Blackwood's Magazine Impact On Society

What effect did Blackwood’s Magazine have on society and its readership? Were these effects impactful enough to make a positive and/or negative difference within society?
Blackwood’s Magazine greatly affected British society socially and politically, both in a positive and negative sense. Firstly in a positive way, it provided information and news about medical reports, births, deaths, marriages, economics and taxation to its readers. However, from evaluation of the registers of births, deaths and marriages, Blackwood’s Magazine only included people with middle to high social standings. This is made evident within the issues of the publication as women are referred to as ladies, while men are referred to as lords or sir, demonstrating

It has been discovered previously that the high price of Blackwood demonstrates the publication’s intention to isolate the lower classes from obtainment so they could market the magazine to a more privileged audience. As a result, it seems that Blackwood’s Magazine was elitist. However, there is a counter argument to be made against this claim as publications automatically tailor a magazine to a specific audience to discover the kind of content it aims to produce in order to obtain longevity within the publishing world. Through using the Reading Experience Database, an understanding can be reached as to how Blackwood was received by its readership, critics and the public that gained access to the magazine throughout its publication. Most of these opinions are found and were formulated through letter writing. It is clear from these letters that the magazine had mixed reviews, with the majority of writers such as Hartley Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle believing that it was too politically driven (Sanders, I, P114). Therefore, it suggests that Blackwood’s preferred audience were middle to high class people as well as the politically right winged

It was through Blackwood that his career took off and he found fame. His reception of the magazine’s content has been recorded in letters that he wrote to the founder William Blackwood. Between the 1st of September and the 29th of October 1819, Hogg wrote in a letter to Blackwood: 'I find your Mag a great favourite in Dumfriesshire especially with the ladies. Macculloch had been trying to stir up a party against it - It is little wonder with all the cleverness and carelessness of composition’ (Hogg, I, P421). Hogg’s statement on women readers contradicts Coleridge’s earlier statement as Hogg believes women enjoy reading Blackwood. It could be said that women readers were attracted to the magazine’s content that was created by writers and poets that supported the British Romanticism movement, such as Wordsworth, Shelley and Coleridge. However, there is no evidence or statistic to support this claim. It seems from the sources of these letters that Hogg’s reception of Blackwood’s Magazine was ever changing. However, it appears that Hogg’s opinions highly influenced William Blackwood and the content of the magazine as in 1817 he helped Blackwood start up the failed Edinburgh Monthly Magazine. He as well as John Gibson Lockhart and John Wilson, who wrote under the name of Christopher North, were large contributors to the publication under its revamped name. Their first published article was