The Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle
2022, 16 minutes
Synopsis:
The pages of an 18th Century antiquarian British magazine, the first of its sort, come to life as the illustrations in it try to find their places.
Filmmaker’s Note:
Flipping through the pages of The Gentleman’s Magazine’s 1794 edition, the pastoral landscapes and curious reclics of a pre-industrialized England unfold in fine woodcuts.This magazine along with the name ‘magazine’ were both the brainchildren of Edward Cave of London. He took the word from the French term meaning ‘storehouse’ and came up with the novel idea for a monthly digest of news and commentary on any topic the educated public might be interested in. It was such a success that the magazine had a running life of more than 2 centuries. Samuel Johnson was a regular employee before he went on to compile the first English Lexicon. An entrepreneur who dabbled in the earliest form of a water-powered spinning mill, Cave was on the doorstep of the great Industrial Revolution as well as on the threshold of England’s colonial victory in many parts of the world. As such, the magazine reflects this new age of unbridled curiosity and passion for classification in England, where all information was power as well as leisure. Pragmatism and escapism are laid out side by side, like a cabinet of curiosities compressed in print. The pages seem to brim with the urge: “To renew the old world – that is the collector’s deepest desire” as Walter Benjamin put it. In that world of quaint knowledge is also recorded a ‘chirurgical operation’ from Poona, India. Is it a coincidence that the magazine earlier called the Trader’s Monthly Intelligencer, is structurally very much in sync with the numerous gazetteers and other sorts of data-banks on India created by numerous British civil administrators whose labours laid the foundation to the Empire to come? These pages reinvoke that spirit of curiosity where knowledge from anywhere was tailored to spectacular utilitarian effect. There is even a disquietinening charm to the unselfconscious historiography in the making.