Graham's American Monthly Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Fashion, Volume 49, Issue 6
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
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Graham's American Monthly Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Fashion, Volume 49, Issue 6
George Rex Graham, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Jacobs Peterson, Ann Sophia Stephens, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, Robert Taylor Conrad, Joseph Ripley Chandler, Bayard Taylor
G. R. Graham, 1856
Graham's American Monthly Magazine of Literature, Art, and Fashion, Volume 47
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
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Graham's American Monthly Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Fashion, Volume 45
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George Rex Graham was an editor, publisher. In January 1841 he issued the first number of Graham’s Magazine to 5, 500 subscribers.
Background
George Rex Graham was born on January 18, 1813, in Philadelphia. He was the elder child of a shipping merchant who lost his money and died poor just as his son, aged fifteen, was to enter the law office of Charles Jared Ingersoll.
The orphaned boy and his sister Mary then found an asylum with a prosperous maternal uncle, George Rex, on a farm in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.
Education
In 1832, Graham returned to Philadelphia and apprenticed himself to a cabinetmaker. With ardent literary and forensic ambitions, he pored at night over Addison, Burke, and Blackstone, and got himself introduced to Judge Thomas Armstrong, who consented to direct his legal studies.
Career
To comply with the bar regulations, Graham worked for one year as a clerk in Armstrong’s office, meanwhile rising daily at 4: oo a. m. so as to work at his trade in the early morning as well as after hours.
On March 27, 1839, he was admitted to practice. Two months later, however, he became assistant editor of Samuel C. Atkinson’s Saturday Evening Post and at the same time bought from his employer a small magazine, the Casket.
In November 1840, he paid William Evans Burton $3, 500 for the Gentleman’s Magazine. Combining his two subscription lists, in January 1841, he issued the first number of Graham’s Magazine to 5, 500 subscribers.
At one time or another, Charles J. Peterson. Edgar Allan Poe, Rufus Wilrnot Griswold, Emma Catherine Embury, Ann Sophia Stephens, Robert Taylor Conrad, Joseph Ripley Chandler, and Bayard Taylor were on the staff, but Graham was his own editor and determined his own policies.
In place of the insipid, jejune, even stale provender then usual, he offered his readers an entirely fresh, appetizing, and varied diet of fiction, light essays, verse, biography, travel, art criticism, book notices, and editorial chat, with a mezzotint every month by the popular John Sartain, a colored fashion plate, and later one or more other engravings.
With canny understanding he made Graham’s the kind of men’s magazine that appeals most strongly to women. He secured contributions from a galaxy of favorite writers by paying them with unprecedented liberality.
This, his greatest innovation, compelled a general increase in magazine rates and made the “Graham page” the standard unit of measure. His success was immediate.
In March 1842, he claimed 40, 000 subscribers, and for some time the magazine yielded an annual profit of $50, 000.
In August 1848, he was forced to assign Graham’s to Samuel D. Patterson & Company, though he remained its editor. Recouping some of his losses, he bought it back in March 1850, but his energies had abated, and the magazine did not flourish. In December 1853, he sold out for good.
His career was ended, although his life was not half over. After 1857, his name disappeared from McElroy’s Philadelphia Directory, which had listed him as connected with the Saturday Evening Mail.
In 1870, in New York, he was beggared by a stock swindle. A place was found for him on the Newark, New Jersey, Daily Journal, but although his habits were good, his mind was sluggish and his will feeble.
He died in the hospital and was buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia.
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
Views
Graham was interested in the Evening Bulletin and speculated in mining stocks and Pennsylvania mountain land. Financial difficulties overwhelming him, he neglected his magazine and began to drink heavily.
Personality
By nature Graham was amiable, generous, and optimistic. Grown suddenly rich, he took a mansion on Arch Street, kept a handsome carriage, and played the host to statesmen, authors, and foreign notables, but his lavishness has been exaggerated.
His house adjoined that of a wine merchant, Elijah Van Syckel, and as the two families were intimate a doorway was cut through the party wall.
Van Syckel, however, did not use his home for a warehouse, and the door did not facilitate the delivery of wine for Graham’s dinners. But his prosperity was short. With Robert Montgomery Bird and Morton McMichael, he bought the Philadelphia North American and merged with it the United States Gazette.
For a while, he lived with a nephew at St. Cloud, Essex County, New Jersey.
In 1880, cataracts were removed from both his eyes and his sight partially restored.
Pensioned by several wealthy Philadelphians, he was cared for by Frank Wilfred Baldwin of the Orange, New Jersey, Chronicle until 1887, when he was committed to the Orange Memorial Hospital.
To visitors he would talk, serenely and with evident pleasure, of the great men he had known in early life, dwelling especially on his relations with Longfellow and Poe.
Connections
In 1839, Graham married Elizabeth Fry of Germantown. She died in 1871.