The Athenaeum (British magazine)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Athenæum was a British literary magazine that spent nearly a century shaping how readers in London thought about books, music, art, and the very idea of culture itself. From its founding in 1828 to its merger with The Nation in 1921, it became one of the most influential weekly publications in the English-speaking world. What drove a magazine launched by James Silk Buckingham to survive multiple ownership changes, several editors, and nearly a century of literary upheaval? How did a publication that struggled to turn a profit in its earliest weeks go on to attract contributors as varied as Lord Kelvin, Thomas Hardy, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf? And who coined one of the most important words in the study of human culture from the pages of this magazine, nearly by accident?

• 2. Shaky Beginnings

  ›

  James Silk Buckingham started the Athenaeum in 1828, but he did not keep it long. Within a few weeks, he sold the publication to Frederick Maurice and John Sterling. They could not make it profitable either. Then, in 1829, a figure arrived who would truly define what the magazine could become: Charles Wentworth Dilke. Taking on the role of part proprietor and editor, Dilke extended the magazine's influence considerably. His tenure lasted until 1846, when he resigned to take up the editorship of the Daily News of London. Even after stepping down, Dilke continued to write notable articles for the Athenaeum, keeping his hand in the publication he had built.

  The editorship that followed Dilke's departure passed to the poet and critic Thomas Kibble Hervey, who served from 1846 until ill health forced his resignation in 1853. Historian and traveller William Hepworth Dixon then took the helm and remained editor until 1869, giving the magazine a period of unusual stability. Norman MacColl succeeded him, leading the Athenaeum from 1871 to 1900, a span that brought a notable expansion of the women contributing to its pages.

• 3. The Critics and Contributors

  ›

  George Darley served as a staff critic during the magazine's early years, while George Henry Caunter was among its principal early contributors, concentrating on reviews of French-language books. Caunter's brother, John Hobart Caunter, also contributed reviews. H. F. Chorley covered musical topics for the magazine from 1830 until 1868, a stretch that began well before regular journalistic music criticism became common in the mid-1840s. His work at the Athenaeum preceded the profession, as it were.

  Gerald Massey contributed literary reviews during the period 1858 to 1868, writing mainly about poetry. Theodore Watts-Dunton served as the magazine's principal poetry critic from 1875 until 1898. In the visual arts, Frederic George Stephens held the role of art editor from 1860 until 1901, when he was replaced by Roger Fry. The reason given was Stephens's unfashionable disapproval of Impressionism. Stephens did not disappear entirely; he continued contributing book reviews and obituaries until 1904. Arthur Symons joined the staff in 1891.

  By the early twentieth century, the contributors' list read like a roll call of literary reputation: Max Beerbohm, Edmund Blunden, T. S. Eliot, Robert Graves, Thomas Hardy, Aldous Huxley, Julian Huxley, Katherine Mansfield, George Santayana, Edith Sitwell, and Virginia Woolf all appeared in its pages. Lord Kelvin, the physicist, had contributed during the nineteenth century. The breadth of that list hints at how many fields the Athenaeum claimed as its territory.

• 4. Women in the Weekly

  ›

  Geraldine Jewsbury contributed more than 2,300 reviews to the Athenaeum between 1849 and 1880, a figure that makes her one of the most prolific voices in the magazine's history. She was one of the few women reviewing for the publication in that era, and by 1854 she was submitting her reviews on a regular basis. Jewsbury held clear aesthetic values: she rated novels highly when they demonstrated character morality alongside entertainment. She was critical of the "fallen woman" theme, which appeared frequently in Victorian literature. Her influence grew over time; during the second half of the 1850s she was entrusted with editing the entire "New Novels" section.

  Under Norman MacColl's editorship in the final decades of the nineteenth century, the number of women contributing to the Athenaeum grew further. MacColl actively invited women to write, often selecting those who were authors themselves and whose expertise gave their reviews authority. Vernon Lee, Emilia Dilke, Augusta Webster, and Mathilde Blind were among the prominent women who contributed on a regular basis. Their presence made the weekly unusual among publications of the period.

• 5. The Birth of Folklore

  ›

  In August 1846, a writer using the pen name "Ambrose Merton" published a short piece in the Athenaeum proposing a new word. The actual author was William Thoms, and the word he proposed was "Folk-Lore" -- described in his own phrasing as "a good Saxon compound, Folk-Lore, the Lore of the People." Thoms used the Athenaeum as a platform to invite readers to submit examples of "manners, customs, observances, superstitions, ballads, proverbs, &c." as survivals of what he called "Popular Antiquities." Scholar Stephen Miller has described the resulting columns as an early public forum for what was then an emerging discipline.

  The folklore correspondence ran intermittently between 1846 and 1849, producing thirty-five columns and eighty-seven separate contributions. After a strong start in 1846, publication of the feature declined sharply. In 1847, Thoms tried to revive interest with nine instalments titled "The Folk-Lore of Shakespeare." Most contributions arrived signed only with initials or ciphers, which means few contributors can be securely identified today. The feature served as a precursor to Thoms's later editorial work on Notes and Queries. A word coined in these pages went on to name an academic discipline and an entire branch of human inquiry.

• 6. Final Years and Legacy

  ›

  A letter from J. S. Cotton, printed in the Athenaeum in 1905, recorded what is considered the first-ever reference to a match of cricket being played in India. That single letter, preserved in the magazine's pages, became a piece of sporting history entirely by chance. The Athenaeum was that kind of publication: a repository for correspondence and debate that sometimes captured moments nobody else was recording.

  By 1921, with circulation falling, the Athenaeum merged with its younger competitor, The Nation, to form The Nation and Athenaeum. A decade later, in 1931, that successor publication merged with the New Statesman to create the New Statesman and Nation. The name Athenaeum disappeared from mastheads after ninety-seven years. Before it launched the Athenaeum in 1828, Buckingham's magazine had absorbed The Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review, a publication that had itself run from 1819 to 1828. In a sense, the Athenaeum was always built from and dissolved into other things -- a magazine that changed shape at every boundary while the writing inside it endured.