The Mirror

The Mirror was a periodical published in Edinburgh between January 1779 and May 1780, edited largely by Henry Mackenzie and modelled on the great London periodicals of the early eighteenth century like Addison and Steele’s Spectator. Mackenzie used the periodical as a vehicle for short essays, character sketches, and occasional fiction, and the collected volumes of The Mirror that appeared in book form became one of his more substantial contributions to Scottish literary culture.

The Mirror appeared twice weekly and each number consisted of a single essay, usually of a few thousand words, on subjects ranging from morals and manners to literature, the theater, and contemporary social topics. Mackenzie wrote the majority of the essays himself, but he had contributions from other Edinburgh literary figures including Alexander Abercromby, William Craig, and other members of the Mirror Club, a small group of Edinburgh lawyers and writers who met regularly to plan the periodical. The character sketches included in The Mirror are among the most readable of the contents and show Mackenzie working in something close to the early form of the short story.

The essays cover the wide range of subjects that periodical writers of the period treated. There are pieces on female education, on the influence of literature on manners, on the proper conduct of conversation, on the relations between parents and children, on the influence of public taste on the production of plays and novels, and on many other typical late eighteenth century subjects. The tone is generally Moderate and Whiggish, in the Scottish Enlightenment tradition that Mackenzie shared with his Edinburgh contemporaries Hume, Adam Smith, and William Robertson.

The collected volumes of The Mirror run several hundred pages and are best read in essay sized pieces rather than straight through. For readers interested in the periodical literature of the Scottish Enlightenment, this is one of the central documents alongside The Lounger, the later periodical Mackenzie also edited. The Mirror is essentially the Scottish Enlightenment’s answer to The Spectator, with a slightly different intellectual tone and a stronger interest in the developing genre of prose fiction. It pairs naturally with The Lounger and with the contemporary essays of Hugh Blair.