The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture by Jared Gardner (review)

Magazines in eighteenth-century America were what twentieth-century media executives would have called “loss leaders.” This insight was by no means lost on printers in the colonial era and early republic. Yet for the better part of a century, the brightest and most business savvy among them continuously poured their resources, talents, and passions into magazines. This begs the question, why?

In The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture, literary historian Jared Gardner tackles this question. The answer, he convincingly argues, is that in magazines, writers and printers hoped to create a new literary form especially fit for the give-and-take of an open, republican society. The model for this distinctly Enlightened literature was the coffee house–birthed magazine of early Georgian London—especially Tatler, The Spectator, and The Gentleman’s Magazine. And the key figure in this literary scene was the editor, or the man or woman of letters qualified to orchestrate the boisterous debates of the day into a civil and coherent, even if still conflicting, body of discourse. Thoughtful printers and writers prized the magazine form, Gardner argues, because it offered a middle ground between the partisan, and often, radical tinge of the newspaper and the authoritarian tendencies of the novel. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, however, such efforts were fading fast in the face of an encroaching market revolution.

Obscuring the early magazine’s rightful place in the history of print culture, Gardner asserts, has been an almost universally held assumption among scholars that the birth of the American novel was tantamount to the birth of an American literary culture. Yet as Gardner shows, the very authors most commonly cited as having invented the American novel—William Hill Brown and Hannah Webster Foster—abandoned that form in favor of anonymous magazine writing. Early chapters analyze their work for signs of an editorial mindset. The heart of the book, though, is Gardner’s study of the uniquely collaborative writing, editing, and reading work through which magazines were constituted, and which enamored figures from Benjamin Franklin to Susanna Rowson. In closing, Gardner tracks the demise of early magazine culture through the lens of a young Washington Irving. Although well done, an expanded body of analysis here could have better illuminated the processes of marketization through which print culture was remade.

Throughout, Gardner situates magazines within the reprint culture of the time, connecting the collaborative activities that characterized it with Habermasian insights on the links between civil discourse and democratic rule. In doing so, Gardner suggests that the open, anonymous nature of the early magazine can tell us much about the political possibilities and perils of contemporary digital culture.

In sum, Gardner’s compact but ambitious work aims to significantly revise our understanding of both early American media and American literature. Succeeding, The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture should be required reading for historians of the early republic and American print culture. New media scholars and contemporary journalism critics have much to gain from reading Gardner’s impressive work as well.