Victorian Periodicals Review

David Latané’s William Maginn and the British Press is the first critical biography of its kind about this larger-than-life journalist. William Maginn (1794–1842), who inherits Romanticism and nurses the Victorians, is a figure of a complex moment in the nineteenth century. His Irish origins explain his prodigality in classics and offer valuable perspective on the London press—the identification of a large cluster of Irish journalists, including J. W. Croker and Theodore Hook. Maginn had a decided political profile: initially an “ultra” as well as a “party” Tory, he modulated into an independent conservative position, always accompanied by a vehement Protestantism and a resolute anti-Catholicism. He was part of the Tory press of his day.

Maginn was a child prodigy, entering university at age eleven. His intelligence, high spirits, good will, and infinite capacity to write quickly, easily, and well lured editors and collaborators, while his reckless irreverence bruised friends, offended victims, and delighted readers. But it was probably a combination of insalubrious characteristics that resulted in the absence of a laudatory or even frank biography for over 170 years. This included his inability to manage money that led to debtors’ prison, an encroaching addiction to alcohol, death from tuberculosis at an early age, and a pauper’s grave. From the start, his aversion to signature, which was reinforced by the mores of Blackwood’s and the accusations of libel it attracted, meant that while Maginn’s many pseudonyms were familiar to readers, credit for his compositions did not accrue to “Maginn” outside the [End Page 303] trade. As Latané argues, Maginn was neither famous nor latterly respectable and thus unlikely to be taken up by the Victorians or Modernists.

It is difficult to credit the variety and number of renowned journals and newspapers with which Maginn was associated in the twenty-five-year window of his career (1817–42). He was not merely casually connected to a host of papers and periodicals but was a key formative contributor. Publishing first in the local press, he became a regular contributor to William Jerdan’s Literary Gazette, 1817–18. Still in Ireland, from 1819 he commenced a decade-long close and multi-faceted involvement—as author, collaborator, and planner—in the high jinks of Blackwood’s before it succumbed to decorum and respectability. Once in London, he helped found, edit, and write for the Representative (January-July 1826), a short-lived daily that campaigned against the Catholic Relief Act and then in favour of the Tory interest in the general election before finally folding. At the same time, Maginn was writing for a gaggle of splenetic popular papers such as John Bull and the Age. He was in at the beginning when the Standard was founded, which he similarly wrote for and edited, and in 1830 he again was in at the founding of Fraser’s Magazine, a Tory monthly that not only resembled Blackwood’s but soon rivalled it. It was Fraser’s that perpetuated Blackwood’s predilection for parody, spoofs, and satire after Maga altered its tone, and it was to Fraser’s that the young Thackeray responded with the Yellowplush Correspondence, Fitz-Boodle’s Confessions, Catherine, and Barry Lyndon, and Carlyle with Sartor Resartus. This is the affiliation, Latané suggests, that gave Maginn’s teeming professional life its significance (121).

However, giving credit to Fraser’s above all sells both Maginn and Latané’s indefatigable research short. Given his gravitation to collaboration and anonymity throughout his career, it is unsurprising that Maginn’s achievement in Fraser’s garnered the most critical attention. But Maginn’s prodigious labour as a journalist—as adumbrated by Latané—involved contributions to a number of other titles (including Blackwood’s, the Standard, and Bentley’s Miscellany) that match his affiliation to Fraser’s in weight and genius. Moreover, for nineteenth-century scholars and students, the value of Latané’s study goes beyond Maginn as an individual subject by populating...