Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 63, No. 388, February 1848

VariousProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.8
Word count
535K words
Chapters
54

Tags

Literature Political AllegorySocial ObservationPortrait GalleryIntellectual CommentaryMagazine SelectionSatirical StyleEssay Collection19th CenturyCultural ChangeVictorian Era

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 63, No. 388, February 1848 by VariousAuthor: Various,Language: English, Class: AP: General Works: Periodicals, Release Date: Sep 2, 2018

Editor's review

This is the February 1848 issue of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 63, No. 388 — a cross-section of a major 19th-century British periodical known for political commentary, literary criticism, essays and serialized fiction. This issue preserves the original voices of intellectuals observing society and debating arts and letters, offering primary-source value for studying early Victorian public opinion, periodical style and serial publishing culture. The pleasure of reading it lies not in cover-to-cover reading but in browsing as one would an old newspaper: editorials reveal political stances, reviews reveal literary tastes, essays reveal everyday customs. The prose carries period rhetoric and allusion, posing some difficulty for modern readers, but precisely for this reason it serves as a textual sample within historical context rather than light reading. Reading alongside a background in 19th-century British history is recommended, using it as a window into the discourse of that era.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Start by scanning the table of contents; read one editorial, one review and one essay to sense the structure.
  2. Look up historical figures and events as you go; don't wrestle with every long sentence.
  3. Excerpt passages of interest as samples for analyzing 19th-century periodical style.
  4. Read alongside other contemporary British periodicals to compare stances and styles.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

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FAQ

Is this a complete issue of the magazine? Sources indicate it is Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 63, No. 388, the February 1848 issue — one issue of the periodical, not an annual bound volume. For specific contents, refer to the electronic text's table of contents.
What if the old English periodical is hard to read? Begin with shorter essays and reviews, skipping dense political passages; look up allusions and historical names first, then return to the sentence. Don't aim for word-by-word reading.
Is it suitable for academic citation? As an original 19th-century periodical text, it can serve as material for studying public opinion, literary taste and publishing culture. When citing, verify specific page numbers and articles, and interpret them in light of secondary research.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Various Author

Various is not a real person but a collective attribution used in book cataloging and databases for works with multiple authors, commonly applied to anthologies, compilations, or publications with too many contributors to list individually. On this Chinese book site, this attribution covers as many as 3,387 titles, spanning encyclopedic entries, historical documents, and trial records. Representative works include several volumes of the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the record of the trial of the major war criminals before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Available public information is limited: nationality, birth and death dates, and common categories are not clearly recorded, making it difficult to summarize a unified writing style or personal biography. Readers should understand it as a cataloging convention rather than a single author.