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
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Mark Parker, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
David Higgins, Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography, Celebrity, Politics (Routledge: New York, 2005).
Jason Camlot, Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic: Sincere Mannerisms (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
Tim Killick, British Short Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Century: The Rise of the Tale (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
Mark Schoenfield, British Periodicals and Romantic Identity: The ‘Literary Lower Empire’ (New York: Palgrave, 2009).
Simon Hull, Charles Lamb, Elia, and the London Magazine: Metropolitan Muse (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010).
David Stewart, Romantic Magazines and Metropolitan Literary Culture (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2011).
William Christie, The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009).
F. D. Tredrey, The House of Blackwood (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1954).
J. H. Alexander, ‘Blackwood’s: Magazine as Romantic Form’, The Wordsworth Circle, 15 (1984), 57–68.
Peter Murphy, ‘Impersonation and Authorship in Romantic Britain’, ELH, 59 (1992), 625–649.
Lisa Niles, ‘May the Married be Single, and the Single Happy’: Blackwood’s, the Maga for the Single Man’, in Romantic Periodicals and Print Culture, ed. by Kim Wheatley (London: Cass, 2003), pp. 102–121.
Ian Duncan, ‘Blackwood’s and Romantic Nationalism’, in Finkelstein, pp. 70–89; Philip Flynn, ‘Blackwood’s Maga, Lockhart’s Peter’s Letters, and the Politics of Publishing’, Studies in Romanticism, 45 (2006), 117–131.
Nicholas Mason, ‘General Introduction’, Mason, I, ix-xxiv; John Strachan, ‘“The mapp’d out skulls of Scotia”: Blackwood’s and the Scottish Phrenological Controversy’, in Finkelstein, pp. 49–69.
Thomas Richardson, ‘James Hogg and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine: Buying and Selling the Ettrick Shepherd’, in James Hogg and the Literary Marketplace, ed. by Sharon Alker and Holly Faith Nelson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 185–120.
Nicholas Mason, ‘Blackwood’s Magazine, Anti-Americanism, and the Beginnings of Transatlantic Literary Studies’, Symbiosis, 14 (2010), 141–157.
Maurice Milne, ‘The Veiled Editor Unveiled: William Blackwood and His Magazine’, Publishing History, 16 (1984), 87–103.
Emily de Montluzin, ‘William Blackwood: The Human Face Behind the Mask of “Ebony”’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 36 (1987), 158–189.
Charles E. Robinson, ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles Ollier, and William Blackwood: The Contexts of Early Nineteenth-Century Publishing’, in Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregynog Conference (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1983), pp. 183–226.
Patrick O’Leary, Regency Editor: Life of John Scott (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1983), p. 168.
Ralph M. Wardle, ‘The Authorship of the Noctes Ambrosianae’, Modern Philology, 41 (1944), 9–17.
Frank Whitson Fetter, ‘The Economic Articles in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and their Authors, 1817–1853’, Scottish Journal of Political Economy, 7 (1960), 85–107, 213–231.
Brian M. Murray, ‘The Authorship of Some Unidentified or Disputed Articles in Blackwood’s Magazine’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 4 (1967), 144–154.
Brian M. Murray, ‘More Unidentified or Disputed Articles in Blackwood’s Magazine’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 9 (1971–72), 107–116
William Maginn, ‘Noctes Ambrosianae. No. IV’, BEM, 12 (1822), 100–114.
John Wilson, ‘Noctes Ambrosianae. No. XXIV’, BEM, 19 (1826), 211–227.
John Wilson, ‘Noctes Ambrosianae. No. II’, BEM, 11 (1822), 475–489.
Irene Elizabeth Mannion, Criticism ‘Con Amore’: A Study of Blackwood’s Magazine, 1817–1834 1984, p. 163.
John MacGregor, British America, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1832), II, 512.
Thomas Aird, ‘Memoir’, The Poetical Works of David Macbeth Moir, ed. by Thomas Aird (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1852), p. lxiv.
J. M. Milne, The Politics of Blackwood’s, 1817–1846 (1984), p. 53.
Barry Symonds, De Quincey to His Publishers: The Letters of Thomas De Quincey to His Publishers, and Other Letters, 1819–1832 (1994), p. 396.
See Michael Michie, An Enlightenment Tory in Victorian Scotland: The Career of Sir Archibald Alison (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), pp. 163–184.
Maurice Milne, ‘A Neglected Paternalist: William Johnston of Blackwood’s Magazine’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 28 (1995), 11–26.
George Croly, ‘Domestic Politics’, BEM, 8 (1820), 329–337.
David Robinson, ‘The Meeting of Parliament’, BEM, 20 (1826), 859–872.
Alan Lang Strout, ‘The Noctes Ambrosianae and James Hogg’, Review of English Studies, 13 (1937), 46–63.
Henry Cockburn, Memorials of his Time, ed. by Karl Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 303–304.
Jerome McGann, ‘Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism’, Modern Language Notes, 94 (1979), 988–1032.
William Keach, ‘Cockney Couplets: Keats and the Politics of Style’, Studies in Romanticism, 25 (1986), 182–196.
Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (New York: Blackwell, 1988).
Kim Wheatley, ‘The Blackwood’s Attacks on Leigh Hunt’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 47 (1992), 1–31.
Jeffrey N. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Emily de Montluzin, ‘Killing the Cockneys: Blackwood’s Weapons of Choice against Hunt, Hazlitt, and Keats’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 47 (1998), 87–107.
