THE EDINBURGH REVIEW IN THE LITERARY CULTURE OF ROMANTIC BRITAIN: MAMMOTH AND MEGALONYX For my family Christies, Days, McLeans, Stockdales and in memory of our loved ones Brian and Diana Christie The Enlightenment World: Political and Intellectual History of the Long Eighteenth Century Series Editor: Michael T. Davis Series Co-Editors: Jack Fruchtman, Jr Iain McCalman Paul Pickering Advisory Editor: Hideo Tanaka T S 1 Harlequin Empire: Race, Ethnicity and the Drama of the Popular Enlightenment David Worrall 2 e Cosmopolitan Ideal in the Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1776–1832 Michael Scrivener 3 Writing the Empire: Robert Southey and Romantic Colonialism Carol Bolton 4 Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle (eds) 5 Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism Jacqueline Labbe (ed.) 6 e Scottish People and the French Revolution Bob Harris 7 e English Deists: Studies in Further Enlightenment Wayne Hudson 8 Adam Ferguson: Philosophy, Politics and Society Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle (eds) 9 Rhyming Reason: e Poetry of Romantic-Era Psychologists Michelle Faubert 10 Liberating Medicine, 1720–1835 Tristanne Connolly and Steve Clark (eds) 11 John elwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon Steve Poole (ed.) 12 e Evolution of Sympathy in the Long Eighteenth Century Jonathan Lamb 13 Enlightenment and Modernity: e English Deists and Reform Wayne Hudson 14 William Wickham, Master Spy: e Secret War against the French Revolution Michael Durey F T Montesquieu and England: Enlightened Exchanges, 1689–1755 Ursula Haskins Gonthier e Language of Whiggism: Liberty and Patriotism, 1802–1830 Kathryn Chittick Romantic Localities: Europe Writes Place Christoph Bode and Jacqueline M. Labbe (eds) e Sublime Invention: Ballooning in Europe, 1783–1820 Michael R. Lynn e Spirit of the Union: Popular Politics in Scotland Gordon Pentland British Visions of America, 1775–1820: Republican Realities Emma Vincent Macleod THE EDINBURGH REVIEW IN THE LITERARY CULTURE OF ROMANTIC BRITAIN: MAMMOTH AND MEGALONYX William Christie ROUTLEDGE Routledge Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2009 by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © Taylor & Francis 2009 © William Christie 2009 All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Christie, William. e Edinburgh review in the literary culture of Romantic Britain: mammoth and megalonyx. – ( e Enlightenment world) 1. Criticism – Scotland – History – 19th century. 2. Criticism – Scotland. 3. English literature – 19th century – History and criticism. 4. Romanticism – Great Britain. 5. Romanticism – Scotland. 6. Scotland – Intellectual life – 19th century. 7. Edinburgh review (1802) I. Title II. Series 820.9’007-dc22 ISBN-13: 978-1-85196-622-6 (hbk) Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited CONTENTS Acknowledgements ix Prologue: Recent Whig Interpretations of Romantic Literary History 1 1 ‘Strange Vigour’: A Review of Reviews 15 2 ‘ e Modern Athenians’: e Edinburgh Enterprise 39 3 ‘ e Self-Indulgence and Self-Admiration of Genius’: Je rey, Words- worth and the Common Apprehension 59 4 ‘ at Superior Tribunal’: Je rey and Wordsworth on the People and the Public 81 5 ‘A Mortal Antipathy to Scotchmen’: e Biographia and the Edinburgh Review 101 6 ‘Running with the English Hares and Hunting with the Scotch Blood- hounds’: Je rey and Byron 123 7 ‘Wars of the Tongue’: Blackwood’s against the Edinburgh Review in Post-War Edinburgh 147 8 ‘Beware, O Teufelsdröckh, of Spiritual Pride!’: Je rey and Carlyle’s Sar- tor Resartus 167 Notes 187 Works Cited 227 Index 243 This page intentionally left blank ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My rst acknowledgements must go to my wife Patrice, for her patience in living with this latest project – or, more accurately, for her patience in living with me while this project has been underway – and then to my research assistant, Angie Dunstan, for her dedication and her optimism, which turn the most tedious task into a pleasure. is book is another chapter in my long and deepening relationship with Edin- burgh. To my Edinburgh friends, then, must go my next acknowledge¬ments. Randall Stevenson and Sarah Carpenter always make me feel at home, and Ian Campbell is always genial and obliging when I ask a favour of him. e Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities attached to the University of Edin- burgh has twice extended its hospitality, and will do so again