The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain:
Mammoth and Megalonyx
William Christie
The Enlightenment World
978 1 85196 622 6: 234x156mm: £60.00/$99.00
978 1 85196 699 8
From its first issue, published on the 10th October 1802, Francis Jeffrey’s Edinburgh Review established a strong reputation and exerted a powerful influence. Under Jeffrey’s ubiquitous editorial hand, it evolved the informative and challenging review essay which it made its own. In the first major literary study of the Edinburgh Review for over fifty years, Christie contextualizes the periodical within the culture wars of the Romantic era.
Early numbers of the Edinburgh Review are characterized by a self-conscious sense of purpose. It was a continuous and coherent political and cultural enterprise, sustained by the oppositional energy of the talented and politically disfranchised Whig faction who launched it. However, it also saw much dissent; bitter personal disagreements between Henry Brougham and Sydney Smith, political and intellectual arguments between Francis Horner and Brougham, as well as violent differences of opinion between occasional reviewers such as Walter Scott, James Mill, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Malthus, Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, Thomas Carlyle and Thomas Babington Macaulay. Christie approaches some of the most celebrated confrontations through the notional and national distinctions of the time – between Whig and Tory; Scotland and England; Byron and Wordsworth; Review critic and Lake poet.
Sample pages
Readership
History of Print Culture, Romanticism, Scottish Studies
Contents
Prologue: Recent Whig Interpretations of Romantic Literary History
1 ‘Strange Vigour’: A Review of Reviews
2 ‘The Modern Athenians’: The Edinburgh Enterprise
3 ‘The Self-Indulgence and Self-Admiration of Genius’: Jeffrey, Wordsworth and the Common Apprehension
4 ‘That Superior Tribunal’: Jeffrey and Wordsworth on the People and the Public
5 ‘A Mortal Antipathy to Scotchmen’: The Biographia and the Edinburgh Review
6 ‘Running with the English Hares and Hunting with the Scotch Bloodhounds’: Jeffrey and Byron
7 ‘Wars of the Tongue’: Blackwood’s against the Edinburgh Review in Post-War Edinburgh
8 ‘Beware, O Teufelsdröckh, of Spiritual Pride!’: Jeffrey and Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus
Related titles
- Blackwood's Magazine, 1817–1825: Selections from Maga's Infancy
- Charles Lamb, Elia and the London Magazine: Metropolitan Muse
- Conservatism and the Quarterly Review: A Critical Analysis
- Contributors to the Quarterly Review: A History, 1809–25
- Dialogue, Didacticism and the Genres of Dispute: Literary Dialogues in the Age of Revolution
- The Language of Whiggism: Liberty and Patriotism, 1802–1830
- The Letters of Francis Jeffrey to Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle
- Wordsworth's Poetic Collections, Supplementary Writing and Parodic Reception