Gregory Dart, ‘Romantic Cockneyism: Hazlitt and the Periodical Press’, Romanticism, 6 (2000), 143–162.
Duncan Wu, ‘Keats and the "Cockney School"’, in The Cambridge Companion to Keats, ed. by Susan J. Wolfson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 37–52.
John Gibson Lockhart, ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry. No. I’, BEM, 2 (1817), 38–41.
John Gibson Lockhart, ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry. No. IV’, BEM, 3 (1818), 519–524.
John Gibson Lockhart, ‘Remarks on Don Juan’, BEM, 5 (1819), 512–518.
George Croly, ‘Remarks on Shelley’s Adonais’, BEM, 10 (1821), 696–700.
John Wilson, ‘The Age of Bronze’, BEM, 13 (1823), 457–460.
Benjamin Lease, Anglo-American Encounters: England and the Rise of American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 57–63.
Alan Lang Strout, ‘Writers on German Literature in Blackwood’s Magazine’, Library, 9 (1954), 35–44.
J. H. Alexander, ‘Learning from Europe: Continental Literature in the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Magazine, 1802–1825’, The Wordsworth Circle, 21 (1990), 118–123.
David L. Clark, ‘We “Other Prussians”: Bodies and Pleasures in De Quincey and Late Kant’, European Romantic Review, 14 (2003), 261–287.
John Wilson, ‘Wordsworth’s Sonnets and Memorials’, BEM, 12 (1822), 175–191.
John Wilson, ‘Some Remarks on the Use of the Preternatural in Works of Fiction’, BEM, 3 (1818), 648–650.
David Erdman, ‘Coleridge and the “Review Business”: An Account of His Adventures with the Edinburgh, the Quarterly, and Maga’, The Wordsworth Circle, 6 (1975), 3–50.
David Higgins, ‘Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the Construction of Wordsworth’s Genius’, in Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine, pp. 90–101.
John Gibson Lockhart, ‘Odoherty on Don Juan’, BEM, 14 (1823), 282–293.
Theodore Redpath, The Young Romantics and Critical Opinion (London: Harrap, 1973), p. 48.
M. A. Hassan, The Major Romantic Poets and their Critics in Blackwood’s Magazine, 1817–1825 (1971).
John Gibson Lockhart, ‘Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude’, BEM, 6 (1819), 148–154.
Robert Morrison, ‘“Abuse Wickedness, but Acknowledge Wit”: Blackwood’s Magazine and the Shelley Circle’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 34 (2001), 147–164.
John Gibson Lockhart, ‘Rosalind and Helen’, BEM, 5 (1819), 268–274.
John Gibson Lockhart, ‘Prometheus Unbound’, BEM, 7 (1820), 679–687.
John O. Hayden, The Romantic Reviewers, 1802–1824 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 258.
Nicholas Roe, ‘A Cockney Schoolroom: John Keats at Enfield’, in Keats: Bicentenary Readings, ed. by Michael O’Neill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), pp. 11–26.
John Galt, The Autobiography of John Galt, 2 vols (London: Cochrane and M’Crone, 1833), II, 235.
Michael Munday, ‘The Novel and its Critics in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Studies in Philology, 79 (1982), 205–226.
William Kilbourne, The Role of Fiction in Blackwood’s Magazine from 1817 to 1845 (unpublished PhD thesis, Northwestern University, 1966), pp. 67–68.
Virginia Blain, ‘Anonymity and the Discourse of Amateurism: Caroline Bowles Southey Negotiates Blackwood’s, 1820–1847’, in Victorian Journalism: Exotic and Domestic, ed. by Barbara Garlick and Margaret Harris (Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1998), pp. 1–18.
Ruth Berman, ‘Critical Reactions to Fantasy in four Nineteenth-Century Periodicals: Edinburgh Review, Blackwood’s, Fraser’s and Cornhill’, The Sphinx, 13 (1981), 1–37.
Brian Stableford, ‘The Nineteenth Century, 1812–99’, in Fantasy Literature, ed. by Neil Barron (New York: Garland, 1990), pp. 62–115.
See Harvey Sucksmith, ‘The Secret of Immediacy: Dickens’ Debt to the Tale of Terror in Blackwood’s’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 26 (1971), 145–157.
Bruce Weiner, ‘Poe and the Blackwood’s Tale of Sensation’, in Poe and His Times: The Artist and His Milieu, ed. by Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV (Baltimore: Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1990), pp. 45–65.
Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick, ‘Introduction’, in The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre, ed. by Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. vii-xxii.
Douglas Kelly Morris, Noctes Ambrosianae: The Influence of Blackwood’s Magazine (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Tennessee, 1972).
Claire Cartmell, The Age of Politics, Personalities, and Periodicals: The Early Nineteenth-Century World of the ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’ of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leeds, 1974.
J. H. Alexander, ‘Literary Criticism in the Later Noctes Ambrosianae’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 16 (1986), 17–31.
Thomas Carlyle, ‘Christopher North’, in Reminiscences, ed. by K. J. Fielding and Ian Campbell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 410–426.
J. H. Alexander, ‘Introduction’, in The Tavern Sages: Selections from the Noctes Ambrosianae, ed. by J. H. Alexander (Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1992), pp. vii-xv (p. xii).
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, On the Constitution of Church and State, ed. by John Colmer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. lvi
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Robert Morrison and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
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
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303851_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-33853-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-30385-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)