Surrey Record Society has published a book reproducing all references to Surrey and its people printed in the world’s first magazine, The Gentleman’s Magazine, between 1731 and 1754. The transcription and research for the volume was undertaken by a team of volunteers at Surrey History Centre, led by Julian Pooley, an authority on the history of the magazine.

The Gentleman’s Magazine, though national in scope, contains much of interest relating to Surrey. The ancient county followed the southern bank of the Thames to include the parishes of Kingston, Richmond, Wandsworth, Lambeth, Southwark, Bermondsey and Rotherhithe, and this proximity to London ensured Surrey’s visibility in each monthly issue, reflecting the diversity of Georgian life: politics, trade, crime and punishment, the arts, religious debate, and advances in technology and agriculture.

Edited by the maverick printer Edward Cave at St John’s Gate in London, this pioneering ‘magazine’ was a compendium of useful and entertaining information aimed at an increasingly literate public in Georgian Britain. Cave presented his readers with a monthly selection from newspapers and pamphlets published in London and the provinces, providing an overview of the political and cultural life of the country alongside a handy almanac of information useful to the aspiring ‘middling sort’. It embraced domestic and foreign news, lists of births, marriages and deaths, reports of freak weather and the latest songs from Vauxhall pleasure gardens on the Surrey side of the Thames.

The Gentleman’s Magazine is a rich resource for Surrey’s family and local historians, reporting the crimes and executions, diseases and ‘infallible remedies’ that, together with religious and political turmoil, markets, fairs and extreme weather, were experienced by our ancestors in Surrey nearly three centuries ago.

In his detailed introduction, Julian Pooley draws on his knowledge of the magazine’s editors, printers and contributors to place the genesis of the magazine within the print culture of the mid-eighteenth century, and uncovers the magazine’s stories of daily life in Georgian Surrey.

Published by Surrey Record Society and available from Surrey History Centre for £31.50 including handling fee, plus postage.

Surrey Record Society Volume L: Surrey in the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’, 1731–1754, edited by Julian Pooley (2026). Source: Surrey Archives.