Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 65, No. 400, February 1849

VariousProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.3
Word count
526K words
Chapters
53

Tags

Literature English Originals Historical ReappraisalPolitical AllegorySocial ObservationPortrait GallerySlow ReadingIntellectual CommentaryMagazine SelectionPopular NarrativeVictorian EraCross-Cultural View

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. 65, No. 400, February, 1849 by VariousAuthor: Various,Language: English, Class: AP: General Works: Periodicals, Release Date: Dec 4, 2013

Editor's review

This is an electronic reprint of the February 1849 issue of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 65, No. 400, a mid-nineteenth-century general periodical. Known at the time for combining reviews, essays, fiction and political commentary, this issue captures the tastes and literary style of mid-Victorian public opinion and serves as a sample for understanding periodical culture, social issues and prose style of the day. Its value lies in being a "slice of the era": readers can sense the agenda-setting, rhetorical habits and editorial taste of a nineteenth-century review, rather than gain systematic knowledge. As an English-language reprint of the original, its style is elaborate and allusive; it is best approached through selected reading combined with background research, as primary material for studying the ecology of nineteenth-century British periodicals and public debate.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Skim the issue's table of contents first, then choose pieces by section—reviews, essays, fiction.
  2. When encountering historical figures and allusions, check the background first, then return to the text to understand the context.
  3. Read only one or two pieces at a time, taking notes on stylistic features and topics.
  4. Compare with other periodicals of the same period to observe differences in the nineteenth-century public sphere.

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

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53

FAQ

Is this a complete book or a single issue of a periodical? It is the February 1849 issue of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 65, No. 400—a reprint of a single periodical issue made up of multiple reviews, essays and literary works, not a monograph on a single subject.
Why is reading an old nineteenth-century periodical still worthwhile? Old periodicals preserve the agenda-setting, rhetoric and atmosphere of public debate of their time; they are primary material for studying Victorian culture and social attitudes, and help readers understand the origins of modern review periodicals.
What is the biggest obstacle when reading? Mainly the long sentences, allusions and period background of nineteenth-century English prose. It helps to learn about the figures and events covered in the issue first, then read piece by piece slowly, without insisting on reading the whole issue.
Is the electronic edition suitable for academic citation? It can be cited as primary periodical literature, but you should note that it is a Project Gutenberg electronic reprint and verify the original page information, rather than treating the electronic layout as the original format.

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.