London Mercury

The London Mercury was the name of several periodicals published in London from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. The earliest was a newspaper that appeared in 1682 during the Exclusion Bill crisis; it lasted only 56 issues. (Earlier periodicals had employed similar names: Mercurius Politicus, 1659; The Impartial Protestant Mercury, 1681.) Successor periodicals published as The London Mercury during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In the 20th century, The London Mercury was the major monthly literary magazine published by Field Press from 1919 to 1939. J.C. Squire served as editor from November 1919 to September 1934; Rolfe Arnold Scott-James succeeded Squire as editor from October 1934 to April 1939.

The monthly published a wide variety of serious contemporary literature, including poetry by Robert Frost, Robert Graves, Richmond Lattimore, Siegfried Sassoon, Conrad Aiken, Hilaire Belloc, and William Butler Yeats, among many others.

In 1934 the London Mercury absorbed The Bookman, and published for a time as the London Mercury and Bookman. Especially after Scott-James became editor, the magazine increasingly featured short stories and poetry by Indian writers, and reviews of Indian art and literature. Indian writers who appeared included J.C. Ghosh, Bharati Sarabhai, and Rabindranath Tagore. In 1939 the magazine experienced financial difficulties, and closed down in April, being absorbed into Life and Letters Today. [http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/makingbritain/content/london-mercury The London Mercury, Making Britain, Open University, Web,

The name London Mercury has also been adopted by an "independent online newspaper."