later this year. My thanks to Susan Manning, its director, for her friendship and scholarly advice, and to Anthea Taylor for her kind attention and assistance. And then at last my thanks must go to the many, many librarians who have enabled this project to go ahead: at the British Library and the Bodleian; at Christchurch, Oxford; University College London; and the London School of Economics; at the University of Glasgow and the University of Edinburgh – but most especially to the librarians of the National Library of Scotland, and not just because they have had to su er me for longer periods. I don’t remember ever receiving from them less than the friendliest attention to my questions and requests. My thanks, too, to Mark Pollard at Pickering & Chatto for welcoming the project into their stable and tolerating a short delay, and to my copy editor, Julie Wilson, for her perspicacity and rigour. I wrote other books to honour my parents, Brian and Diana Christie, while they were alive. ey died within months of each other while I was writing up this one, and it is dedicated to their memory with all the confused love and pain¬ful gratitude we could never express to each other. ose parts of the book which have been published elsewhere, and are here republished in a more or less revised form with the permission of their respec- tive editors, also need to be acknowledged. For my prologue, I have adapted an – ix – x Th e Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain article ‘Francis Je rey in Recent Whig Interpretations of Romantic Literary His¬tory’, English Literary History, 76 (Fall 2009); a part of Chapter 3 appeared as ‘Francis Je rey’s Associationist Aesthetics’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 33 ( July 1993); and of Chapter 5 as ‘ e Printer’s Devil in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria’, Prose Studies, 19 (April 1996); Chapter 6 draws on my articles ‘Run- ning with the English Hare and Hunting with the Scotch Bloodhounds’ and ‘Byron and Francis Je rey’ in Byron Journal, 25 (1997)’ and Chapter 7 on ‘“Wars of the Tongue” in Post-War Edinburgh: On Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and its Campaign against the Edinburgh Review’, Romanticism, 15 ( July 2009). PROLOGUE: RECENT WHIG INTERPRETATIONS OF ROMANTIC LITERARY HISTORY INTERLOCUTOR: … do you think this new history is a good thing? AUTHOR: … It’s been the only viable career move the past ten years. 1 Herbert Lindenberger Discussing the triumph of René Wellek’s ‘uni ed eld theory’ of Romanticism (‘imagination for the view of poetry, nature for the view of the world, and symbol and myth for poetic style’), Jerome McGann makes a rhetorical gesture familiar to readers of his in uential Romantic Ideology: e danger of Wellek’s uni ed eld theory has been such that the character of schol- arly agreement is in danger of utter trivialization. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the now widespread idea that Romanticism comprises all signi cant literature produced between Blake and the present – some would say between Gray, or even Milton, and the present. is will never do. Let me begin to reopen the problem of de ning Romanticism …2 At a vital moment of critical renunciation, McGann self-consciously invokes Francis Je rey’s emphatic and equally provocative renunciation of Wordsworth’s Th e Excursion: ‘ is will never do. It bears no doubt the stamp of the author’s heart and fancy: But unfortunately not half so visibly as that of his peculiar sys- tem’.3 Let me begin to reopen the problem of writing Romantic literary history by bringing out the relationship implicit in this quotation from Romantic Ide- ology – the relationship, that is, at once analogical and genealogical, between certain assumptions and strategies characteristic of the Edinburgh Review under Je rey’s editorship on the one hand, and, on the other, the assumptions and strategies of recent historicism. Wordsworthian Romanticism From as early as the 1830s there prevailed an interpretation of the literary his- tory of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that by the 1970s had become ‘second nature’ to us. Because it originated (in part at least) earlier, with – 1 – 2 Th e Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain Wordsworth and Coleridge in the late 1790s, the two of them remained not sur- prisingly central: Wordsworth was its creative centre, Coleridge its theoretician and (in the Biographia) its apologist. Many of the ideas and choices of what