Attributions of Authorship in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1827–1830: A Supplement to the Union List

Abstract

The following list consists of eighty-six new attributions of authorship (and three corrected ones) of anonymous, pseudonymous, or incompletely signed letters, articles, drawings, reviews, poems, obituaries, and staff notes appearing in the Gentleman’s Magazine (hereafter GM) during the years 1827–1830. The period covered in this list encompasses the first four years of the editorial stewardship of John Bowyer Nichols, John Nichols’s son and longtime partner, who succeeded his father as sole conductor of the magazine upon the latter’s death on 26 November 1826 and thus assumed the persona of ‘Sylvanus Urban’, the GM’s fictitious editor, in his own right. The authorial attributions that follow constitute the latest installment in my ongoing efforts to supplement my Attributions of Authorship in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1731–1868: An Electronic Union List (Charlottesville, VA: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 2003), https://bsuva.org/bsuva/gm2 (accessed 28 February 2023). The overwhelming majority of the fifty-one contributors whose writings and drawings appear below consists of antiquaries, clergymen, artists, and architects, a predictable assemblage consistent with the fact that for some years John Bowyer Nichols had been reorienting the GM more and more along the path of antiquarian concerns. Other contributors represented in the following list include poets, historians, schoolmasters, members of the legal community, art collectors, and a Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum, as well as various miscellaneous writers.