The mutual improvement group that produced this magazine was based at River Terrace Church (River Terrace was later renamed Colebrooke Row), Islington, London. The church was built in 1834 for its Scottish congregation. The River Terrace Young Men’s Association later became The River Terrace Bible Class, before changing again to the Islington Presbyterian Church Young Men’s Association in 1862.

There are two minute books (also housed in the London Metropolitan Archives) and three extant volumes of a manuscript magazine from this later group (see also LMA catalogue for the records of the earlier River Terrace groups). From these, we know that the association was made up of young Scottish men that met weekly at the church between December and June, a session that was a bit unusual for this type of society.  The object of the association was the ‘moral, intellectual and religious improvement of the Young men connected with the church’. Women were allowed to join as full members in January 1891. Four years after its founding, the group started its own manuscript magazine for its members.

In 1866, the first issue of The Aemulus was produced. The contributions to the issue were previously read aloud at the society’s ‘Magazine Nights’. ‘Magazine Evenings’ or ‘Magazine Nights’ were meetings that were devoted to the reading of original essays (or occasionally poems) written by group members that were submitted to the Magazine Editor beforehand. The Editor would be responsible for collecting, occasionally selecting, and reading the pieces aloud to the group (more rarely this was done by the contributor him/herself) on the appointed night. This would be followed by ‘criticism’ — or discussion on the piece’s positive and negative points — by the group members.

After the meetings, these contributions were sometimes bound and saved in the society’s library (if they had one) or would be kept by one of the office bearers. In these cases, it was intended that the magazine was to be preserved and that group members would have access to it at a later date. It is of note that literary and mutual improvement groups used the term ‘magazine’ to refer to the oral as well as the material medium.

The 1866 volume serves as a ‘typical’ example of the later volumes. There are 35 prose pieces, 14 poems (of which two that are listed as such in the front ‘Index’ are acrostics), one musical score for piano and one voice, three illustrations, and six photographs of Office Bearers. According to the ‘Preface’, the pieces were produced over the course of one year, and nineteen members and two non-members contributed.

As the Editor, Thomas William Thacker, wrote at the beginning of the volume, ‘[t]his manuscript magazine was started to give the members of the Islington Presbyterian Church Young Men’s Association a means of committing to paper thoughts more or less matured. It is strictly anonymous: and few beyond the fellow members have seen the parts as they were issued month by month.’ While the group continued to meet until 1894 (at least), it is currently unknown if they continued to produce their magazine after 1878.

Name of Club, Society or Group That Produced the Magazine

Islington Presbyterian Church Young Men’s Association (London)

Date of Existence

1862-1894?

Date of Magazine

Vol. I, ‘(Parts IX)’, 1866; Vol. III, 1868-1869; Vol. III [sic], 1878

Number of Issues

3

Manuscript/Published Magazine

Manuscript

Contents and Contributions

Art/Illustrations (original); Articles (non-fiction); Editorials; Essays; Indexes; Lists of Office Bearers; Magazine Rules; Music; Photographs (members); Poems (original); Prefaces; Puzzles; Title pages

Repository

London Metropolitan Archives

Reference

LMA/4303/E/04/015;
LMA/4303/E/04/016;
LMA/4303/E/04/017

Overview

A summary of the history of the Pollokshields Free Church Literary Institute is available on our sister website, Glasgow’s Literary Bonds (see ‘Additional Notes’ below).

One 74 page volume (the second) survives of this magazine. The volume is neatly written in the same or very similar hand throughout, and contains a list of members on the inside cover: six names are listed as editors of the M.S. Magazine. The editor’s Preface states that contributions show that their writers are ‘desirous – nay, determined – to take advantage of the written, as well as the spoken, means of improvement in literary efforts’, that they preserve the memory of good talks given at weekly meetings, and that they show the ‘degree of literary merit’ expressed at these meetings.

Of particular interest in this magazine is the focus in several contributions on the dangers of ‘theories of scepticism and infidelity’ current in the 1880s (‘Stray Reflections’ by ‘A Moderate’). Hugh Smith, for example, in ‘The Advantages of Literary Institutes’, notes as one of the additional advantages of literary institutes that they enable young men to ‘understand and discriminate between false and true argument’, meaning that they are less likely to question their Christian beliefs.

The magazine contains reflective and descriptive essays on various subjects, including ‘Stray Reflections on Study’, ‘The Advantages of Literary Institutes’, ‘A Day on Scuir-na-Gillean’ (Skye), ‘Temper’, ‘Life on the Stage’, ‘Home Mission Effort’ and ‘General Knowledge’.

Name of Club, Society or Group That Produced the Magazine

Pollokshields Free Church Literary Institute (Glasgow)

Date of Existence

1883?-1887?

Date of Magazine

No. 2, Session 1883-84 (Carbon duplicate of MS)

Number of Issues

1 (extant)

Manuscript/Published Magazine

Manuscript

Contents and Contributions

Articles (non-fiction); Editorial; Essays; List of Office Bearers; Membership list; Table of Contents; Title page

Repository

Mitchell Library Special Collections

Reference

97615, 285-2/G

Additional Notes

See also entry for Pollokshields Free Church Literary Institute on our sister website, Glasgow’s Literary Bonds.

This society was based at Park Church, located on Grosvenor Lane, Highbury, London, which was a Scottish Presbyterian church. It had a thriving middle-class congregation, and several active clubs and societies attached to it, including this young men’s literary association. The society was founded in 1859, and their later minute books — also housed at London Metropolitan Archives —  still survive.

