British Magazines

Origins

Not only did the Gentleman's Magazine, which soon sold 10,000 copies a week, make Edward Cave rich, it also laid the foundations for the “reader comes first” mantra that all British magazine publishing employees learn to recite like a prayer from their first day working in the industry. Serving the reader generally takes three forms—what is sometimes called the “sacred trinity” of information, education, and entertainment—and Cave realized this from the start. He called his magazine A Collection of All Matters, Of Information and Amusement and introduced it in response to what he saw as readers' demand for a publication that explained complicated matters, such as parliamentary debates, in a language they could understand. He also recognized that with “two hundred or so Halfsheets per Month thrown Upon the Press,” there would be a demand for a publication that brought all the news of the latest “Accidents and Occurrences” together into one magazine (quoted in Ardburgham). “Newspapers,” he wrote, “are of late so multiplied as to render it impossible … to consult them all” (quoted in Ballaster et al.). Like the magazine industry in the early twenty-first century, Cave was innovative—parliamentary debates, for example, had never been reported on before—and he experimented with new forms of writing—the government declared parliamentary coverage illegal in 1738 but Cave got around this by having his reporter write in code about a so-called Parliament (or Senate) of Lilliput. British magazine editors are passionate about their publications and their readers, and Cave was no different. His magazine combined essays, stories, poems, biographies, political commentary, and even recipes. It covered pretty much everything Cave thought his readers would want to know about, from the fluctuating prices of grain or coal to the latest diseases, inventions, and executions. It had a star writer, Samuel Johnson, and several female contributors in an age when “ladies” would never dream of publishing under their own name: a significant forerunner for an industry that is closer than most to abolishing the glass ceiling. The one thing setting Gentleman's Magazine apart from most new twenty-first-century magazines is its longevity: even with a circulation that is small by twenty-first-century standards it survived for 183 years.

Birth of Mass Consumer Media

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, magazines tended to be largely the playthings of the upper classes, favoring text-heavy formats and literary discussion aimed at an educated audience. But technological advances, most notably the linotype machine (1886), which moved magazine production away from painstaking letter by letter text assembly to allow type to be printed line by line, and the rotary printing press (1833), which could produce a million pages per day, gave publishers the opportunity to broaden their audiences. This, along with increased literacy rates (public education was introduced in 1870); improvements in lithography, which allowed magazines to use illustrations and, later, photography; and the growth of advertising in the 1870s and 1880s in response to an increased disposable income across most societal groups in Britain, laid the foundations by the end of the nineteenth century for the development of a mass consumer media.

...