Abstract
William Blackwood found the name ‘Magazine … already degraded to the dust, when he planned his memorable revolution in that department of literature’, announced Thomas De Quincey in 1827; ‘and it would be too much to expect, that ten years of brilliant writing should dissolve the inveterate associations which almost a century of dulness had gathered about that title’. Yet as De Quincey went on to acknowledge, these associations did not prevent Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine from ranking ‘first, in point of talent, amongst the journals of the present day’, and his calculations included the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review, both of which might be thought of as having ‘the advantage in point of dignity’, but both of which fell below Blackwood’s because they had to strain to reach – whereas it was intimately connected to – ‘the shifting passions of the day’ (WTDQ, V, 149–150). De Quincey’s assessment is rooted in his own strong preference for magazines (he was a professional writer for almost three decades before he published a single article in a review), and it underestimates Blackwood’s immediate impact, as it took far less than a decade for its ‘brilliant writing’ to dislodge the ‘century of dulness’ that had gathered about the title of ‘magazine’. But certainly De Quincey is correct in his observation that Blackwood had effected a ‘memorable revolution’, for his magazine was the most important literary-political journal of its time, and a major force not only in Scottish letters, but in the development of British and American Romanticism.1
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Notes
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© 2013 Robert Morrison and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts
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Morrison, R., Roberts, D.S. (2013). ‘A character so various, and yet so indisputably its own’: A Passage to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine . In: Morrison, R., Roberts, D.S. (eds) Romanticism and Blackwood’s Magazine. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303851_1
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