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6437 Mason & Mole.Indd Introduction Nicholas Mason and Tom Mole Using and Abusing Romantic Periodicals In introducing the ‘Romantic Age’ volume of his four-part encyclo- paedia of British Literary Magazines (1983–6), Alvin Sullivan, him- self a specialist in British modernism, remarked that ‘every artistic movement has some advocate in print, but the Romantic movement was embraced by more journals, reviews, and miscellanies than any other’.1 To no small degree, the phenomenon Sullivan identifi es was a product of Romanticism’s emerging at an especially vibrant moment in British media history. The half-century between the outbreak of the French Revolution and the coronation of Queen Victoria witnessed the arrival of still-iconic dailies like The Times (1785–) and The Guard- ian (1821–); the twin ‘monarch-makers in poetry and prose’, as Byron dubbed them, the Edinburgh Review (1802–1929) and the Quarterly Review (1809–1962);2 and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (BEM, 1817–1980), the upstart literary, cultural and political miscellany that not only inspired countless nineteenth-century imitators but created a blueprint still found in highbrow magazines like The New Yorker and The Spectator. Rather than standing idly by as this new wave of dailies, monthlies and quarterlies shaped nineteenth-century tastes, eminent authors including Mary Robinson, Walter Scott, Robert Southey, Lord Byron, Letitia Landon and Felicia Hemans frequently took to the periodi- cal press both to publish their writing and to critique that of others. Writers best known as poets, novelists or essayists would compose several of the age’s most prescient reviews, including Scott’s of Emma and Frankenstein, Leigh Hunt’s of Keats’s Poems of 1817 66437_Mason437_Mason & MMole.inddole.indd 1 112/08/202/08/20 55:22:22 PPMM 2 Nicholas Mason and Tom Mole and William Hazlitt’s of The Excursion.3 Meanwhile, many texts that later became canonical, ranging from ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ to Confessions of an English Opium Eater to ‘Casabianca’, were originally addressed to readers of literary magazines.4 Some leading authors in the period even set about founding their own periodicals, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge (The Watchman [1796] and The Friend [1809–10]), James Hogg (The Spy [1810–11]), Hunt (The Examiner [1808–81]) and Byron and Percy Shelley (The Liberal, with Hunt [1822–3]). Writing for literary periodicals, or being written about in them, fuelled what Lucy Newlyn has identifi ed as an acute ‘anxiety of reception’ among the era’s writers. ‘The demonization of review- ers by authors – and particularly by poets’, she notes, ‘was in some cases well founded; but paranoia was so widespread as to appear almost indiscriminate.’5 A fed-up Byron, for instance, once point- edly instructed his publisher, John Murray, to ‘send me no periodi- cal works whatsoever’.6 Similarly vexed, Coleridge devoted his third chapter of Biographia Literaria to railing against reviewers who had subjected him to ‘so merciless and long-continued a cannonading’.7 Meanwhile, Coleridge’s fellow Lake Poets, Southey and Wordsworth, took such umbrage over Blackwood’s jests at their expense that, despite the magazine’s sharing their conservative values and widely lauding them elsewhere, both fl atly rejected entreaties to contribute to it.8 So thin-skinned, in fact, was Wordsworth, that his sister-in-law Sara Hutchinson reported in July 1819, ‘We females have a great curiosity to see the Reviews &c of Wm’s poems &c in Blackwood’s Magazine; but as Wm will not suffer it to come into the house with his knowledge we must smuggle it.’9 Avoid literary periodicals as he might, though, Wordsworth regularly heeded his critics when revising. After several reviewers mocked his depiction of the ‘little muddy pond’ in ‘The Thorn’, he converted a passage where the narrator ‘measured it from side to side: / ’Tis three feet long, and two feet wide’ into a more ‘poetical’ description of the pond’s being ‘of compass small, and bare / To thirsty suns and parching air’.10 Similar cases of the anxiety of recep- tion can be observed in Keats’s withholding ‘Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil’ over fears it represented ‘what I should call were I a reviewer “A weak-sided Poem”’ and Hunt scrubbing the second edition of The Story of Rimini to remove the ‘jaunty’, ‘newfangled’ coinages 66437_Mason437_Mason & MMole.inddole.indd 2 112/08/202/08/20 55:22:22 PPMM Introduction 3 (e.g., ‘clipsome’, ‘quoit-like’, ‘passion-plighted’) that Blackwood’s and others had found so ridiculous.11 Towards a Subfi eld of Romantic Periodical Studies Yet, however large periodicals may have loomed in the consciousnesses of the era’s writers and readers, they have never occupied more than a marginal place in the academic study of the Romantic period. While the Edinburgh, the Quarterly and, especially, Blackwood’s have long attracted coteries of enthusiasts, it was only relatively recently that Romantic periodicals began to be treated as an object of study in their own right. During