The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (February issue)

Early in January, William Fulford took over the job of editing The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine from Morris, who paid him £100 for the taking job ( Memorials 127). Mackail sees this change as a mixed blessing: Fulford’s energy helped keep the magazine going, but his own contributions weighed it down (37). This condemnation is perhaps unfair, as Fulford, especially in the later issues, had trouble finding contributors to fill the magazine’s pages, and was forced to include his own work. Certainly the magazine could not have survived as long as it did without Fulford’s efforts. Morris, toward the end of January, had signed with Street’s architecture firm (Mackail 109), and it is doubtful the magazine would have continued had he remained editor.

Burne-Jones mentioned the second issue of the magazine in an 1855 letter to Maria Choyce, telling her that it was to contain, besides the next parts of Heeley’s essay on Sidney and Fulford’s on Tennyson: A Northern Tale (by himself); an essay on French churches (by Morris); an essay on The (Crimean) War, (by Dixon); a review of Macaulay (by Heeley); and an essay on Carlyle (by Vernon Lushington) ( Memorials 122). Not all of these predictions were correct. The second part of Heeley’s essay on Sidney did not appear until March, and his review of Macaulay was not published until April (though Macaulay’s book, then being serialized in Notes and Queries, is advertised on the back cover of this issue). In place of these are a story by Fulford, an essay on Shakespeare by Price, and a poem by Fulford.

The first letter of each entry in the Magazine is ornamental, and in this issue and the January issue, the ornamental letter of the first entry is larger than the rest. This practice was abandoned after the second issue (Forman 26). Burne-Jones also hoped to have an engraving in this issue, but did not. In fact, though Burne-Jones was nominally the official artist for the Magazine, the only engravings included in any of the issues are Woolner’s medallions of Carlyle and Tennyson.

The insert at the front of this issue, alerting the reader that Dixon’s essay was in type before the arrival of news of the coming end of Crimean war and promising another essay on this theme, demonstrates the topical, political nature of The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine , one of the main factors that distinguishes it from The Germ.