ABSTRACT
In the 1820s, the New Monthly Magazine under Henry Colburn, Thomas Campbell, and Cyrus Redding participated in a new domain of public opinion, exploited by Tory apostate George Canning for its leverage against partisan gridlock. Current criticism takes the New Monthly’s refusal of partisanship as a refusal of politics, calling it an authorless institution. Yet partisanship caused the death of the London Magazine’s editor, and the New Monthly went on to dominate the London market by embracing constitutionalism abroad and middle-class reformism at home. Through its contributors, republican émigrés, offshore commentators, and women writers sharing a republican idiom, the New Monthly promoted institutional as well as political reform: a better term than authorless for the magazine’s identity, then, is coverture.
