ABSTRACT
The Aberdeen Magazine, Literary Chronicle, and Review, printed by J. Chalmers & Co., began publication on Thursday, 17 January 1788 and finished in December 1791 (D. L. McCue, ‘Aberdeen Magazine, Literary Chronicle and Review’, in A. Sullivan (ed.), English Literary Magazines: Augustan Age and the Age of Johnson, 1698–1788 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), pp. 3–8). A bimonthly 8vo selling for 3d. per 32-page number, it was collected in four volumes. According to the preface of its first volume, the purpose of the Aberdeen Magazine was to fill ‘a vacancy in our Northern literary amusements’ by providing ‘One Original Essay, at least … in every number’, as well as reprinted items from other magazines (p. iii). Perhaps as a result, in 1888, J. Malcolm Bullock commented that ‘[b] esides some music and local gossip, it is a worthless production, characterized by the pomposity and sickly didactic writing of the period’ (‘A Bibliography of Local Periodical Literature’, Scottish Notes and Queries, 1 (1888), pp. 3–5).
