Free student essays: The Adventurer British periodical
admin @ December 30, 2007
Free student essays: Together with Joseph Addison’s Spectator and Samuel Johnson ’s Rambler, the Adventurer was one of the three most influential English-language periodicals of the 18th century. Published serially twice a week by London bookseller John Payne, and running to 140 numbers between 7 November 1752 and 9 March 1754, it was consciously designed to succeed the Rambler, which made its final appearance on 14 March 1752, but greatly outstripped the Rambler’s popularity, peaking at a circulation three times that of Johnson’s publication.
Free student essays: A contemporary hack journalist, Arthur Murphy, author of the competing Gray’s Inn Journal, complained in print about the "attachment to the Adventurer" felt by so many readers and the impediment such loyalty placed in the way of his own efforts to generate a reliable circulation (no. 53, 20 October 1753). Another indication of the Adventurer’s success was the personal profit it brought to the publisher John Payne, who netted the then considerable sum of £422 from the sale of the 2000 sets of the second edition of the complete Adventurer and an additional £120 from the sale of half the copyright.
Free student essays: When Payne decided to follow up the Rambler with another serial of moral, aesthetic, and reflective essays, he turned to John Hawkesworth, then a little known but widely employed journalist and a fellow member of the Ivy Lane Club, which met at the King’s Head, a tavern and beefsteak house located in Ivy Lane near St. Paul’s Cathedral. Hawkesworth was a particularly astute choice on Payne’s part: he was a regular contributor to Edward Cave’s Gentleman’s Magazine, where he worked closely with Samuel Johnson and developed an essayistic style so like Johnson’s that contemporary and subsequent readers have struggled to distinguish among their many contributions to the Gentleman’s Magazine.
Free student essays: Furthermore, Johnson had used the weekly Tuesday night meeting of the Ivy Lane Club to test and develop ideas for his Rambler papers. Johnson was the star attraction of that literary society, whose membership included, with Payne and Hawkesworth, the dissenting clergyman Samuel Dyer, the magistrate and editor John Hawkins, and three physicians, William McGhie, Edmund Barker, and Richard Bathurst. The Ivy Lane Club became Hawkesworth’s finishing school as an intellectual, and it was there that he learned to emulate so convincingly the moral and literary voice of Johnson.
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