Contributors to the Quarterly Review:
A History, 1809–25
Jonathan Cutmore
The History of the Book
978 1 85196 952 4: 234x156mm: £60.00/$99.00
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
- Contributors to the Quarterly Review: Introduction
- Contributors to the Quarterly Review: Index of Authorship Attributions
- Contributors to the Quarterly Review: General Index
Readership
History of Print Culture, Political History, Romanticism
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Origins
Chapter 2: Launching the Quarterly Review
Chapter 3: Competition for Editorial Control
Chapter 4: The Quarterly Review Ascendant
Chapter 5: The Transition to Lockhart
Identification of Contributors
Abbreviated Contents of the Quarterly Review
Publication Statistics
John Murray’s 1808 Lists of Prospective Contributors
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