Conservatism and the Quarterly Review:
A Critical Analysis
Editor: Jonathan Cutmore
The History of the Book
978 1 85196 951 7: 234x156mm: £60.00/$99.00
978 1 85196 554 0
This monograph is the first of two related titles about the Quarterly Review in Pickering & Chatto’s series The History of the Book. It draws together a collection of scholarly essays which illustrate the complexity of the early nineteenth-century conservative publishing milieu.
The Quarterly Review was launched in March 1809 by a consortium of powerful conservative politicians and literary men, including George Canning and Walter Scott. The publisher, John Murray, gained prestige and came to be known as ‘the prince of booksellers’. The purpose of setting up a new periodical was to combat the ‘radically bad principles’ of Archibald Constable’s flagship journal, the Edinburgh Review. Repelled though they were by the Edinburgh Review’s politics, they were also attracted by its wit, verve, and public success. In response, they created a contending journal uncannily like its rival in outward appearances but irreconcilably opposed to its critical, religious and political principles.
In its time, the Quarterly Review was thought to closely reflect government policy. William Hazlitt even described it as the publishing arm of the secret police. However, the essays included in this monograph reveal that the Quarterly Review was inconsistent in its support of government positions. The editor, the publisher and contributors disagreed about a range of issues, from the influence of the High Church on British religious conservatism, through discussions about economic conservatism favoured by Canningites, to disquiet about the increasingly Burkean tenor of the Tory party.
Sample pages
Readership
History of Print Culture, Political History, Romanticism
Contents
1 Plotting the Success of the Quarterly Review – Kim Wheatley
2 'Sardonic grins’ and ‘paranoid politics’: Religion, Economics, and Public Policy in The Quarterly Review – Boyd Hilton
3 A Plurality of Voices in the Quarterly Review – Jonathan Cutmore
4 Politics, Culture, and Scholarship: Classics in the Quarterly Review 1809–24 – Christopher Stray
5 Walter Scott and the Quarterly Review – Sharon Ragaz
6 John Barrow, the Quarterly Review’s Imperial Reviewer – J M R Cameron
7 Hung, Drawn and Quarterlyed: Robert Southey, Poetry, Poets, and the Quarterly Review – Lynda Pratt
8 Robert Southey’s Contribution to the Quarterly Review – W A Speck
Reviews
'The fullest account to date of one of the nineteenth century's most imporant periodicals; based on extensive and painstaking archival research ... will be of lasting value to Romanticists.'
– Robin Jarvis, BARS Bulletin & Review
Related titles
- Anti-Jacobin Novels
- Blackwood's Magazine, 1817–1825: Selections from Maga's Infancy
- Charles Lamb, Elia and the London Magazine: Metropolitan Muse
- Contributors to the Quarterly Review: A History, 1809–25
- The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain: Mammoth and Megalonyx
- The Language of Whiggism: Liberty and Patriotism, 1802–1830
- Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793–1810
