THE LITERARY INTERESTS OF CHICAGO 5 1 1
on merging the Alliance in March 1882, the Western Magazine became the Weekly Magazine, and announced that thereafter it would
present to its readers each week the same choice collection of literary matter, with an added department of great interest devoted to discussions, by able and well-known writers, on the important political, social, and economic topics.
While the weekly sermon-essay by Professor Swing, written after the manner of Addison in The Roger de Coverly Papers, was the leading literary feature, and there were some stories and poems, the main source of interest in the contents of the Weekly Magazine came more and more to be inquiry about social ques- tions. A regular letter from Washington was sent by Gail Hamilton. James G. Elaine contributed an article on "The South American Policy of the Garfield Administration." Mr. William A. Starrett, Mrs. Starrett's husband, at first associate editor, wrote such acceptable reviews of political events that in the later numbers his name was put above Mrs. Starrett's in the lines naming the editors.
The circulation of the Weekly Magazine reached 23,450 in 1883, not equaling, however, the 50,000 credited to the Western Magazine in 1880. It was backed to an extent by prominent Chicago business men. George M. Pullman and C. B. Farwell contributed $1,000 each for stock, and Marshall Field $500. The editors had no part in the business management. The business manager, who had previously been in charge of the Alliance, got the affairs of the Weekly Magazine into such a hopeless tangle that it became bankrupt, and ended its career in 1884.
The history of the Western Magazine and the Weekly Maga- zine gives another example of the diverting of the aesthetic literary interest to the knowledge interest. But the story of its attraction to Chicago from the farther West, and of its develop- ment thereafter, shows the movement toward metropolitanism in Chicago, and carries us over into a period of greater develop- ment toward that characteristic in the eighties.
