Athenaeum, The

a periodical devoted to literature, art, and science founded in 1828 by J. S. Buckingham, who was succeeded as editor in 1830 by Charles Dilke, under whose direction it became the best-selling weekly magazine of its kind. Charles Lamb, W. S. Landor, Thomas Carlyle, Robert Browning, and Walter Pater were among the contributors who established its reputation for the quality of its critical commentaries on literature, drama, painting, and music. The Athenaeum's most memorable period in the twentieth century was under John Middleton Murry's editorship between 1919 and 1921, when T. S. Eliot contributed some thirty-five items; work by Edith Sitwell, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden, and Aldous Huxley was also published. In 1921 it merged with the Nation and continued for ten years as the Nation and Athenaeum; from 1923 it became a mouthpiece for liberal political opinion under the control of a group led by J. M. Keynes. Leonard Woolf was editor of its literary pages, which published writing by Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Gilbert Murray, and Maxim Gorky. In 1931 a further merger with the New Statesman effectively marked the end of the Athenaeum. L. A. Marchand's study The Athenaeum appeared in 1941.