Primary Texts

The Grand Magazine of Universal Intelligence and Monthly Chronicle of Our Own Times (1758–60)

This title – very similar to that of the Grand Magazine of Magazines (1758–59) – was published by Ralph Griffiths, principally known for founding the Monthly Review in 1749 (which ran until 1845). The Monthly Review carried the first critical response to Tristram Shandy in the press in January 1760, with an unsigned review by William Kenrick that was mostly favourable towards Sterne’s work.

Griffiths’ Grand Magazine was less successful, perhaps, but it also manifested the early interest Tristram Shandy inspired among the reading public, and of how critical and creative responses intertwined in Sterneana.

The February issue reprints the review of Tristram Shandy first published in the Monthly Review, showing the borrowing typical of press publications in the period. The April issue carries ‘Animadversions on TRISTRAM SHANDY’, a comical-critical essay written in epistolary form – the letter is headed ‘Comus’s Court, April 15, 1760’. Its author addresses the magazine’s ‘Proprietor’, telling him that ‘I Have the pleasure to acquaint you that I am one of the jolly sons of Comus, and that we are all in raptures with his facetious disciple, that paragon of mirth and humour, Tristram Shandy’. The piece goes on to offer critical commentary on Sterne’s text, adopting the Shandean style associated with it, and picking out key features familiar from the work, such as the infamous clock-winding episodes. The same April issue of the Grand Magazine also includes a ‘Specimen of TRISTRAM SHANDY’s Poetry. Extracted from his LYRIC EPISTLES, Just published’ – reprinting the second of the twopoetic verses by John Hall-Stevenson, Sterne’s friend, and published under the title Two lyric epistles: one to my cousin Shandy, on his coming to town; and the other to the grown gentlewomen, the Misses of **** (London: R. Dodsley, 1760).

The Grand Magazine, June 1760 (Google Books)

These ‘four stars’ had, in fact, become notorious as a visual-verbal byword for Shandean bawdry. Sterne had first used them to conceal the presumably indelicate word that Toby had uttered, when discussing with Walter Mrs Shandy’s preference for having a female over a male midwife, as she doubtless would ‘not care to let a man come so near her ****’. These four stars reappear on numerous occasions in critical and creative responses to Tristram Shandy, textual and visual.

They resurface in the June issue of the Grand Magazine, for instance, in a reproduction of the frontispiece depicting Sterne that had accompanied the publication in May of The Sermons of Mr. Yorick. Based on Reynolds’ portrait of Sterne, painted only the previous April, the ‘official’ frontispiece, engraved by Simon François Ravenet, had been accompanied by the albeit facetious caption ‘Laurence Sterne, A.M., Prebendary of York, &c. &c.’ – several contemporaries found the overt association between Sterne the clergyman and his famously bawdy fiction work too provocative, and that publishing his sermons under Yorick’s pseudonym was inappropriate. The Grand Magazine’s version replaces this caption with ‘****’, name enough, it seems, to identify Sterne and his fictional work.

The Grand Magazine, June (1760), British Library (author’s photograph)

You may recollect, Sir, that, in the account of Tristram Shandy, when the author was unknown, not a word was said of the indecency or obscenity of this novel: but when Yorick’s Sermons appeared, when Mr. St****’s merit and good fortune were the standing topics, then forsooth these goodly Reviewers found out that Tristram Shandy was an obscene novel, and that for a clergyman openly to avow such a performance, was an outrage against christianity, and a mockery on religion.

The network of connections between Sterne, his publications so far, their critical reception, and creative Sterneana all meet together in this single magazine issue.

Earlier in the June issue, a quite different item of Sterneana appears, but which manifests another strand of the enthusiasm for Tristram Shandy and the unusual forms it too. ‘TRISTRAM SHANDY: A new Game at CARDS’ includes a set of instructions for playing a card game, similar to whist, based on Sterne’s novel – or, at least, which appropriates the famous name of Sterne’s famous narrator.

The Grand Magazine, June (1760), British Library (author’s photograph)

The Grand Magazine, June (1760), British Library (author’s photograph)

Photographs taken by the author of the British Library copy of The Grand Magazine

Critical Works

Jennie Batchelor, The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) and the Making of Literary History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023)

This is an important publication – and winner of the 2023 Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize – that focusses, for the first time, on a magazine which had widespread popularity during the long period of appearance. It promotes the significance of women’s writing, as foregrounded by and channelled through the route of periodical publication, but also the extent to which the notion of authorship such as it came to be established in the period following the magazine’s demise brought about the neglect paid towards this significant publication.

Batchelor contends that The Lady’s Magazine emblematises the multi-authored, collaborative nature of productivity characteristic of this publication mode, and the periodical press more widely. This approach to multi-authorship – and cognate areas of pseudonymity, anonymity, and de-centred authorial branding – are very pertinent to the concept of ‘networks of creativity’ as pursued in our Polonez Bis project.

As Paul Goring summarises in his review of Batchelor’s book, it ‘offers an insightful and detailed history of the magazine, of its impact in its time and of its subsequent sidelining. It is an outstanding work that makes a major contribution to periodical studies and persuasively uncovers, as Batchelor terms it, an “unromantic” strand of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literary culture’. As such, it plays an important role in the reconstruction of this period’s patterns of creativity as manifested in the complex terrain of press publications of all types explored through the Networks of Reception project.

The Lady’s Magazine features numerous Sterne-related items, too, including allusions, reviews, and advertisements, and examples of Sterneana. Most significantly, it carried the long-running ‘A Sentimental Journey, by a Lady’, the title of which takes its cue from Sterne’s work. As scholars such as Paul Goring have demonstrated, though, this item of Sterneana incorporates elements drawn from both A Sentimental Journey and Tristram Shandy, but also from other texts – and beyond, to establish itself as a creative work independent from (if related to) a Sternean route. This serialised narrative is a very effective example of the simultaneous exploitation and decentering of ‘brand Sterne’.  

The Lady’s Magazine, January 1807 (Google Books)