Sider Jost, Jacob. TheGentleman’s Magazine, Samuel Johnson, and the Symbolic Economy of Eighteenth-Century Poetry. The Review of English Studies (RES) 66, no. 277 (2015): 915–935. https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgv047

Jacob Sider Jost is a professor of English at Dickinson College.

Between 1733 and 1736, Edward Cave offered a series of eight poetry contests in his newly founded Gentleman’s Magazine. These competitions varied widely in theme and scale, ranging from an offer of free back issues for the best set of epigrams to a substantial £50 prize for the best poem, in English or Latin, on a weighty devotional topic. Taken as a whole, Cave’s contests were an attempt to appropriate and supplant incumbent sources of literary prestige, particularly the traditional model of courtly and aristocratic patronage. Just as Richard Savage set himself up in the 1730s as a ‘volunteer laureate’, the Gentleman’s Magazine offered itself to English elites as a volunteer patron and would-be tastemaker. This attempt to assert the magazine’s critical authority by adapting traditional patronage models and appealing to the Whiggish Hanoverian court was a failure; even today, the critical judgements and canonical consecrations of opposition figures like Pope are dominant. I close by suggesting that Cave’s contests may have a further legacy as an influence on the career of the young Samuel Johnson.

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