The Kaleidoscope; or, Literary and Scientific Mirror was an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 weekly published between 1818 and 1831 by the Liverpool

Liverpool

Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...

 publisher Egerton Smith

Egerton Smith

Egerton Smith was a Liverpool publisher, founder of the Liverpool Mercury.Egerton Smith was the son of Egerton Smith the elder and Ann Prescott. He joined his mother and then his brother in the family firm, making navigational instruments, and took out a patent for one invention in 1809. However,...

 (1774-1841), who had established the Liverpool Mercury in 1811. The magazine's name was taken from David Brewster

David Brewster

Sir David Brewster KH PRSE FRS FSA FSSA MICE was a Scottish physicist, mathematician, astronomer, inventor, writer and university principal.-Early life:...

's recent invention. The first number appeared on July 28, 1818 in folio form; two years later the publication became an eight-page quarto

Quarto

Quarto could refer to:* Quarto, a size or format of a book in which four leaves of a book are created from a standard size sheet of paper* For specific information about quarto texts of William Shakespeare's works, see:...

. The price was kept at threepence-halfpenny throughout the magazine's history.

An anonymous writer for the British Quarterly Review suggested that the Kaleidoscope was Britain's first cheap weekly miscellany: "It consisted of slight original and selected articles in literature, science and art, and aimed at that happy combination of instruction and amusement which has since been more elaborately developed in still cheaper serials." Contributors included William

William Howitt

William Howitt , was an English author.He was born at Heanor, Derbyshire. His parents were Quakers, and he was educated at the Friends public school at Ackworth, Yorkshire. His younger brothers were Richard and Godrey whom he helped tutor. In 1814 he published a poem on the Influence of Nature and...

 and Mary Howitt

Mary Howitt

Mary Howitt was an English poet, and author of the famous poem The Spider and the Fly. She was born Mary Botham at Coleford, in Gloucestershire, the temporary residence of her parents, while her father, Samuel Botham, a prosperous Quaker of Uttoxeter, Staffordshire, was looking after some mining...

, and the magazine also inserted the American Washington Irving

Washington Irving

Washington Irving was an American author, essayist, biographer and historian of the early 19th century. He was best known for his short stories "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle", both of which appear in his book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. His historical works...

's Sketch Book.

The last number bore the date September 6, 1831. The magazine was being discontinued, Egerton Smith informed his readers, since the new railways

Liverpool and Manchester Railway

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway was the world's first inter-city passenger railway in which all the trains were timetabled and were hauled for most of the distance solely by steam locomotives. The line opened on 15 September 1830 and ran between the cities of Liverpool and Manchester in North...

 had disrupted road distribution by stage-coach.

External links

• Republished as part of ProQuest
  ProQuest
  ProQuest LLC is an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based electronic publisher and microfilm publisher.It provides archives of sources such as newspapers, periodicals, dissertations, and aggregated databases of many types. Its content is estimated at 125 billion digital pages...
  
  's British Periodicals Collection I (subscription only)