Abstract
The original advertisement of the Edinburgh Review announced the intention to be notable “rather for the selection, than for the number of its articles.” The editorial voice acknowledges that this approach is not new, but an intensification of an existing one:
[T]he tongue of an Edinburgh Reviewer is not the tongue of the wise. It is not the tongue of health, but a running sore.
—John Ring, The Beauties of the Edinburgh Review, Alias the Stinkpot of Literature
Because Mr Blackwood is becoming a great and good Publisher, are we not to review his books? a pretty joke truly. Does the Quarterly Review, never on any occasion whatever, take notice of a single work emanating from Albemarle Street? Does the Edinburgh Review blink every heavy volume from the Mount of Proclamation?… in a certain sense, we ought all to be friends.
—“Postscript to the Public” following a double-columned article, with a letter from “Philomag” on the left, and “Answer from C. North” on the right, Blackwood’s Magazine, XII:54
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Notes
Dallas claims that, but for this insult, the positive reactions of other critics and his friends, as well as brisk sales, would have let him ignore “the asperities of a pseudo-critic, purchased by the proprietors of the Review, like other commodities of trade, to fill their periodical bale.” Emphasizing the Edinburgh’s dehumanization of the “pseudocritic” provides the first of a series of links between the Edinburgh and slaveholders, as the metonymic framework of the article.
A footnote cites Samuel Foote’s The Liar for “Papillons.” In the play, Papilion explains his power as a critic: The whole region of the belles lettres fell under my inspection; physic, divinity, and the mathematics, my mistress managed herself. There, sir, like another Aristarch, I dealt out fame and damnation at pleasure. In obedience to the caprice and commands of my master, I have condemned books I never read, and applauded the fidelity of a translation, without understanding one syllable of the original. (79)
Even after the Quarterly was well established, Scott wrote to Byron about “my friend Jeffrey, for such, in spite of many a feud, literary and political, I always esteem him” (LLJ 1:143).
John Murray learned from Gifford that Lord Teignmouth “and the Wilberforce party had some idea of starting a journal to oppose the Edinburgh Review, that Henry Thornton and Mr. [Zachary] Macaulay were to be the conductors, that they had met, and that some able men were mentioned. Upon [Gifford’s] sounding Lord T. as to their giving us their assistance, he thought this might be adopted in preference to their own plans” (Smiles I:116–7).
Blackstone provides the common gloss; corporations consist “of many persons united together in one society, and are kept up by a perpetual succession of members.” But the distinctions between corporations and individuals is complicated by the existence of “sole corporations” that “consist of one person only and his successors, in some particular station, who are incorporated by law, in order to give them some legal capacities and advantages … which as natural persons they should not have had” (I:457–8). Individuals, corporations, and nations are all, potentially, persons—and the character of their personhood is determined by reference to law.
He is reiterating a theme from the prior letter: “The cure [for the Edinburgh] lies in instituting such a Review in London as should be conducted totally independent of bookselling influence, on a plan as liberal as that of the Edinburgh, its literature as well supported, and its principles English and constitutional” (Lockhart III: 129). He shared the same views with Murray and Gifford; he wrote the latter: The points on which I chiefly insisted with Mr. Gifford were that the Review should be independent both as to bookselling and ministerial influences—meaning that we were not to be advocates of party through thick and thin, but to maintain constitutional principles. Moreover, I stated as essential that the literary part of the work should be as sedulously attended to as the political, because it is by means of that alone that the work can acquire any firm and extended reputation. (Smiles I:103) His insistence on acting from a constitutional perspective, rather than one of party alliance, echoes Jeffrey’s view of the Edinburgh (LLJ 197).
Jonathan Cutmore’s website provides an excellent overview of the Quarterly Review, including useful statistics and the following summary of the accounts for the first issue: This Number cost Murray £544. Costs included £70 for printing, £1 for wrappers, £13 for corrections, £1 for a cancelled article (11 pages), £2 for night work, £156 for paper, £43 for stitching, £50 for the editor, £10 for books, postage, carriage, £30 for advertising, £163 for the articles. Murray’s loss after all 3000 copies were sold was £19. Murray reprinted the number, 1000 copies, on 14 July 1810. The reprinting sold out. Murray printed a third edition of this Number on 6 May 1811, a run of 1000 copies. The Third Edition cost Murray £123, including £52 for printing, £54 for paper, £14 for stitching, and £3 for advertising. By November 1811, Murray still had on hand 800 copies.
If the ground of the Edinburgh was economics, then the Quarterly was founded on a notion of character, and this critique of the Edinburgh emphasizes Jeffrey’s (like Horner’s) assimilationist view of the relation of Scotland to England. In 1807, Walter Scott had accused Francis Jeffrey: “Little by little, whatever your wishes may be … [y]ou will destroy and undermine until nothing of what makes Scotland Scotland shall remain” (Harvie 90). A decade later, Blackwood’s would similarly construct its identity in opposition to the Edinburgh’s assimilationism (Flynn “Early” 46–8).
Jeffrey also wrote “I have seen the Quarterly this morning. It is an inspired work, compared with the poor prattle of [Richard] Cumberland [editor of the London Review]. But I do not think it very formidable; and if it were not for our offences, I should have no fear about its consequences” (LLJ 193). Ballantyne wrote that the Quarterly’s “view of Burns’s character is better than Jeffrey’s. It is written in a more congenial tone, with more tender, kindly feeling. Though not perhaps written with such elaborate eloquence as Jeffrey’s, the thoughts are more original, and the style equally powerful” (Smiles 1:145–6). When the first issue appeared, Southey complained that it was “too much in the temper of the Edinburgh” (Edgar Johnson I:311).
Scott, who similarly felt disabled from publicly engaging English Bards, alludes in his review of Gertrude to the “indiscreet, and undaunted precipitation with which another popular poet is said to throw his effusions before the public with the indifference of an ostrich to their success of failure” (QR II:255).
Gifford contrasts journals to earlier modes of distribution: “I know of no pamphlet that would sell 100; besides, pamphlets are thrown aside, Reviews are permanent, and the variety of their contents attracts those, who never dream of opening a pamphlet.” He also notes, however, the continued strength of the opposition’s press: “In what you say of the secrecy which is affected to the friends of Government, while everything that can do mischief steals into the world through the channels of hostile papers, it is a folly that wants a name” (Barrow 507).
From early on, Jeffrey worried that the Edinburgh would become a commercial, rather than intellectual, enterprise that would define him. In 1803, he wrote to Horner, “I hope you do not imagine that I have made a trade of this editorship. … The main object of every one of us, I understand to be, our own amusement and improvement—joined with the gratification of some personal, and national, vanity” (LLJ I:83). Arguably, the Edinburgh Reviewer was more and differently ambitious than any of its component contributors.
Another way to conceptualize the Edinburgh’s transitional status would focus on its uneasy relation to Scottishness as it developed its British presence; as Fiona Stafford points out, while Byron “perceived an ‘oat-fed phalanx,”’ James Mill “found excessive enthusiasm for all things English” (53). Asserting its own Scottishness allowed Blackwood’s to contrast its own materiality against the Edinburgh’s abstraction.
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© 2009 Mark Schoenfield
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Schoenfield, M. (2009). Proliferating Voices: Founding the Quarterly Review and Maga . In: British Periodicals and Romantic Identity. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230617995_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230617995_4
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