Tait's Edinburgh Magazine in the 1830s: Dialogues on Gender, Class, and Reform

Tait's Edinburgh Magazine was founded in 1832, just one month before the passage of the first Reform Bill. In his 1832 prospectus for the magazine, William Tait writes, "on the eve of great events, it has appeared to us not only desirable, but necessary, to provide an organ or vehicle through which the voice of a renovated people may be heard" (qtd. in Houghton 3:476). Tait emphasized that his magazine represented "no party but that of the country" and as such spoke for the "good of THE PEOPLE" (476). By claiming to speak for "the people," Tait's Edinburgh Magazine was attempting to market its reformist philosophy to a broad base of mid-dle-class and artisan-class readers with diverse regional affiliations. With this marketing strategy, Tait's also aimed to promote a sense of national unity at a time when class interests were becoming increasingly divided.

One of the ways the magazine attempted to express the views of "the people" was by facilitating dialogue between middle-class and artisanclass reformers. Tait's attempted to fulfill this goal by publishing the contributions of artisans alongside those of middle-class writers. By creating a dialogic space, the editors of Tait's hoped to minimize conflicts and contradictions between middle-class and working-class reform movements. They also hoped to improve the self-culture of readers of both classes by providing guidelines for more class-sensitive leisure time reading. In this way, Tait's would provide a form of literary representation to artisan-class readers, who had been denied political representation by the first Reform Bill.

Just as important as Tait's explicitly stated commitment to promoting dialogue between class interests was its implicit goal of facilitating a political and literary discourse that was inclusive of both male and female perspectives. From 1834 to 1846, Tait's was edited by a woman, Christian Isobel Johnstone (1781–1857), who, in collaboration with William Tait, gradually changed the magazine's contents to incorporate women's points of view. Consequently, debates over social issues, especially class conflict, often implicitly addressed the role of gender in determining literary authority. Must the reformist writer, the facilitator of dialogue between class interests, always be male? Or was the woman writer, with her attention to the need for self-culture among readers of all classes, an appropriate national instructor in a time of crisis? These questions form the core of a debate that was conducted between the lines of the maga-zine's more explicit dialogue over class politics.

In this essay, I will first examine how Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, under the editorship of Christian Johnstone, attempted to facilitate a dialogue between middle-class and artisan-class writers and readers during the 1830s. In the second part of the essay, I will explore the ways dialogues on class and reform in Tait's were complicated by issues of gender and literary authority. Through an analysis of the literary criticism published in Tait's, I will demonstrate how the magazine aimed to construct a national literature of reform that would "solve" conflicts and inequalities in the Victorian class and gender system. As I will demonstrate, this goal was to some extent undermined by the reappearance of gender and class as markers of difference and inequality in dialogues over social reform. Consequently, Tait's demonstrates the necessity of communication across boundaries of class and gender, while at the same time highlighting factors that prevent the equal participation of women and artisan-class writers in public discourse.

Class and the Politics of Literary Criticism

Tait's Edinburgh Magazine emerged in the 1830s as an influential reformist periodical that rivaled Blackwood's Magazine in its popularity and sales. A key factor leading to the success of Tait's was its absorption in 1834 of Johnstone's Magazine, a cheap monthly aimed at artisan-class readers. With the union of the two magazines came a new editor: Christian Isobel Johnstone, a prominent Edinburgh novelist and journalist perhaps best known as the author of Clan-Albin (1815) and the Cook and Housewife...