Subjects
Conservatism and the Quarterly Review:
A Critical Analysis
Editor: Jonathan Cutmore
The History of the Book
978 1 85196 951 7: 234x156mm: £60.00/$99.00
This monograph is the first of two related titles about the Quarterly Review in Pickering & Chatto’s series The History of the Book. It draws together a collection of scholarly essays which illustrate the complexity of the early nineteenth-century conservative publishing milieu.
The Quarterly Review was launched in March 1809 by a consortium of powerful conservative politicians and literary men, including George Canning and Walter Scott. The publisher, John Murray, gained prestige and came to be known as ‘the prince of booksellers’. His and his colleagues’ purpose in setting up a new periodical was to combat the ‘radically bad principles’ of Archibald Constable’s flagship journal, the Edinburgh Review. Repelled though they were by the Edinburgh Review’s politics, they were also attracted by its wit, verve, and public success. In response, they created a contending journal uncannily like its rival in outward appearances but irreconcilably opposed to its critical, religious and political principles.
In its time, the Quarterly Review was thought to closely reflect government policy. William Hazlitt even described it as the publishing arm of the secret police. However, the essays included in this monograph reveal that the Quarterly Review was inconsistent in its support of government positions. The editor, the publisher and contributors disagreed about a range of issues, from the influence of the High Church on British religious conservatism, through discussions about economic conservatism favoured by Canningites, to disquiet about the increasingly Burkean tenor of the Tory party.
Sample pages
Readership
History of Print Culture, Political History, Romanticism
Contents
- Kim Wheatley, ‘Plotting the Success of the Quarterly Review’
- Boyd Hilton, ''Sardonic grins’ and ‘paranoid politics’: Religion, Economics, and Public Policy in The Quarterly Review’
- Jonathan Cutmore, ‘A Plurality of Voices in the Quarterly Review’
- Christopher Stray, ‘Politics, Culture, and Scholarship: Classics in the Quarterly Review 1809–24’
- Sharon Ragaz, ‘Walter Scott and the Quarterly Review’
- J M R Cameron, ‘John Barrow, the Quarterly Review’s Imperial Reviewer’
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Lynda Pratt, ‘Hung, Drawn and Quarterlyed: Robert Southey, Poetry, Poets,
and the Quarterly Review’ - W A Speck, ‘Robert Southey’s Contribution to the Quarterly Review’
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