The Language of Whiggism:

Liberty and Patriotism, 1802–1830

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Kathryn Chittick

The Enlightenment World

The early years of the nineteenth century saw unprecedented press activity, due in large part to Napoleon and protracted international war. It was against this background that the Edinburgh Review was launched in 1802. The Review became the mouthpiece of the new Whig government of 1806 (the first since 1784). Chittick highlights the connections between the Whig party and ideological Whiggism and addresses the question of how wartime politics affected contemporary literary language.

Just as the Civil War transformed seventeenth-century English prose, so the Napoleonic period made the matter of language crucial, as educated and uneducated alike fought over the definitions of libel, loyalty and freedom. The challenge was to find a safe language when for reasons of security the government demanded repression. ‘Whiggism’ was the safe language of liberty, developed through periodical publishing.

Sample pages

• The Language of Whiggism: Introduction
• The Language of Whiggism: Index

Readership

Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Politics

Contents

Introduction
1 1802–7: The Intellectual Ascendancy of Whiggism
2 1807–10: The Revival of Liberty
3 1816–20: The Liberty of the Press and the Literary Language of the People
4 1816–24: The New Criticism: Apostasy and Personality
5 1821–3: Historical Retrospective of the Edinburgh Review
6 1824–30: Whiggism and Liberalism

Related titles

• Blackwood's Magazine, 1817–1825: Selections from Maga's Infancy
• Conservatism and the Quarterly Review: A Critical Analysis
• Dialogue, Didacticism and the Genres of Dispute: Literary Dialogues in the Age of Revolution
• The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain: Mammoth and Megalonyx
• Lives of Victorian Political Figures, Part I: Palmerston, Disraeli and Gladstone by their Contemporaries
• The History of Suffrage, 1760–1867
• The Journals of Thomas Babington Macaulay
• The Letters of Francis Jeffrey to Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle
• The Reception of Locke's Politics: From the 1690s to the 1830s
• William Cobbett: Selected Writings

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