The Mechanics' Magazine

Joseph Clinton Robertson (c.1787–1852), pseudonym Sholto Percy, was a Scottish patent agent, writer and periodical editor. He was a political radical prominent in the early days of the working-class press in London, and in the debates within the Mechanics Institute movement.

He was born about 1787, the son of Colin Robertson of Perth, Scotland, a doctor who was required to leave Scotland, and of Grant Thompson, daughter of Bailie Adam Thompson. His family was of the Robertsons of Lude, his upbringing was Catholic, and it is assumed he was born in Perth, the birthplace London given in the Dictionary of National Biography being a later fabrication. Reacting against his background he went to Edinburgh and became involved with radicals there. By 1811 he had written for the Spy of James Hogg. He went to London in 1819, and did hack work for the publisher Thomas Boys.

Robertson founded The Mechanics' Magazine in 1823, and edited and largely wrote it until the year of his death. It was a low-priced scientific weekly, and the first publication of its kind. To begin with he was in close alliance with Thomas Hodgskin: they had met in Edinburgh. It took advantage of a stamp tax exemption for technical weeklies not dealing in news. Robertson also devised a way of generating cheap content by an early crowdsourcing technique: letters to the editor were used without payment in continuing threads.

In the Mechanics Magazine Robertson first proposed the London Mechanics' Institution. The idea was shortly taken out of his hands and those of Hodgskin, by a group around George Birkbeck. Robertson became a long term critic of the Institution.

Robertson's publishers John Knight and Henry Lacey attempted in 1826 to remove him from the editorship of the Magazine on the pretext of his quarrel with Birkbeck over the Institution; but Robertson had recourse to the law and his ownership of the title. In fact Robertson had been fraudulently passing letters of credit, claiming to a partner of "Knight, Lacey & Robertson", and successfully blackmailed his publishers, whose other publication the Pulpit had an evangelical readership, by threats to their reputation. Knight & Lacey became bankrupt that year, and in a complex series of events the Mechanics Magazine was published dually for a period, two versions of the same title being produced weekly. Lacey left for the USA, and Henry Kelly was brought in by Knight as a new partner. The Bankruptcy Court dealt with the matter by requiring Robertson to work on as editor, but upheld his claim to the title. By 1829, with just one more dual issue, the legal dust had settled.

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