Contributors to the Quarterly Review:

A History, 1809–25

Jonathan Cutmore


The History of the Book
Hb: 256pp: 2008
978 1 85196 952 4: 234x156mm: £60.00/$99.00
E ISBN   978 1 85196 576 2

This monograph is the second of two related titles about the Quarterly Review in Pickering & Chatto’s series The History of the Book.

The Quarterly Review was a commercially successful literary and political review. It owed its success to the complex interactions between several competing elements: the material conditions of periodical publishing at the turn of the nineteenth century; the entrepreneurial ambitions of John Murray, the journal’s publisher; the careerist imperatives of the Quarterly’s editors and contributors; and the propagandist goals of its political backers in government. John Murray paid his writers handsomely and was able to attract such luminaries as Robert Southey, who became a key contributor. As the journal built up a strong reputation, it advanced its contributors’ careers. The Quarterly Review played a leading role in dignifying writing for the market and made journalism a viable way to earn a living.

A large amount of primary material relating to the journal survives, so the Quarterly Review presents a rare opportunity to Romantic scholars to test the truth of Marilyn Butler’s claim that the early nineteenth-century periodical is the matrix for the democratization of public writing and reading.

Sample pages

Readership

History of Print Culture, Political History, Romanticism

Contents

Introduction
1 Origins
2 Launching the Quarterly Review
3 Competition for Editorial Control
4 The Quarterly Review Ascendant
5 The Transition to Lockhart

Identification of Contributors
Abbreviated Contents of the Quarterly Review
Publication Statistics
John Murray’s 1808 Lists of Prospective Contributors

Reviews

'An outstanding contribution to the study of Romantic print culture.'
– Robin Jarvis, BARS Bulletin & Review

Related titles

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