This weekend The Spectator reaches a truly historic milestone. For forty years, it has been the oldest current-affairs or literary magazine in the UK, since Blackwood’s Magazine (1817-1980) at last came to an end. But now, in its 2,300th month, it becomes the longest-running news magazine in the world, taking that title from the journal that started the genre.
The Gentleman’s Magazine that appeared in 1731 was not just any magazine: it was the venture that first launched this word in print, repurposing the French/Arabic magasin/makhazin (‘storehouse’) to describe its novel medley of current affairs, news gazette, literary criticism and antiquarian speculation. (While the original Spectator, founded by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele twenty years earlier, was an amalgam of individual essays on all and sundry subjects, it was in no sense a journal of news.)
Devised by the printer and inventor Edward Cave (1691-1754) – under the optimistic pseudonym of ‘Sylvanus Urban, Gent.’
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