Background
William Maginn was born on the 10th of July, 1793 in Cork, County Cork, Ireland.
William Maginn was born on the 10th of July, 1793 in Cork, County Cork, Ireland.
When its short career was run, William Maginn helped to found in 1827 the ultra Tory Standard, a newspaper that he edited along with a fellow graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, Stanley Lees Giffard. He also wrote for the more scandalous Sunday paper, The Age. In 1830 he instigated and became one of the leading supporters of Fraser's Magazine.
William Maginn's Homeric Ballads, much praised by contemporary critics, were published in Fraser's between 1839 and 1842. In 1837, Bentley's Miscellany was launched, with Charles Dickens as editor, and Maginn wrote the prologue and contributed over the next several years a series of "Shakespeare Papers" that examined characters in counter-intuitive fashion (eg, the key to Falstaff is his melancholy). From "The Man in the Bell" (Blackwood's, 1821) through "Welch Rabbits" (Bentley's, 1842) he was an occasional though skillful writer of short fiction and tales. Three rounds of shots were fired, but no one was struck. One of the most brilliant periodical writers of his time, Maginn left little permanent work behind him. In his later years, 1842, his intemperate habits landed him in debtor's prison, and when he emerged through the grace of the Insolvent Debtor's Act he was in an advanced stage of tuberculosis.