From the Periodical Archives

An editor's introductory address to his or her readers is among the most revealing sites in a periodical's life. It is an occasion to set an agenda, to establish a tone, and to characterize an implied audience. In this issue of American Periodicals, we reach into the archive to reprint a selection of editors' inaugural essays from American magazines established between 1825 and 1850. In his monumental history of American magazines, Frank Luther Mott quotes the Illinois Monthly Magazine's exclamation, in 1831, that "This is the golden age of periodicals!" Mott goes on to acknowledge that hindsight shows us subsequent periods of even greater magazine activity and influence, but he concedes that the enthusiasm of the moment was by no means misplaced. He estimates that "there were somewhat less than a hundred periodicals other than newspapers in 1825, and about 600 in 1850."¹ Moreover, the variety of magazines inaugurated during this period is noteworthy, for magazines were beginning to address what we would now call niche markets, based on such factors as geographic region, political affiliation, gender, or age.

We have tried to suggest some of this range of interests in our brief samplings here. Juvenile periodicals emerged at this time as a viable and popular genre, and they also provided an early opportunity for women to assume positions as editors. These genres are represented here by Lydia Maria Child's introduction to The Juvenile Miscellany and by Caroline Howard Gilman's introduction to the Rose-Bud (a juvenile periodical subsequently transformed into the family magazine The Southern Rose). Similar in many ways, these two juvenile magazines nevertheless have sharply distinct regional identities: The Juvenile Miscellany was published out of Boston, and Child used it as a vehicle to urge her liberal, northern, abolitionist views upon her young readers. The Rose-Bud was published out of Charleston, South Carolina, and though Gilman herself was a transplanted New Englander married to a Harvard-trained Unitarian minister, she nevertheless embraced Charleston as her new home, became something of an apologist for the South and for slavery, and expresses a strong regional identity in her magazine. Magazines for women also flourished at this time, and they too provided a field not only for women writers but also women editors. We include here the editor's introduction to Boston's Ladies' Magazine—Sarah Josepha Hale's first successful venture in editing, before she became the literary editor of Philadelphia's Godey's Lady's Book in 1837, a position she held for the next forty years. Popular magazines with a cosmopolitan scope but a strong and explicit regional identity are represented here by excerpts from Charles Fenno Hoffman's introductory sketch for New York's The Knickerbacker (though Hoffman only served as editor for three months, and the magazine's name was quickly changed to Knickerbocker); and by James E. Heath's introductory essay on "Southern Literature" for the Southern Literary Messenger, published out of Richmond. John L. O'Sullivan's introduction to The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, from which we print excerpts here, conveys the hybrid nature of this periodical, mixing the literary magazine with partisan politics, and drawing on elements of both the monthly magazine and the quarterly review. The Democratic Review was not only eclectic in its contents, but, given its political identity, also explicitly targeted a national rather than a regional audience: the magazine literally moved from Washington, D.C. to New York, and it also carefully cultivated contributors from the South (e.g., William Gilmore Simms) and New England (e.g., Nathaniel Hawthorne). We also include the inaugural editorial address from the transcendentalist periodical The Dial, written by Ralph Waldo Emerson, as an example of one of the first "little magazines," appealing to a small coterie audience. Our final selection is editor John Inman's introductory essay from The Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, on the topic of "Magazine Literature." Inman'...