William Hazlitt's days as regular contributor to the London Magazine were few, but they mark a turning point in his career. His most lasting work, the essays written under the pseudonym “Table-Talk,” were begun under Scott's tenure as editor. As in the case of Lamb's essays, Hazlitt's contributions stand in an active relation to the London, but the rhetoricity of the Table-Talk essays differs from that of the Elia essays. Despite their archaic style, Lamb's essays are much more the up-to-date commodity text than Hazlitt's. The diction may be quaint, but the Elia essays accord with the division of labor that marks the production of nineteenth-century periodicals. For all their jaunty modernity, Hazlitt's essays recall an older mode of production: the conversational relation between periodical and contributor established in the eighteenth century. To follow Hazlitt's career in the London under Scott, in the interregnum between Scott's death and the sale of the magazine to the firm of Taylor & Hessey, and under Taylor, is to examine the complex workings of a shifting array of factors – different conceptions of the magazine, different ideological tendencies, and different political commitments – in the production of meaning for Hazlitt's contributions.