William Jerdan and "The Literary Gazette"

Abstract

William Jerdan, Scottish by birth and education, arrived in London in 1806, at age twenty-four, determined to make writing his career. Like Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Dickens (Hessell), Jerdan began as a parliamentary reporter and supplemented his income writing for Satirist, or Monthly Meteor, which he bought in July, 1812. It collapsed in 1814, after Napoleon, main target, was defeated. However, Jerdan was already writing for Sun, and, in May, 1813, was appointed editor, with a salary and one-tenth share. Under pen name Viator, he contributed thirty-one articles written in Paris over six months after Napoleon was exiled. After a bitter dispute among other shareholders in 1817, Jerdan sold his share, dissolved partnership, and, on July 12, 1817, became editor and one-third owner of Henry Colburn's Literary Gazette, first weekly review magazine of arts, launched previous January and in its 24th number. At one shilling, three columns per page, it proposed to form at end of year, a clear and instructive picture of moral and literary improvement of times, and a complete, and authentic Chronological Literary Record for general reference. In December, 1819, Longmans purchased journal and took on management of sales and accounts, which Jerdan had found irksome and for which he was ill-suited. He announced new arrangement in issue of December 18, 1819. The Literary Gazette was ideally placed to participate in a new literary culture comprised of popular poets such as Byron, novelists such as Scott, and, along with other reviews, help create new reading public Among first to use lithography, it could be printed faster, more efficiently, and more economically than competing journals. According to Samuel Carter Hall in Book of Memories, Literary Gazette exercised immense power ... between 1820 and 1840. A laudatory review there was almost certain to sell an edition of book, and an author's fame was established when he had obtained praise of journal ... for a quarter of a century there was but one who was accepted as an 'authority'. The Gazette stood alone as arbiter of fate, literary and artistic. (285) Although, initially, Jerdan wrote most of reviews himself, he confessed that the dignity and stilts of authorship never suited me. If I tried to write grand or fine I was sure to fail. (11:174) Gerald Pyle calculated that, during time Jerdan edited, Literary Gazette contained, exclusive of advertisements, roughly 25,000 words per issue, a million and a quarter a year, totalling 42 million words--the vast majority written by Jerdan himself' (8). To help support his family of five children, Jerdan also wrote leaders for North Staffordshire Potteries Gazette., essays for Chelmsford Chronicle, edited two books for John Murray (for 125 [pounds sterling]), negotiated a copyright (for 100 [pounds sterling]), and contributed an article to Quarterly Review. Reviewing involved conflicting interests. Colburn, for example, wanted to use Gazette to promote books he published and other publishers courted Jordan to time his reviews to their advantage. Jerdan, however, in charge of selection, reviewers, and timing of reviews, wanted to publish objective reviews. Sometimes he was wrong: he overlooked Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, but featuring Washington Irving's Sketch Book, included excessively long extracts that would interfere with sales. The long extract was a common practice among literary reviews with advantages for both editors who needed to fill space and promote their own sales and for reviewers who were paid by word or sheet. Pyle calculated that quantity of extracted text from work reviewed rose from about 43% in 1818, to over 80% in 1847, when Gazette was in rapid decline. (68) Letitia Landon, as L.E.L., at age eighteen, published her first poem in Literary Gazette in 1820. …