The Gentleman’s Magazine
Simon Fowler explains why the articles in this long-running title can be vital for researchers
From the 1730s to the 1830s the Gentleman’s Magazine provides us with an excellent way of confirming the births, marriages and deaths of middle-class and aristocratic families. The title also offers a fascinating insight into the world of 200–250 years ago. It was the first journal to be recognisably a modern magazine with a variety of articles on different subjects.
The original intention of its founder, the journalist Edward Cave, was to summarise the daily and weekly newspapers circulating in London “as a method much better calculated to preserve those things that are curious”, much as
Reader’s Digest and
The Week do today. The magazine became an instant success when it launched in 1731, and over time more and more original material appeared within its pages, although much was dull and laboured poetry.
By the end of the decade its circulation had reached 10,000, and this had risen to 15,000 by 1745. Taking advantage of improving communications and an insatiable desire for news, the journal was sent throughout Britain and to the colonies in North America and the West
Indies, and contained stories from the Continent and farflung parts of the Empire, as well as closer to home.
The key events of the day feature in its pages, but fight for space with more trivial articles. For example, the August 1776 issue contains the American Declaration of Independence, perhaps the single most important document of the 18th century. Yet it is next to an article on “Prince Ivan Alexis Knoutschoffschlerwitz”, a Russian newly arrived in London who offered “his services to the ladies in the important business of their hairdressing” and provided a cure for baldness for gentlemen who “cannot submit to the gothic taste of covering their pates with wigs”.
Name-Rich Resource
More helpfully for family historians, each issue of the magazine from 1731 to the mid-1830s is full of baptism, marriage and death notices, either gleaned from other newspapers or submitted by readers themselves. Often the bare dates are supplemented by other information, which might not be found elsewhere. As might be expected entries for births are the least informative. Entries for marriages occasionally