While Great Britain was fighting the War of Jenkins' Ear with Spain in 1740, Commodore George Anson led a squadron of eight ships on a mission to disrupt or capture the Spanish possessions in the Pacific. He returned to Britain in 1744 by way of China, thereby completing a circumnavigation of the globe. The voyage was notable for the capture of the Manila galleon and for its horrific losses due to powerful storms and disease, with only 188 men of the original 1,854 crew and officers surviving. An account of the voyage was published in 1748. It was widely read by the general public and was a great commercial success. It has been described in 1899 as being "still esteemed as the story of a remarkable voyage extremely well told."[1]
The London Magazine is England’s oldest literary periodical, with a history stretching back to 1732. Today – reinvigorated for a new century – the Magazine’s essence remains unchanged: it is a home for the best writing and an indispensable feature on the British literary landscape.
Across a long life – spanning several incarnations – the pages of the Magazine have played host to a wide range of canonical writers, from Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Hazlitt and John Keats in the nineteenth century, to T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and Evelyn Waugh in the early twentieth century. Meanwhile, in recent decades the Magazine has published work by giants of contemporary fiction and poetry such as William Boyd, Nadine Gordimer, and Derek Walcott.
The London Magazine was founded in 1732 as The London Magazine, or Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer, a rival to the new, and popular, Gentleman’s Magazine.