This thesis is concerned with establishing the nature of the critical standard which Fraser's Magazine, a Victorian journal, used in evaluating the artistic merit of current English novels. Eminent critics such as William Thackeray, Thomas Carlyle, and William Maginn were associated with the magazine during its early years of publication: thus, the early numbers contain some of its most valuable criticism. Because the English novel was in a period of transition in the decade of the 1840's and the years immediately preceding and following it, this study is confined to the twenty-year period from I830 to 1850. Imitative writers of romance and novels of manners were gradually being replaced with novelists concerned with social reform and with the artistic merit of the genre itself. Thackeray's and Maginn's associations with the magazine also occurred during this period, and their literary opinions are an important indication of the magazine's critical development.