Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–30441–3 Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Robert Morrison and Daniel S. Roberts 2013 Individual chapters © contributors 2013 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–30441–3 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–30441–3 Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–30441–3 Contents List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgements x Abbreviations xi Note on the Referencing of Blackwood’s Articles xiii Notes on Contributors xiv ‘A character so various, and yet so indisputably its own’: A Passage to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 1 Robert Morrison and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts Part I Blackwood’s and the Periodical Press 1 Beginning Blackwood’s: The Right Mix of Dulce and Ùtile 23 Philip Flynn 2 John Gibson Lockhart and Blackwood’s: Shaping the Romantic Periodical Press 35 Thomas Richardson 3 From Gluttony to Justified Sinning: Confessional Writing in Blackwood’s and the London Magazine 47 David Higgins 4 Camaraderie and Conflict: De Quincey and Wilson on Enemy Lines 57 Robert Morrison 5 Selling Blackwood’s Magazine, 1817–1834 69 David Finkelstein Part II Blackwood’s Culture and Criticism 6 Blackwood’s ‘Personalities’ 89 Tom Mole 7 Communal Reception, Mary Shelley, and the ‘Blackwood’s School’ of Criticism 101 Nicholas Mason 8 Blackwoodian Allusion and the Culture of Miscellaneity 113 David Stewart vii Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–30441–3 Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–30441–3 viii Contents 9 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in the Scientific Culture of Early Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh 125 William Christie 10 The Art and Science of Politics in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, c. 1817–1841 137 Duncan Kelly 11 Prosing Poetry: Blackwood’s and Generic Transposition, 1820–1840 149 Jason Camlot Part III Blackwood’s Fictions 12 Blackwood’s and the Boundaries of the Short Story 163 Tim Killick 13 The Edinburgh of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and James Hogg’s Fiction 175 Gillian Hughes 14 The Taste for Violence in Blackwood’s Magazine 187 Mark Schoenfield Part IV Blackwood’s at Home 15 John Wilson and Regency Authorship 203 Richard Cronin 16 John Wilson and Sport 215 John Strachan 17 William Maginn and the Blackwood’s ‘Preface’ of 1826 227 David E. Latané, Jr. 18 All Work and All Play: Felicia Hemans’s Edinburgh Noctes 239 Nanora Sweet Part V Blackwood’s Abroad 19 Mediating Indian Literature in the Age of Empire: Blackwood’s and Orientalism 255 Daniel Sanjiv Roberts 20 Tales of the Colonies: Blackwood’s, Provincialism, and British Interests Abroad 267 Anthony Jarrells Selected Bibliography 279 Index 281 Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–30441–3 Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–30441–3 ‘A character so various, and yet so indisputably its own’: A Passage to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine Robert Morrison and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts William Blackwood found the name ‘Magazine . already degraded to the dust, when he planned his memorable revolution in that department of literature’, announced Thomas De Quincey in 1827; ‘and it would be too much to expect, that ten years of brilliant writing should dissolve the invet- erate associations which almost a century of dulness had gathered about that title’. Yet as De Quincey went on to acknowledge, these associations did not prevent Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine from ranking ‘first, in point of talent, amongst the journals of the present day’, and his calculations included the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review, both of which might be thought of as having ‘the advantage in point of dignity’, but both of which fell below Blackwood’s because they had to strain to reach – whereas it was intimately connected to – ‘the shifting passions of the day’ (WTDQ, V, 149–150). De Quincey’s assessment is rooted in his own strong preference for magazines (he was a professional writer for almost three decades before he published a single article in a review), and it underestimates Blackwood’s immediate impact, as it took far less than a decade for its ‘brilliant writing’ to dislodge the ‘century of dulness’ that had gathered about the title of ‘magazine’. But certainly De Quincey is correct in his observation that Blackwood had effected a ‘memorable revolution’, for his magazine was the most important literary-political journal of its time, and a major force not only in Scottish letters, but in the development of British and American Romanticism.1 There was nothing else quite like Blackwood’s.2 It demolished much of what had come before in magazine publishing, and set the pattern for a great deal of what was to follow. It bristled always with confidence and contradiction, mobilizing a coruscating wit and explosive irony while calling repeatedly for stability and continuity. It was infamous for its belligerent High Toryism and its vicious literary reviews, especially of ‘Cockney School’ poets such as Leigh Hunt and John Keats. But it was equally remarkable for its variety, its inconsistency and irreverence, its breadth of insight, its groundbreaking 1 Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–30441–3 Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–30441–3 2 Romanticism and Blackwood’s Magazine treatment of fiction, its penetrating reviews of contemporary poetry, and its fictionalization of its own production in its immensely popular Noctes Ambrosianae, the raucous and wide-ranging dialogues that capture in full the exuberance of ‘Maga’ during Blackwood’s seventeen-year editorship. One of the magazine’s leading contributors, David Macbeth Moir, concisely summarized Blackwood’s appeal: ‘no other existing periodical has like Maga a character so various, and yet so indisputably its own’. More recently, Jon Klancher explores how in Blackwood’s ‘a powerful transauthorial discourse echoes through its protean collocation of styles, topics, and voices’.3 Blackwood’s magazine began, not with a bang, but a whimper. In 1816, Blackwood – increasingly successful as a bookseller and publisher – determined to establish a magazine.4 In part, he was anxious to exploit the rich literary and cultural climate of Edinburgh, and undoubtedly he recognized that the magazine format itself, which had remained essentially unaltered since Edward Cave introduced his Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731, was ripe for change. More directly, however, Blackwood sought to challenge Archibald Constable, his senior by only two years, a fellow Scot, a Whig, and the high-profile publisher of the Edinburgh Review, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and most of Walter Scott’s novels, as well as of The Scot’s Magazine. Blackwood published the first issue of his Edinburgh Monthly Magazine in April 1817, and while it contained work by James Hogg, John Gibson Lockhart, Walter Scott, and John Wilson, it also opened – irritatingly – with an article praising Francis Horner, arch Whig and one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review. Unimpressed, Blackwood gave his editors, Thomas Pringle and James Cleghorn, two more numbers to give his magazine a clear direction and a distinct identity. But the situation did not improve, and by October he himself was in the editor’s chair when a reconstituted effort, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, exploded onto the British literary scene with an issue that contained a scathing review of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817), the first indictment of the ‘Cockney School of Poetry’, and the ‘Chaldee Manuscript’, an allegorical attack on Constable and other nota- ble Edinburgh Whigs that left many gasping and others threatening legal action. ‘Whatever may become of Blackwood or his antagonists – the “read- ing” or rather the talking “public” is greatly beholden to the Author’ of the ‘Chaldee’, remarked Thomas Carlyle. ‘He has kept its jaws moving these four weeks – and the sport is not finished yet’.5 Blackwood quickly capitalized on his initial