The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture

Conclusion: What Happened Next

Conclusion What Happened Next If the magazine of the early republic allowed for the imagination of a virtual salon, of the ongoing, serial conversations of Jürgen Habermas’s ideal public sphere, several factors in the early decades of the nineteenth century contributed to make the early American magazine and its model of periodical citizenship seem increasingly antiquated. If the tumultuous birth of the nation was the most tremendous force shaping the first generations of the early republic, by the antebellum period, and especially after the Crash of 1837, the dramatically changing urban landscape was the engine transforming everyday life for millions of Americans. It is thus not surprising that the magazine imagined by this country’s first century of editors as offering a model for the literary and political foundations of the new nation increasingly became reimagined after 1810 as a refuge from the realities of nation-building—the “retreat from history into the sanctuary of literary or aesthetic consciousness.”1 The virtual salon was no longer the place in which the editor could organize the best and brightest the nation had to offer to do the vital work of steering the ship of state, as early republican periodical editors and serial authors from Webster to Dennie had imagined. It was now a space apart from the fray. One sees this change most clearly in the understated—indeed, when compared to their predecessors, incredibly diminished—terms by which new magazines announced themselves in the 1820s. Samuel L. Knapp, for example, claims in defense of his new Boston Monthly Magazine (1825) only that “we are a reading people, and must have a large supply of periodical literature for the demands of the market.”2 The following year, the Album and Ladies’ Weekly Gazette cites its “entire new type, with new and appropriate embellishments” and its collection of “many of the most esteemed [foreign] literary and scientific journals” to recommend it to the public’s attention.3 And yet, we must not mistake this subdued tone for fatalism or despair. In fact, the diminished rhetorical claims for the magazine are voiced at a time when magazines are, for the first time, becoming profitable. The Boston Monthly Magazine and the Album and Ladies’ Weekly Gazette have reason to be much more optimistic about their prospects than were their ancestors of the 1780s and 90s. This is not to say that there were no meaningful continuities between the early American magazine and the “golden age” periodical of the nineteenth century. Like the pioneering editors and authors of the early republic, many popular magazines in the nineteenth century would promote an interactive space through the serialization of sensational fiction, inviting readers to participate in the process of guessing at how the heroine would extricate herself from the cliffhanger, in imagining an intimate relationship with the authors themselves, or in at least ceremonially sharing with the editor the work of passing judgment on the relative merits of the different authors and stories. This was especially true for the midcentury story papers such as the New York Ledger, edited by Robert Bonner. But the differences were ultimately more meaningful than the continuities. Unlike the early American magazine, which explicitly invited readers to themselves become authors,Bonner—much like the more openly elite editors of the antebellum monthlies against which he liked to position himself—explicitly does not invite his readers to join his stable of professional and highly paid authors. This fact erupts occasionally in the pages of the Ledger, as when Fanny Fern from time to time ridicules readers who plead with her to share her limelight: “I will not undertake to tell, lest I should not be believed, how many letters I receive a month from ‘literary aspirants,’ who lack the first essentials of preparation for the employment they desire.”4 Here, Fern calls out for especial ridicule one young aspirant who is “tired of sewing for a living , and wants to write,” who asks Fern “to remember that I once struggled myself.”Indeed, Fern’s success story (culminating in the well-publicized terms of her contract with Bonner) was central to her celebrity. But equally central, as her response to her correspondent suggests, was the notion that this story was not one open to imitation. Nowhere in the pages of the Ledger do Fern or Bonner invite readers to become authors or suggest in any way that the boundaries between the two are permeable. Readers are invited to write in, to ask for...