The Illinois Monthly Magazine (Vandalia, Illinois, 1830–1832), edited and mainly written by James Hall, was the earliest literary publication in the West; it was superseded by The Western Monthly Magazine (Cincinnati, 1833–1836), edited by Timothy Flint.
One of the most popular of the Philadelphia magazines was Godey’s Lady’s Book (1830–1877), which as early as 1859 circulated 98,500 copies, and which published compositions by Paulding, Park Benjamin, Holmes, Irving, Poe, Bayard Taylor, Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Simms, Willis, Buchanan Read, Thomas Dunn English, and Lydia H. Sigourney. Poe’s contribution on “The Literati of New York,” published in its columns in 1846, created a great sensation at the time. For more than thirty years Godey’s was edited by Mrs. Sarah J. Hale, who is also famous as the author of “Mary had a little lamb,” and through whose exertions our national Thanksgiving Day was secured.
The New England Magazine, established in Boston in 1831 by Joseph T. and Edwin Buckingham, published contributions from Hildreth, Park Benjamin, Whittier, Holmes (who published here the first two papers, never by authority reprinted, of his “Autocrat” series), Longfellow, William and Andrew Peabody, George S. Hillard (“Literary Portraits” and “Selections from the Papers of an Idler”), and other eminent writers. In 1835 Park Benjamin took it to New York and continued it till 1838 as The American Monthly Magazine.
The North American Quarterly Magazine (Philadelphia, 1833–1838) was conducted by Sumner Lincoln Fairfield, author of “The Cities of the Plain,” and of an unpublished poem, “The Last Night of Pompeii” (finished in 1830), from which he alleged that Bulwer, to whom he sent the manuscript, stole the plot of his “Last Days of Pompeii.”
Much more successful was The Knickerbacker or New-York Monthly Magazine, founded in the same year and quietly changed with the seventh number to The Knickerbocker. The founder was Charles Fenno Hoffman, who edited three numbers. Some contributors were Harry Franco, Bryant, Irving (“Crayon Papers”), Longfellow, Lewis Gaylord Clark (for a time the editor), William L. Stone, the brothers Duyckinck, Frederick S. Cozzens, Simms, Park Benjamin, John L. Stephens (letters from Egypt), and Parkman (“The Oregon Trail”). With some exceptions it must be said that the contents of The Knickerbocker were not of very great merit; and in its later years there were too many stories on the order of “Carl Almendinger’s Office, or, The Mysteries of Chicago,” which ran as a serial in 1862. In 1864 the title was The American Monthly Knickerbocker, and from July till October, 1865, when publication was suspended, the title was The Fœderal American.
The Southern Literary Messenger, published monthly at Richmond, Virginia, between 1834 and 1864, exerted a marked influence upon the literary taste of the whole South. In it were first published many of Poe’s stories and criticisms, and he was the editor of the second volume. Other contributors were Paulding, Park Benjamin, John W. Draper, Willis, Henry C. Lea, R. H. Stoddard, Simms, John B. Dabney, Matthew F. Maury, Philip Pendleton, and John Esten Cooke, Henry Timrod, Paul H. Hayne, Aldrich, Moncure D. Conway, Thomas Dunn English, John P. Kennedy, James Barron Hope (“Henry Ellen”), and W. Gordon McCabe.
In 1837 William E. Burton, the comedian, established in Philadelphia The Gentleman’s Magazine to do for his sex what Godey’s was doing for the ladies. Beginning with July, 1839, Poe became joint editor. The next year Burton sold out to George R. Graham, who combined the magazine with The Casket (begun by Samuel Coate Atkinson in 1827) to form Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine. For years Graham’s was the most famous and truly national periodical in America. Graham understood the reading public as did few other men. He paid contributors liberally for those days, and collected a brilliant list of writers, including every name well known in letters at the time except Irving, who confined himself to The Knickerbocker. To Graham’s Longfellow contributed his “Spanish Student,” “Childhood,” “The Builders,” “The Belfry of Bruges,” “The Arsenal at Springfield,” “Nuremberg,” etc. Poe contributed “The Mask of the Red Death,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Conqueror Worm,” “Life in Death,” and some minor pieces. Here were first published also many of Hawthorne’s “Twice-Told Tales.” Simms, Paulding, Geo. H. Boker, Henry W. Herbert, Robert T. Conrad, E. P. Whipple, and John G. Saxe were “principal contributors.” Lowell and Bayard Taylor were editorial writers. Cooper received $1800, then a very high price, for “The Islets of the Gulf, or Rose Budd,” later republished as “Jack Tier, or The Florida Reefs,” and $1000 for a series of biographies of distinguished naval commanders. Nathaniel P. Willis wrote much between 1843 and 1851. In 1852, Graham boasted that in the decade previous he had paid American contributors between eighty and ninety thousand dollars. The circulation of the magazine for a long time was 40,000 copies. About 1854 Graham sold out. In competition with Harper’s and Putnam’s, Graham’s soon declined. In 1859 its name was changed to The American Monthly, and it quickly disappeared.
In 1839 Willis began, in connection with Dr. T. O. Porter, to issue a weekly, The Corsair, from the basement of the Astor House, New York. Willis was the chief writer, contributing romantic stories, dramatic criticism, letters from Europe entitled “Jottings Down in London,” and gossip. While in England he met Thackeray, whom he induced to contribute eight letters. In all, fifty-two numbers were printed, the last dated March 7, 1840.
The Transcendental Movement, which will be discussed elsewhere, found expression in 1840 in a Boston quarterly called The Dial, which flourished till 1844, and which was edited successively by George Ripley, Margaret Fuller, and Emerson. The last contributed more than thirty prose articles and poems, among them “The Conservative,” “Chardon Street and Bible Convention,” “The Transcendentalist,” and in verse “The Problem,” “The Sphinx,” and “Woodnotes.” Bronson Alcott sent his “Orphic Sayings,” the mystery of some of which has never been fathomed. Other writers were Theodore Parker, George Ripley, Thoreau, James Freeman Clarke, William H. and William Ellery Channing, Eliot Cabot, John S. Dwight, Christopher P. Cranch, Mrs. Ellen Hooper, and Charles A. Dana. “Conceived and carried on in a spirit of boundless hope and enthusiasm,” the magazine encountered much ridicule among the Philistines. The Knickerbocker said of the first number:
It is to be devoted to that refinement upon common-sense literature, just now so much in vogue at the East; which, like the memorable science of Sir Piercie Shafton, shall indoctrinate the dull in intellectuality, the vulgar in nobility, and give that “unutterable perfection of human utterance”; that eloquence which no other eloquence is sufficient to praise; that art which, in fine, when we call it literary Euphuism, we bestow upon it its richest panegyric.