Thomas Browne.
This mender of old boats, with the strange fire in his
eyes, was rather a puzzle to the worthies of Peelboro’.
'Uncle Ned,’ or 'Daddy Longlegs’ the 'character’ of a
Scotch burgh has always a number of apparently
irrelevant aliases: by what process of transmutation
Adam Meldrum became 'Uncle Ned’ or 'Daddy Longlegs’ it
is needless to conjecture—was considered mad by some,
uncanny by others. The boys sometimes called him 'the
warlock,’ which, being translated, means 'the male
witch.’ If we were to call him one of the primitive
saints of science—for science, as well as religion, has
its saints—we might, I think, be nearer the mark. The
vision and faculty divine is not the exclusive
possession of the maker of rhymes. Adam loved nature as
the poet loves her. His heart beat when he discovered a
rare plant or a rare bird, as the lover’s beats in the
presence of his mistress. The earth he trod was
consecrated ground, and the plants, the trees, the
birds, the sea, the stars, spoke to him of an
incalculable beneficence.
There is, therefore, some other hand that twines the
thread of life than that of nature; our ends arc as
obscure as our beginnings; the line of our days is drawn
by night, and the various effects thereon by a pencil
that is invisible; whereof, though we confess our
ignorance, I am sure that we do not err if we say it is
the hand of God.
This, more or less formulated, was the creed at which
Adam had arrived. He did not belong to any of the
ecclesiastical factions which flourished in Peelboro’;
he had worked out his own conclusions about life, death,
and immortality; yet he had reached what, after all is
said that can be said, is truly the divinest divinity.
That vague something which philosophers call the ‘Ego’
'had become a quite subordinate consideration with Adam.
It was merged in a wider life. He was utterly unselfish.
An old comrade who had gone to the south and died there,
had left his books to Adam. One morning a parcel arrived
by the London smack. It had been despatched from the
metropolis three weeks before, but in the year One they
thought little of three weeks. Uncle Ned valued it
beyond silver and gold. To him, indeed, it was the true
El Dorado. It contained the plays of Shakespeare, the
works of Sir Thomas Browne, Walton’s ‘Angler,’ White’s 'Selbome,’
George Edwards’ 'Book of Birds,’ and a few others, all
of which were duly placed on the shelf beside the
box-bed in the wall. They grew into his life as the sea
and the stars had grown. They represented to him in the
moral and intellectual world that high and noble order
which he had already discerned in the physical.
Such a man—strange as it may sound to outsiders—was
bound to be happy. His surroundings were mean and
homely; he was very poor. He had none of the luxuries of
life; a crust of 6tale bread and a cup of cold water
from the spring were the dainties to which he was used.
But while he was munching his dry crust he was examining
with almost passionate rapture the wing-feather of some
new or rare bird which he had captured. A stale
crust?—or the nectar and ambrosia of the gods? What did
it matter when the whole ideal volume of science on
which to feast was being opened to him. To such men life
is a pure flame, and they live by an invisible sun
within them.
Science seeks for the unity without us, as religion
seeks for the unity within us. Nothing is so hateful to
science as isolation: nothing so hateful to religion.
For isolation is selfishness, and selfishness at bottom
is confusion and misery. Preachers have waxed pathetic
upon the loneliness of a great soul; a truly great soul
is never lonely. It has infinite relationships. Self
ceases to be engrossing. The imperious instincts of the
individual consciousness are subdued. It loses itself
(as Christianity affirms) in Christ, or (as science
affirms) in the immutable and unshaken order of the
universe.
To Adam, as I have said, nature was simply the
expression of that complaisant activity of which the sea
was one aspect, and the Old Testament another, and
Shakespeare another, and a rare fern and the skilful
mechanism of a sea-bird’s wing another and another.
Throughout the whole of a universe in which each part
was thus clearly related to the rest, his imagination
roamed with a freshness of wonder that never diminished;
each dawn and each sunset touched him with a new joy.
‘Te veniente die, te descendente canebat.’ They were all
incidents in the sure silent triumphal march of the
divine order. And while such belief filled his life with
an ideal rapture, it took away the sting from death.
Death could only bring him a step closer—to What?—to the
heart of this divine and glorious Order,—the Father of
Lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of
turning.
I fancy this is what is sometimes called
transcendentalism,—well, it is the only scrap of
transcendentalism that you will find in this book. But
as Uncle Ned was really the ideal or transcendental
element in the hard and prosaic life of the canny
Peelboro’ burghers, it was expedient that I should try
to indicate its main characteristic. That I have now
done; and for the rest it will be enough to add that
this long gaunt bony mender of old boats was—was—(may I
take the liberty, Mr. Professor?) a village x—y of the
year One. The colourless brilliancy of the great
teacher's style, the easy facility with which the drop
of light forms itself into a perfect sphere as it falls
from his pen, belong indeed to a consummate master of
the art of expression, which Adam of course was not; but
the mental lucidity, justice, and balance, as well as
the reserve of power, and the Shakespearian gaiety of
touch, which made the old man one of the most delightful
companions in the world, were essentially Heleian.
To have asserted that the crazy bird-fancier was the one
really notable man in the town would have utterly
shocked the susceptibilities of Peelboro’, where indeed
the assertion that he was not mad as a hatter or a March
hare would have been received with derision and
incredulity. The Doctor was perhaps the only man in the
place who did him full justice; but the Doctor’s jests,
like his sermons, went over the heads of his hearers.
When he told the councillors of the burgh on an occasion
of civic festivity that a bailie is made once a year,
but a poet or a naturalist only once in many years, he
took the precaution to veil the compliment in the
obscurity of a learned language. (‘Consoles fiunt
quotannis, et novi proconsules, Solus aut rex aut poeta
non quotannis nascitur’). So no harm was done: on the
contrary, the Doctor’s acquaintance with the tongues of
antiquity was looked upon as a credit to the town.
Adam, I may add, was not a native of the burgh—he
belonged to the fertile lowlands of Moray; but he had
been little more than a lad when he migrated to Buchan.
The great sorrow of his life had driven him away from
his own people; but of it and of them he never spoke;
and he had long ago taken root upon the bleak and stormy
headland where Peelboro’ was built. For many years he
had lived a solitary life—until ‘little Alister’ had
been thrown upon his hands, 'little Alister’ now
two-and-twenty years old, six feet one in his stockings,
and (in spite of his six feet) in love over head and
ears with Eppie Holdfast ol Fontainbleau. |