ABSTRACT
The new magazine's sense of novelty did have its historical precedents, though. Samuel Johnson's Rambler essays provided one of the primary models for the kind of writing that was revived as a novel mode of literary composition in literary magazines of the 1820s and 30s. The possible import of this magazine for my exploration of the significance of magazine writing for ideas of literature in the 1830s depended, in part, upon the correct authorial attribution for the essay entitled, "Literature of the Day—The New Magazine", and signed, simply, "M". John Wilson's serialized and collaborative work of critical fiction, Noctes Ambrosianae raises important questions about the changing status of the romantic lyric within the context of a monthly periodical that was aware of how ephemerality and novelty now informed the production and conceptualization of literature. The Noctes is perhaps best characterized as a dialogical, literary gossip column that tries to keep track of the vanities of the day.
