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Over the forty-eight years of its existence, Macmillan’s Magazine­ hosted -- in addition to poetry by Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Longfellow, George Meredith, and Matthew Arnold, essays by Arnold, Spencer, Thomas Henry Huxley, and Harriet Martineau -- works of fiction in serial form by Charles Kingsley, Margaret Oliphant, Thomas Hardy, and the American writers Francis Marion Crawford and Henry James. Arnold and Alexander Macmillan had a particularly close relationship of mutual respect and trust, with well over two dozen volumes of essays and poems by Arnold being published, frequently reprinted, and put out in new editions by the house of Macmillan (Bell, pp. 52-69). Though the Tennyson connection was somewhat less smooth, Tennyson being a notoriously hard bargainer, Alexander was a true admirer of his work. In a letter of January 1884, written on the occasion of a new contract with the poet to Tennyson’s wife Emily, herself a poet, Alexander recounted that “it is just forty years since I first read ‘Poems by Alfred Tennyson’, and got bitten by a healthy mania from which I have not recovered – and don’t want to recover. [. . .] How much I owe to Alfred Tennyson for the increase of ennobling thought & feeling, no one can tell. Now our closer connection will not lessen my desire to repay the debt” (quoted in Millgate, p. 132).

Introductory material

A sampling of the Magazine's Articles on Art and Architecture

A sampling of the Magazine's Literary Articles

A sampling of the Magazine's Articles on Social and Political History


Last modified 5 November 2020