the 1960s and 1970s, John O. Hayden and Donald H. Reiman laid important groundwork for understanding the age’s reviewing culture.12 In many respects, though, the standard-bearer for fully utilising the era’s periodical riches was Jon Klancher’s The Making of English Reading Audiences: 1790–1832 (1987), which its author revisits in this collection’s lead chapter. Klancher’s deep dive into a cross-section of Romantic periodicals allowed him to offer the most sophisticated analysis to date of such phenomena as ‘mass experience’ and the ‘public sphere’ in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England.13 Thirteen years later, Mark Parker’s equally path-breaking book, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (2000), unabash- edly anointed the magazine ‘the preeminent literary form of the 1820s and 1830s in Britain’ and supported this assertion with insightful readings of ‘runs’ of Blackwood’s, Fraser’s, the London and the New Monthly Magazine.14 In the wake of Klancher’s and Parker’s pioneer- ing work, essay collections on the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s and important monographs by David Higgins (2005), Mark Schoen- fi eld (2009), William Christie (2009), Karen Fang (2010), Richard Cronin (2010), David Stewart (2011), Kim Wheatley (2013) and Megan Coyer (2017) have done much to reveal the richness and diver- sity of the age’s periodicals.15 Partly because of such studies, today’s specialists in the Romantic period will likely be able to list the era’s leading literary periodi- cals and, if pressed, recall the basics of especially notorious hatchet- jobs like Jeffrey’s eviscerations of Wordsworth in the Edinburgh or Croker’s ‘mansplaining’ to Barbauld in the Quarterly. Yet, the era’s landmark periodicals remain largely an afterthought in most 66437_Mason437_Mason & MMole.inddole.indd 3 112/08/202/08/20 55:22:22 PPMM 4 Nicholas Mason and Tom Mole major classroom anthologies and scholarly monographs. The gen- eral slowness among Romanticists to develop their own distinctive approaches to periodical studies is all the more puzzling in light of the ongoing boom in periodicals research in adjacent literary periods. Even before the recent windfall of digitised content, Victorianists had built a robust infrastructure for studying their era’s periodicals. Upon completing the monumental Wellesley Index of Victorian Peri- odicals in 1968, its lead contributors used the momentum from that undertaking to launch the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals and its house publication, Victorian Periodicals Newsletter (renamed Victorian Periodicals Review in 1978).16 Fifty years later, RSVP and VPR remain major presences in Victorian Studies, offering promi- nent platforms for scholarship in the fi eld and, thanks to bequests from founding members, generous research awards for periodical scholars at all career stages. While no match for the industrious Victorianists, Romanticists’ next-door neighbours on the other side – specialists in eighteenth- century literature and culture – have also made signifi cant efforts in this area – and arguably while working with less promising materi- als. Classic essays from The Spectator, Tatler and Rambler enjoy a place in the eighteenth-century literary canon unmatched by their Romantic-era counterparts and, correspondingly, have attracted considerably more scholarly attention than comparable essays by the likes of Cobbett, Hazlitt, Hunt and Lamb. Moreover, in both print and the classroom, scholars of the eighteenth century have typically laid much greater emphasis on their era’s having invented the mod- ern book review than Romanticists have on theirs transforming it into a distinctive branch of the literary arts.17 These efforts by scholars in neighbouring historical periods risk squeezing Romantic periodicals from both sides and marginalising or altogether eliding them from the historical narrative. One seeming indicator of this risk is the new Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth- Century British Periodicals and Newspapers (2016). In their intro- duction to this otherwise impressive reference companion, the editors defend their decision to take the entire century rather than just the Victorian period as their subject by arguing that, ‘while the idea of Romantic and Victorian periodization helps to defi ne academic fi elds of inquiry . ., newspaper and periodicals scholarship has rightly become more attentive to the nineteenth century as a whole’.18 This 66437_Mason437_Mason & MMole.inddole.indd 4 112/08/202/08/20 55:22:22 PPMM Introduction 5 fails to explain, however, why not a single specialist in the Romantic period is to be found among the volume’s thirty-two contributors. Nor does it account for the tendency throughout the volume to give short shrift to the century’s fi rst three decades. As a case in point, William Gifford, the Quarterly’s equally feared and revered editor from its 1809 founding until 1824, gets but a single mention in this nearly-500-page collection, and that for his earlier contributions to the Anti-Jacobin Review.
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