Sharing the Tory politics of Blackwood's Magazine, Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country was founded in 1830 by Hugh Fraser and William Maginn, and edited by the latter until his death in 1842. Like the Athenaeum, Fraser's had no direct links with a publishing house and was aimed a general middle-class audience. Establishing a reputation for its wit and confrontational style, it attacked the laissez-faire policies of the Whig government and was outspoken in support of the Tory paternalist campaign for factory reform. It was an important channel of German thought, and published Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus in 1833-34. Other contributors included William Thackeray, who contributed a series of critical articles on art, 'Strictures on Pictures', during 1839-1845, and Charles Kingsley, whose novel, Yeast, was published in serial form during 1848. The Christian Socialist, J. W. Parker, became editor in 1847. Ruskin 's series of essays on political economy, Munera Pulveris, began publication in 1862, but was terminated because of Ruskin's opposition to current economic theory, just as Unto This Last had been brought to an abrupt end by the Cornhill Magazine in 1860. (See also Graham, English Literary Periodicals, Gross, Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, Houghton, Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, Thrall, Rebellious Frasers.)
A sympathetic review of Modern Painters I appeared in Fraser's Magazine, March 1846, shortly before the publication of Modern Painters II in April that year. Fraser's also welcomed The Stones of Venice (1851, 1853), and supported Ruskin against the critical attack from the Quarterly Review and Edinburgh Review following the publication of Modern Painters III (1856). Other periodicals which took Ruskin's part in response to this attack included the British Quarterly Review, April 1856, the Westminster Review, April 1856, the American Putnam's Monthly Magazine, May 1856, the Eclectic Review, June 1856, the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, June 1856, and the National Review, July 1856. Many of these periodicals represented the interests of religious dissent.