The Imperial Magazine; or, Compendium of religious, moral, and philosophical knowledge

James?] J.P.C. (pseud.) [Crossley, William Harrison Ainsworth

Book

The Imperial Magazine; or, Compendium of religious, moral, and philosophical knowledge

James?] J.P.C. (pseud.) [Crossley, William Harrison Ainsworth

1821

Full title: The Imperial Magazine; or, Compendium of religious, moral, and philosophical knowledge: comprehending religion, literature, moral philosophy, or ethics, natural philosophy, chemistry, review of books, historical narrative, antiquities, domestic economy, trade, miscellaneous articles, poetry. Volume three, for 1821. 8vo. pp. 4, cols. 1240. Signatures: [A]4 B-Z4 2A-2Z4 3A-3Z4 4A-4I4. Illustrated. Vol. 3, containing (cols. 507-15) ‘An Old Tragedy’, signed ‘J.P.C., Inner Temple’, but in all likelihood written by the young law clerk and bibliophile James Crossley of Manchester (1800-1883), perhaps in collaboration with the even younger future novelist, William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882). The pair had amused themselves by inventing specimens of Elizabethan and 17th-century verse and prose, which they submitted successfully–under silly pseudonyms– to several uncritical journals, and in 1821, just as John Payne Collier was republishing specimens of the early drama in critical essays in the Edinburgh Magazine, they managed to place in the relatively obscure Imperial Magazine some extended extracts from a supposed Jacobean tragedy, ‘The famouse historie of Petronius Maximus . . . now attempted in blanke verse by W. S.’ This was described as ‘formerly bound up in a volume of worthless tracts’, and ‘printed by William Brent for Nathaniel Butter, 1619’, and they compounded their mischief, for no obvious reason, by signing the introductory note ‘J.P.C.’ They then revised their text slightly and resubmitted it to the Edinburgh Magazine itself (having changed ‘J. P.C.’, a potentially dangerous trick, to plain ‘T.’) and that journal duly reprinted their ‘blanke verse’ a month later. Whatever their point was at the time–this was long before Collier was suspected of any such chicanery, and he may never have seen the Imperial version– the prank took a dark turn forty years later, when Crossley, in Notes and Queries, disingenuously called attention to the existence of the ‘J.P.C.’ version, describing the text as ‘extremely suspicious’ (‘I consider [it] to be of modern manufacture’). Collier, at this moment up to his neck in defending himself from (valid) accusations of Shakespearean forgery, was understandably nonplussed. See A. and J. Freeman, John Payne Collier. Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century. New Haven, 2004, pp. 885-88. <a href="https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog/bib_4103428" rel="ugc nofollow">Click here to view the Johns Hopkins University catalog record.</a>