Category:Hedderwick's Miscellany of Instructive and Entertaining Literature

Title: Hedderwick’s Miscellany of Instructive and Entertaining Literature

Editor: James Hedderwick

Publisher: Miscellany Offices: Red Lion-Court, Fleet-Street, London and St. Enoch-Square, Glasgow

Hedderwick’s Miscellany is a literary magazine published out of both Glasgow and London and intended for the average adult. It was published weekly and each sixteen-page issue sold for one pence. The periodical regularly included serialized novelettes, short stories, essays, literary or societal criticisms, letters from the editor, and poetry. There was a range of genres, including scary stories, romances, nonfiction informative essays, opinion essays, and sentimental or didactic stories. The overall voice of the magazine is intelligent, fresh, funny, occasionally biting, and, as it claims to be, instructive and entertaining.

Begun in October of 1862, it marked only a relatively small publishing venture on part of its editor, James Hedderwick. Hedderwick had regularly contributed to various literary magazines, and had worked on the staff of several by the time he founded his own. Unfortunately, in spite of its success, Hedderwick’s Miscellany lasted just under a year before it folded in September of 1863, with only two semi-annual volumes ever created. After Hedderwick’s Miscellany folded, Hedderwick moved on to create the highly successful Glasgow Evening Citizen, among other works. ^[1]

Hedderwick’s Miscellany was a high-quality, general literary magazine that folded only because “the pressure of other avocations [of the editor] . . . compel[led] its discontinuance. Its success, [the editor] may add, has been considerable.” ^[2]

Notes

1. ↑ DNB
2. ↑ Hedderwick, James ed. Hedderwick’s Miscellany of Instructive and Entertaining Literature. II.26 (1863): 368. 1863.

Submitted by: Lewis, Mary-Celeste: section 1, Winter 2014