[2] In its April 1819 issue it published John Polidori's Gothic fiction The Vampyre, the first significant piece of prose vampire literature in English, attributing it to Lord Byron, who partly inspired it.
Colburn paid contributors well, and they included Sydney Morgan, Thomas Charles Morgan, Peter George Patmore, Mary Shelley, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, Stendhal, Thomas Noon Talfourd, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Felicia Hemans, Ugo Foscolo, Richard Lalor Sheil, Mary Russell Mitford, Edward Bulwer, James and Horace Smith, and William Hazlitt.
In 1831 the novelist Edward Bulwer became editor, turning "the essentially apolitical, slightly Whiggish, literary journal into a vigorous radical organ shouting 'Reform' at the top of its lungs.
Contributors now included Catherine Gore, Anna Maria Hall, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Felicia Hemans, Caroline Norton, Thomas Haynes Bayly, and Theodore Edward Hook.
Now edited by Theodore Hook,[7] it published contributions from Leigh Hunt, Douglas Jerrold, Frederick Marryat, Frances Trollope, Charles Robert Forrester, and W. M. Thackeray.