James Austen (with his brother, Henry) wrote The Loiterer and published it every Saturday for 60 weeks, starting in January of 1789. Along the way, the men recruited school friends -- it will become immediately clear that the journal belongs to James' Oxford experience -- who contributed several numbers. The bulk of the writing was done, however, by James himself.

Copies of The Loiterer are not very accessible. The Newberry has a paper copy; some research libraries (the University of Georgia and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for example) have microfilmed versions as part of the Early English Newspaper series. Unfortunately, the paper has not been edited since 1792, at the latest, and so it's difficult for those not accustomed to 18th century orthography to read. In addition, it contains the residue of a classical education at that time -- lots of Latin and Greek tags that no one has translated or tracked down. And, at least according to the microfilm's marginalia, probably by Charles Burney in whose collection the filmed volumes belonged, James seemed to have trouble remembering some of them accurately.

I am currently working on an edition of the journal which looks at the original loose papers as well as the bound volumes, modernizes the spelling and characters, and provides footnotes. I am about a third of the way along, and hope to be finished by next summer. The Loiterer is a fantastically fertile document in its own right, but it is especially interesting to students of Austen. So I thought I'd let you in on it as it grows -- I hope you enjoy it.

Because of the age of the journal and its orthography (and the badness of photocopies in general), the text of The Loiterer has had to be entered manually into the computer. I have tried to be as accurate a typist as possible; probably there are several typographical errors. Please email me when you find them.

There are, however, errors in the original text -- words obviously misspelled or left out, or homonym errors -- these I have marked with a [sic] to distinguish them from my own. I have left eighteenth-century and British spellings (s for z, or ou for o in certain words) as they do not obscure meaning and are, after any reader's brief acclimation to the text, not distracting since they are fairly regularly employed.

I have left the format on the title pages as it appears in the original; however, in the body of each paper, I have substituted bold-face for italics to facilitate reading at a computer. Bold-face, I think, is just easier to read.

If you have any questions, please feel free to email me. I have begun working on annotations, too, so if you see things you'd like more information on, let me know. If you'd like the whole text of The Loiterer and you are at or near a large university, you can get probably get it on microfilm at the library. Otherwise...

Emily Hipchen
Assistant Professor
University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

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