A Republican Literature
A Study of Magazine Reading and Readers in Late Eighteenth-Century New York
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2730976 |
|---|---|
| Authors | David Paul Nord (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1988 |
| Volume | 40 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 42 |
| Publication date | 1988-03-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0003-0678 • E-ISSN: 1080-6490 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2713141 |
| OpenAlex | W2042526384 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 7 |
John Adams, Chief Justice John Jay, and New York Mayor Richard Varick. With such a distinguished readership, it little wonder that the publishers of The New-York Magazine; or, Literary Repository decided to publish a list of subscribers to their first volume in 1790. Like all eighteenth-century magazine publishers, Thomas and James Swords were proud of their association with gentlemen of character, stature, and literary taste.' Yet men such as Washington and Adams were not the only readers of The New-York Magazine, as the standard magazine histories seem to suggest.2 There were women on the list, and barbers, bakers, butchers, and boardinghouse proprietors. These are the forgotten readers of The New-York Magazine, and of late-eighteenthcentury magazines in general. Who were these people? How did they make a living? Where did they live? What were they like? Were they different from nonsubscribers? What kinds of material did they read? This article seeks to answer these questions. It is, in effect, a magazine readership survey; and its purpose to contribute to our understanding of the history of readingespecially among the shopkeepers and artisans of New York City-during the first years of the American republic. As Carl Kaestle has recently pointed out, we have learned a great deal in the past twenty years about the demographics of simple literacy in the past, but we have only begun to develop a genuine social history of reading-that is, a history of the uses of literacy. This hardly surprising, for as Kaestle says, it is very difficult to trace printed works to their readers and still more difficult to trace meaning from the text to the reader.3 This paper tries to do both, though with more confidence about the former than the latter. It a study of both the subscribers and the content of The New-York Magazine in 1790. The main argument that magazine reading in this era seems to have been a more broadly democratic activity than has usually been supposed. At first
Art · Literature · Political science · Reading (process · History · Law · Media, Communication, and Education
| Citations per year | 0.29 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2012 - 2026 (15) |
| Highly cited | No |