Rejected Articles

London: Henry Colburn, 1826. First Edition. Hardcover. Joints started but the binding is holding well and is still quite supple; a previous owner has written a long note in a faint pencil on the page preceeding the title page and on the title page, else very good;. Duodecimo; pp; iv, (ii), 353; three quarter brown morocco and marbled paper covered boards, marbled endpapers, spine lettered in gilt;. "Late in his life, Peter George Patmore, the periodical essayist, Regency man of letters and father of Coventry Patmore, recalled walking arm in arm through the streets of London with William Hazlitt. Hazlitt, he remembered, was overjoyed: not only had Patmore (then Secretary of the Surrey Institution) secured him a commission to deliver a series of lectures, but he had also promised him a positive review in the last place he expected it, Blackwood's Magazine. Recent criticism has drawn a polarized image of the magazine culture of the period, with the culturally, politically and socially conservative Blackwood's relentlessly hounding the liberal 'Cockney' writers, like Hazlitt, for the threat they posed to the established order. In this view of things, Patmore's positive review seems conspicuously anomalous. But Patmore contributed to all three of the major literary magazines of the late 1810s and early 1820s - Blackwood's, the London, and the New Monthly Magazine -and his eclecticism, I want to suggest, is farless surprising than the current conception of a polarized magazine market might suggest. Patmore's Rejected Articles, a collection often imitations of the most notable magazine writers of the age, provides a model, I will argue, for a less antagonistic understandingof the magazine culture it represents. His imitations present an understanding of magazines based on aesthetic rather than political principles: stylistic similarity matters more than political difference. Rejected Articles provides a unique and fascinating glimpse of how magazines might be read by a contemporary: by collecting together these apparently divergent styles, Patmore offers in microcosm an image of the entire magazine market. As his own career suggests, affinities between magazines could be just as important as their more evident differences."