Forerunners
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The issue of Joseph Addison's Spectator shown here, was mostly devoted to a satire on vain-but-ugly London gentlemen. The picture shows Addison painted in his maturity by Joseph Kneller -- around 35 or 40? |
Magazines didn't look like that until after World War II. The first magazines, in the 1700s, looked like....books.
Magazines began as genteel soapboxes from which literate men expounded their points of view, in essay or satire. Daniel Defoe started the first English magazine, The Review, during or just after his imprisonment for criticizing the Church of England. His purpose: a statesman or man of letters offers his comment, criticism and satire to influence public taste. The audience is composed of members of the same social scene that is the subject of most of the magazine's writing. Over the course of time, readers come to depend on the regularity of its point of view. The form of the Review set the form for British journals: four small pages, dense print, few illustrations (except some engraved borders and lettering) and most of the compelling force contained in the acerbic, airborne sarcasm of the text.
Joseph Addison, a high bred moralist and social critic, followed the form in his essays for his friend Richard Steele's Tatler. When the Tatler folded Addison created The Spectator, the most famous of the early British journals. It looked just like newspapers of the time: a daily 8 x 12-1/2" one-page paper, printed on both sides. Again tiny print, again no illustrations, and maybe half a column of classified ads. Historians consider it a magazine because instead of news, it printed comment. Each issue was written by entirely by Addison or Steele; occasionally by a friend.
Addison introduced the short informal essay and the short fiction story to English literature in his magazine. The Spectator lasted three years, but hundreds of others appeared to replace it. Colonial Americans established their magazines in the same style. Since Addison, prominent literary/art personalities use magazines as one of the most accessible vehicles of their point of view. They magazines they create are usually not popular, but can be influential.
In many ways, the magazines of comment of our time -- The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthy , Harper's, Weekly Standard, Salon, and Slate -- are simply continuing this tradition. There have also been soapbox-magazines for typographic and design theory -- Typographica, Milton Glaser's Push Pin Graphic -- which in their own way were as influential. The Dadaist magazines of the 1920s and 1930s combined the two forms, and ushered in machine-age modernism. It may be that the soapboxes of the Web could have an equally strong cultural influence, but it will take ten years or more to see.
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