The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 of Literature, Science and Art.

Excerpt

Of the revolutions of the age, one of the most interesting and important is that which has taken place in the forms of Literature and the Modes of its Publication. Since the establishment of the Edinburgh Review the finest intelligences of the world have been displayed in periodicals. Brougham, Jeffrey, Sidney Smith, Mackintosh, Macaulay, have owed nearly all their best fame to compositions which have appeared first in journals, magazines and reviews; the writers of Tales and Essays have uniformly come before the public by the same means, which have recently served also for the original exhibition of the most elaborate and brilliant Fictions, so that we are now receiving through them by almost every ship from Europe installments of works by Dickens, Bulwer, James, Croly, Lever, Reynolds, Mrs. Marsh, Mrs. Ellis, and indeed nearly all the most eminent contemporary novelists. So complete is the change, that all mind, except the heaviest and least popular, is likely to flow hereafter through the Daily, Weekly, Monthly or Quarterly Miscellanies, which compete with universities, parliaments, churches, and libraries, for ascendency in the government of mankind.

In this country we must keep pace with the movements abroad. It will not answer that we issue literary productions as soon as possible after their completion. The impatient readers demand chapters by chapters, as they are spun from the brain and the heart of the author; facts, upon the instant of their discovery; and suggestions, as they flash from the contact of imagination and reflection.

The International Weekly Miscellany will be a result of efforts to satisfy a plain necessity of the times. It will combine the excellencies of all contemporary periodicals, with features that will be peculiar to itself.

I. A leading object will be to present the public, with the utmost rapidity and at the cheapest possible rate, the best of those works in Popular Literature which are appearing abroad in serials, or in separate chapters. With this view, we print in the first number the initial portions of the brilliant nautical romance now in course of publication in Blackwood's Magazine, under the title of "The Green Hand," by the author of the most celebrated fiction of its class in English literature, "Tom Cringle's Log;" and other works will be selected and carried on simultaneously, as they shall come to us with the stamp of sufficient merit.

II. The foreign periodicals are continually rich in novelettes of from two or three to a dozen chapters, which—being too short for separate volumes—are rarely reproduced at all in this country. Of these the International will contain the choicest selections.

III. Of the Quarterly Reviews the most admirable papers will be presented in full; and those works will in all cases be carefully examined for such valuable and striking passages as will be likely to interest the American reader, to whom the entire articles in which they appear may be unattractive.

IV. The Literary, Religious, Political and Scientific newspapers and magazines will be consulted for whatever will instruct or entertain in their several departments. The leading articles in the great journals, upon Affairs, and Philosophy, and Art, which are now very unfrequently reprinted in America, will appear in the International in such fullness and combination as to display the springs and processes of the world's action and condition.

V. But the work will not be altogether Foreign, nor a mere compilation. In its republications there will be a constant effort to display what is most interesting and important to the American; and in its original portions it will be supported by some of the ablest and most accomplished writers in all the fields of knowledge and opinion.

VI. As a Literary Gazette and Examiner, it is believed that it will equal or surpass any work now or ever printed in the United States. It will contain the earliest announcements of whatever movements in the literary world are of chief interest to general readers; its Reviews of Books will be honest and intelligent; and its extracts, when they can be given in advance of the publication of the works themselves, will be the choicest and most valuable possible....