Tait's Magazine

"Tait's Edinburgh Magazine" was a monthly periodical founded in 1832. It was an important venue for liberal political views, as well as contemporary cultural and literary developments, in early-to-mid-nineteenth century Britain. [Alexis Easley, "Tait's Edinburgh Magazine in the 1830s: Dialogues on Gender, Class, and Reform," "Victorian Periodicals Review", Vol. 38 No. 3 (Fall 2005), pp. 263-79.]

The magazine was founded by William Tait (1792–1864), the son of a builder and an inheritor of a large fortune. Tait was an "independent radical" in politics; he strongly favored the Whig party. 1832 was a time of great political ferment, with the first Reform Bill the dominant subject of discourse. Tait's periodical was intended as a "Radical riposte" to "the politically revanchist but culturally avant-garde "Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine"." [Ian Duncan, "Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh", Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2007; p. 21.] "Tait's" welcomed many new and unknown writers like Robert Nicoll, as well as established voices like James Henry Leigh Hunt, and figures of future fame like Harriet Martineau and John Stuart Mill.

From 1833 on, "Tait's Magazine" was a regular venue for the essays of Thomas De Quincey. Perhaps most notably, De Quincey published a series of biographical essays on the Lake Poets (later collected as "Recollections of the Lake Poets") in the pages of "Tait's" between 1834 and 1840. [Thomas De Quincey, "Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets", Edited with an Introduction by David Wright, New York, Penguin, 1970.] Tait published a range of other selections by De Quincey, including, somewhat surprisingly, "A Tory's Account of Toryism, Whiggism and Radicalism" (December 1835, January 1836). That article, however, was supplied with many sarcastic footnotes disagreeing with its points — "objecting foot-notes from the pen, presumably, of Tait himself." [Horace Ainsworth Eaton, "Thomas De Quincey: A Biography", Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1936; New York, Octagon Press, 1972; p. 246.]

In 1834 "Tait's Magazine" was combined with "Johnstone's Edinbrugh Magazine", a liberal periodical started two years earlier by husband and wife John Johnstone and Christian Isobel Johnstone. She was an early feminist who wrote extensively for "Tait's" in the following years, becoming the magazine's "chief contributor and director" under William Tait himself. Christian Johnstone was "the first woman to serve as paid editor of a major Victorian periodical," to which she brought "fresh life and popularity." [Duncan, p. 298.]

Christian Johnstone died in 1857; "Tait's Magazine" ceased publication in 1861.

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