ABSTRACT
The first number of Macmillan’s Magazine appeared at the end of October 1859. Its 80 closely printed double-columned pages, unrelieved by illustrations, contained eight pieces: a sober account of ‘Politics of the Present, Foreign and Domestic’; the first installment of a new novel by Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown’s School Days, a bestseller of two years earlier; two meditative essays – ‘Paper, Pen, and Ink: An Excursus in Technology’ and ‘Cheap Art’; a poem based on Cobbett’s Rural Rides, preceded by a prose introduction; an article about the ongoing Italian struggle against Louis Napoleon; and a half-serious, half-convivial ‘Colloquy of the Round Table’, in which a varied group of men discuss matters of current and perennial concern, drink, smoke and listen to one of their number sing a song about the bibulous ‘Old Sir Simon the King’, ‘son to Old King Cole’.1