Whilst initially made up of young Scottish men, after 1895, women were allowed to join as full members. Overall, this was a fairly good-sized group, with an average of 63 members between 1881 and 1897, and its membership appears to have risen slightly in the first decades of the twentieth century to around 77 members.

There are 15 extant issues of this association’s magazine, eight of which date from 1901 to 1911 (falling within our study’s time frame of 1800 and 1914), and were the sole focus in this project. This miscellany has a variety of fiction and non-fiction pieces on a variety of topics, and the number of original poems is a bit higher than other mutual improvement and literary society magazines. There are also several biographical pieces on canonical authors such as Hans Christian Anderson, Charles Kingsley and Charles Lamb.

A particularly notable feature of this magazine was the elaborate, handcrafted covers and bindings that were used, with most issues having an elaborate outer cover that was attached to the inner magazine with a colourful ribbon. The most elaborate of these was a needlepoint cover, the design of which was taken from a book cover housed in the British Museum that was said to be made by Queen Elizabeth. This magazine was intended to be saved and was perhaps a treasured production of this society.

Name of Club, Society or Group That Produced the Magazine

Park Church Literary Society (in association with Park Presbyterian Church, Grosvenor Place, Highbury, Islington, London)

Date of Existence

1859-1939?

Date of Magazine

1901-1911; 1929-1937

Number of Issues

The Highbury Magazine, No. 2 (1901); No. 3 (1902); No. 4 (1903); No. 6 (1905); No. 8 (1907); No. 9 (1908); No. 10 (1909); No. 12 (1911); 1 vol (1926-1927);

Park Church Literary Magazine, 1 vol. (1926-1927); 1 vol. (1930-1931)

(Within the date range of this study: 8 issues, 1901-1911.)

Manuscript/Published Magazine

Manuscript

Contents and Contributions

Advertisements (humorous); Articles (non-fiction); Ballad (original); Circulation List; Clippings (printed material); Correspondence column; Editorial; Fiction/Narratives; List of Office Bearers; Magazine Rules; Music; Poems (original); Tables of Contents; Title pages

Repository

London Metropolitan Archives

Reference

LMA/4366/B/008-15 (for later magazines, see: LMA/4303/E/02/043; LMA/4303/E/02/044)

Overview

According to the ‘Preface’ of the 1849 volume, The Society for Mutual Improvement was formed in 1846. Since that time, it had admitted 48 men (see below) and had 108 essays delivered at its meetings. The society had its own library for its members’ use in which it was estimated there were between two and three hundred volumes. The object of the society was ‘the improvement of the Minds of its Members in Useful and Entertaining knowledge’ (‘Laws and Constitution, 1849’, The Society for Mutual Improvement, Edinburgh, in The Weekly Miscellany, Nos. 1-26, 02 February 1849 – 25 July 1849, p. viii).

The group met weekly on Friday nights at 7pm, but the venue is not mentioned (possibly somewhere in the New Town?). The subscription fee was 4d per quarter. There is no list of readers in this volume, and, with the exception of the Office Bearers — a list of which is found at the front of the volume — we don’t know the members’ names or addresses. It is unclear if the 48 members stated to have been admitted since the society’s founding represented the then current state of its membership: in February 1849, the number of members is given as 22, with only about half of the members attendant at the meetings (‘A Correspondent’, ‘Correspondence’, The Weekly Miscellany, 9 February 1849, p. 16).

The magazine (the full title of which is The Weekly Miscellany; Containing Contributions from various Members of The Society for Mutual Improvement) ‘originated in a desire for benefiting the Society with which it is connected by furnishing a medium for the interchange of sentiment between its Members’ (James Boyd, ‘Preface’, The Weekly Miscellany, p. iv). There are 26 issues bound together in one hardcover volume. With very few exceptions, each issue is eight pages with between four and five short contributions apiece written by various members of the society using a nom-de-plume, all of which are re-written by James Boyd, the Editor-cum-Treasurer. This was an uncommon practice in mutual improvement and literary groups. It was usually done to try to maintain the anonymity of the authors as their respective handwriting was presumably recognisable by other group members. It also helped to give a uniformity to the magazine, which, for some societies — including this one — was of some import.

The issues contain a mixture of essays and articles on various topics, and some serial fictional pieces along with original poetry. Beginning in May 1849, it also includes a few extracts from published authors (e.g. Samuel Johnson, Saint Basil, William Haslitt) as filler material at the very end of an issue. There is no original artwork in any of the issues.

What is interesting about this magazine is that the society seemed to use it as a magazine-cum-minute book: included in each issue is a piece entitled ‘Society for Mutual Improvement’, which records the details of the essay given at the previous week’s meeting, and includes a summary of the ‘criticism’ (i.e. the comments made by members) that followed. Debates were usually held after the essays, and a note of the subject and some general comments are included. Typically, these things are recorded in a society’s minute book rather than its magazine.

A ‘Correspondence’ section is a regular feature in these issues. Members wrote letters to the Editor suggesting improvements for various aspects of the society meetings or the magazine (or both), or indeed for the members themselves. These letters could include criticism of the criticisms. This section thus acted as a dynamic discussion forum for society members.

Name of Club, Society or Group That Produced the Magazine

The Society for Mutual Improvement (Edinburgh)

Date of Existence

October 1846-1849?

Date of Magazine

Nos. 1 – 26, 02 February 1849 – 25 July 1849

Number of Issues

26

Manuscript/Published Magazine

Manuscript

Contents and Contributions

Articles (non-fiction); Correspondence column; Essays; Extracts of published works; Filler; Index; Laws and Constitution; List of Office Bearers; Poems (original); Preface; Serial articles/stories; Title pages

Repository

Mitchell Library Special Collections

Reference

Mitchell (AL) 358075