Front page of The Gentleman's Magazine, May 1759
was founded in
London,
England, by
Edward Cave in January,
1731. The original complete title was
The Gentleman's Magazine: or, Trader's monthly intelligencer. Cave's innovation was to create a monthly digest of news and commentary on any topic the educated public might be interested in, from commodity prices to Latin poetry. It carried original content from a stable of regular contributors, as well as extensive quotes and extracts from other periodicals and books. Cave, who edited
The Gentleman's Magazine under the pen name "Sylvanus Urban", was the first to use the term "
magazine" (meaning "storehouse") for a periodical. The iconic illustration of
St John's Gate on the front of each issue (occasionally updated over the years) depicted Cave's home, in effect, the magazine's 'office'.
Prior to the founding of
The Gentleman's Magazine, there had been specialized journals, but no such wide-ranging publication (though there had been attempts, such as
The Gentleman's Journal, which was edited by
Peter Motteux and ran from 1692 to 1694).
Samuel Johnson's first regular employment as a writer was with
The Gentleman's Magazine. During a time when parliamentary reporting was banned, Johnson regularly contributed parliamentary reports as "Debates of the Senate of Magna Lilliputia". Though they reflected the positions of the participants, the words of the debates were mostly Johnson's own. The name
Columbia, a poetic name for the
United States coined by Johnson, first appears in a 1738 weekly publication of the debates of the British Parliament in the Magazine.
Cave, a skilled businessman, developed an extensive distribution system for
The Gentleman's Magazine. It was read throughout the English-speaking world, and continued to flourish through the eighteenth century and much of the nineteenth, latter under a series of different editors and publishers. It went into decline in the later nineteenth century, and finally ceased general publication in September 1907. However, issues consisting of four pages each were printed in very small editions between late 1907 and 1922 in order to keep the title formally 'in print'.
Series
- 1731-1735 The Gentleman's Magazine or Monthly Intelligencer
- 1736-1833 The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Chronicle
- 1834-1856 (June) New Series: The Gentleman's Magazine
- 1856 (July)-1868 (May) New Series: The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Review
- 1868 (June)-1922 Entirely New Series: The Gentleman's Magazine
See also
