Blackwoodian Allusion and the Culture of Miscellaneity

Abstract

When Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine began many felt compelled to publish what they thought of it, often, it seems, because they weren’t quite sure what to think. One review of the first number set out intending to ‘examine the morality, the consistency, the composition of that Magazine, in regular order’. Regularity proved impossible, however: ‘the whole of these are frequently so mixed, so crowded in the same paragraph, that it is more than difficult to analyze and arrange them’.¹ It is a common reaction to a magazine that so often asserted a high moral tone and yet, even in a paragraph that insisted on consistency, produced a perplexing but oddly compelling inconsistency. The magazine’s attitude to literary culture often occasioned such confusion. The first of the Cockney School articles on Leigh Hunt prompted this description of the activities of ‘Z.’:

this is the last time, we are resolved, we shall be in danger of being bespattered by his ‘holy water’, in which some wicked wag has poured a quantity of ‘Warren’s jet blacking’; and which composition he scatters around him, on his hearers, chuckling and pluming himself all the while on his pure and immaculate fluid and his clean hands. (11)