Those who would join the Atlantic circle were keenly aware of the cultural problems of so much information, as well as the business challenges of magazines. The publication’s inaugural editor, James Russell Lowell, had launched a magazine in Boston called The Pioneer in the previous decade, promising a better publication for “the intelligent and reflecting portion of the Reading Public.” Readers would find no “thrice-diluted trash” and no “loss of time and deterioration of every moral and intellectual faculty” that comes with it. The venture lasted just three months. For his part, Emerson founded, in the 1840s, the seminal transcendentalist journal The Dial, to provide “one cheerful, rational voice amidst the din of mourning and polemics.” That magazine, also launched during an economic downturn, lasted four years. Emerson could thus knowingly remark in 1850 that “the measles, the influenza, and the magazine” flared up as “periodic distempers” in and around Boston.
But the conditions that birthed these magazine flare-ups only got worse. In 1853, a publisher’s assistant named Francis Underwood briefly persuaded his boss, the publisher who’d taken a chance on publishing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to use some of the proceeds from Stowe’s novel to start a magazine that would combine antislavery activism with serious literary content. That venture, like many others, collapsed before it even made it to print. But in 1856, Underwood resumed conversations in Boston with the people who would form the Atlantic circle—Emerson, Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and others. At a long dinner in the spring of 1857, the group resolved on going forward with the venture.
The magazine they launched was not nearly as strident as Lowell had once been in dismissing the “thrice-diluted trash” that filled most publications. Nor was it quite as direct in its political commitments as Underwood had initially imagined. The goals remained the same, however. The Atlantic would publish original work of “abstract and permanent value” (as its mission statement—signed by Emerson, Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville, and others—put it) while promising to “deal frankly” with politics outside of any direct affiliation with political figures, parties, or reform movements.
The first issue offered 128 double-columned pages in service of that vision, but its purpose was stated most plainly by the stern visage of Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor John Winthrop on the cover: a declaration of Bostonian seriousness against the light, illustrated ephemerality of popular periodicals from New York and Philadelphia. The magazine’s aim, Emerson wrote in his personal journal, was to “guide the age,” even if that meant that it must “defy the public” and refuse what was merely popular or sensational.
