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 4
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.
Readership
History of Print Culture, Romanticism, Scottish Studies
Contents
Prologue: The Whig Interpretation of Literary History
Chapter 1: 'Strange Vigour': A Review of Reviews
Chapter 2: 'A Distinct and Marked Set': The Edinburgh Enterprise
Chapter 3: 'A Mortal Antipathy to Scotchmen': Coleridge, the Biographia, and the Edinburgh Review
Chapter 4: 'The Self-Indulgence and Self-Admiration of Genius': Jeffrey and Wordsworth on the Poet, the People, and the Public
Chapter 5: 'Bluestockings': Jeffrey, Women, and the Novel
Chapter 6: 'Mere Caprice and Contradiction': Lord Byron, English Hare and Scotch Bloodhound
Chapter 7: 'The Joys of Reading a Gazette': Print Lords Brougham and Byron
Chapter 8: 'Wars of the Tongue': Blackwood’s against the Edinburgh Review in Post-War Edinburgh
Chapter 9: Twilight of the Godless: The Unlikely Friendship of Jeffrey and Carlyle
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
- The Letters of Francis Jeffrey to Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle