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Author Description William Maginn was an Irish journalist and writer.<br /><br />Maginn became a contributor to <i>Blackwood's Magazine</i>, and and featured as the character O'Doherty in its series 'Noctes Ambrosianæ'. After moving to London in 1824, he became for a few months in 1826 the Paris correspondent to <i>The Representative</i>, a paper started by John Murray, the publisher. When its short career was run, he helped to found in 1827 the ultra Tory <i>Standard</i>, a newspaper that he edited along with a fellow graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, Stanley Lees Giffard; he also wrote for the more scandalous Sunday paper, <i>The Age</i>. In 1830 he instigated and became one of the leading supporters of <i>Fraser's Magazine</i>. His Homeric Ballads, much praised by contemporary critics, were published in Fraser's between 1839 and 1842.<br /><br />In 1837, <i>Bentley's Miscellany</i> was launched, with <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/239579.Charles_Dickens" title="Charles Dickens" rel="nofollow noopener">Charles Dickens</a> as editor, and Maginn wrote the prologue and contributed over the next several years a series of "Shakespeare Papers" that examined characters in counter-intuitive fashion (e.g., the key to Falstaff is his melancholy). From <i>The Man in the Bell</i> (Blackwood's, 1821) through <i>Welch Rabbits</i> (Bentley's, 1842) he was an occasional though skilful writer of short fiction and tales. His only novel, <i>Whitehall</i> (1827) pretends to be an historical novel set in 1820s England written in the year 2227; it is a droll spoof of the vogue for historical novels as well as the contemporary political scene. He also wrote <i>The Military Sketch-Book: Reminiscences of Seventeen Years Service Abroad and at Home</i>, "By An Officer of the Line" (anonymously) published in two volumes by Henry Colburn in 1827. Partly set in Australia and involving the capture of a notorious gang of Bushrangers.<br /><br />In 1836, he fought a duel with <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/22558162.Grantley_Berkeley" title="Grantley Berkeley" rel="nofollow noopener">Grantley Berkeley</a>, a member of Parliament. Three rounds of shots were fired, but no one was struck. Berkeley had brutally assaulted magazine publisher James Fraser over a review Maginn wrote of Berkeley's novel <i>Berkeley Castle</i>, and Maginn had called him out.

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