ABSTRACT
On March 29, 1884, the first issue of The Rambler: A Journal of Men, Manners and Things appeared in Chicago. The weekly publication, modeled after the topical British literary magazine Truth and costing the less-than-princely sum of five cents, was the brainchild of Ian Lewis, an architect, and Reginald de Koven, a classically trained composer withering away in the employ of the J.V.Farwell Company, a dry-goods wholesale business owned by his fiancée’s family. The promised production of Cupid, Hymen and Company had never come to pass, and de Koven had followed his father’s advice and given up the hope of making music his career, but the wholesale business was providing too slender an outlet for the art that was calling to him. As his wife, Anna, recalled in her memoir, A Musician and His Wife:
I have in my mind’s eye a picture of my perplexed young husband, sunk in a deep blue armchair, who, at my question as to his profound despondency, announced that he was convinced he had done very wrong to heed his father’s advice to give up music as a career. That talent will find some way of expressingitself, and will try all sorts of experiments, was shown by my husband’s attempts to found a weekly paper.
