Harper's magazine, one of America's most culturally signifi-cant periodicals, was founded in 1850 under the name Harper's New Monthly magazine by the New York-based Harper & Brothers, the largest publishing company in nineteenth-century America. Initially conceived as a miscellany—a collection of reprints from other publications—consisting mostly of fiction, Harper's gained a broad middle-class audience by positioning itself as the Victorian reader's gateway to refinement and respectability. In the twentieth century, Harper's transformed itself into the magazine of choice for an elite, well-educated readership whose opinions and tastes have helped shape the nation's political debates and social trends.

With an antebellum circulation of two hundred thousand, Harper's was easily the best-read and most influential magazine of its time; its list of nineteenth-century contributors reads like a roll call of some of the era's finest British and American fiction writers. But in spite of its long...