The Manuscript Magazines of the Wellpark Free Church Young Men’s Literary Society

Abstract

This case study examines the three extant manuscript magazines produced by the Wellpark Free Church Young Men’s Literary Society, one of many similar types of clubs and societies in Glasgow throughout the nineteenth century formed for the purpose of ‘mutual improvement’. The society’s magazines provide useful tools to book historians and historians of reading. They gave members a chance to practise and develop their style, penmanship, and skills in writing essays and poetry, and an opportunity to display their artwork, offering a platform for their work to be critically assessed by their peers. Members’ contributions—along with the peer criticisms that immediately follow—offer a wealth of information on various aspects of late-Victorian life more generally. Importantly, they are also a genre that has not been previously studied.