Macmillan's Magazine, widely agreed to be the first ever shilling periodical in Britain, was envisaged by its co-founder, the UCL Professor of English David Masson, as a forum for fiction and non-fiction. With his support and that of lawyer John Ludlow and author Thomas Hughes, the new magazine was its name from its publisher, the bookseller Alexander Macmillan. Before this point, it was standard policy for periodical articles to be written anonymously, something which was much disputed in the mid-nineteenth century, as its opponents saw it as encouraging puffery and defamation, while its proponents argued that it encouraged writerly freedom. Macmillan's was the first periodical to have all its articles signed by their authors.

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Citation: Editors, Litencyc. "Macmillan's Magazine". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 August 2013 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1416, accessed 23 November 2024.]