The Athenaeum (British magazine)

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The Athenæum was a weekly British literary magazine published in London from 1828 to 1921.

It began in 1828, started by James Silk Buckingham but was soon bought by Frederick Maurice and John Sterling. For the first volumes it appeared as The Athenæum and Literary Chronicle. It later absorbed The Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review (1819–1828).

In 1829 Charles Wentworth Dilke became part owner and editor, greatly increasing the magazine’s influence. He left the editorship in 1846 to run the Daily News, but he still contributed many important articles to The Athenæum.

The next editors were Thomas Kibble Hervey (1846–1853) and then William Hepworth Dixon (1853–1869). Other notable staff included George Darley, and Gerald Massey, who wrote many literary reviews (especially on poetry) from 1858 to 1868. George Henry Caunter and his brother John Hobart Caunter also contributed reviews. H. F. Chorley covered music from 1830 to 1868. Frederic George Stephens was art editor from 1860 to 1901, and was later replaced by Roger Fry after 1901.

The magazine also featured many famous writers in the 20th century, such as Max Beerbohm, Edmund Blunden, T. S. Eliot, Robert Graves, Thomas Hardy, Aldous and Julian Huxley, Katherine Mansfield, George Santayana, Edith Sitwell, and Virginia Woolf. In the 19th century, Geraldine Jewsbury was a prolific reviewer (1849–1880), one of the few women reviewers, who favored morally strong and entertaining novels and edited the New Novels section in the late 1850s.

In 1846 William Thoms launched a folklore column under the name Folk-Lore, inviting readers to submit notes on manners, customs, superstitions, and other traditional topics. It ran intermittently from 1846 to 1849 and is viewed as an early step toward the field of folklore and Notes and Queries.

Almost all volumes of The Athenæum are available online. The Hathi Trust has many volumes from 1828–1879 and some from 1880–1921, while the Internet Archive lists a large selection of volumes across many years.

In 1905 a letter in the magazine notes the first reference to playing cricket in India.

In 1921, due to falling circulation, The Athenæum merged with The Nation to form The Nation and the Athenaeum. In 1931 this publication merged with the New Statesman to become the New Statesman and Nation, and the Athenaeum name disappeared after 97 years.