Conservatism and the Quarterly Review

A Critical Analysis

Jonathan Cutmore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781851969517
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317314370
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In its time, the Quarterly Review was thought to closely reflect government policy, however, the essays in this volume reveal that it was inconsistent in its support of government positions and reflected disagreement over a broad range of religious, economic and political issues.

1 Plotting the Success of the Quarterly Review

Kim Wheatley

A good plot good friends and full of expectation – An excellent plot excellent friends

QR Letter 5

The exchanges of letters between John Murray and his gentlemen beginning in 1807 offer a revealing look behind the scenes of the Quarterly Review. Jonathan Cutmore’s unpublished edition of these letters gives us a greatly enlarged impression of what Murray, Walter Scott (not yet Sir Walter Scott) and George Ellis thought they were doing as they worked in secrecy to found the Quarterly in opposition to the Edinburgh Review and enlist William Gifford as editor. I will be concentrating here on the letters written prior to the first issue of the Quarterly that discuss the founders’ elaborate plans for the new periodical. Our new insight into the specificities of these plans deepens our understanding of the material conditions underlying Romantic-era print culture. Mixed in with references to other business matters, we can also find in the letters plenty of eye-opening general reflections about what these so-called ‘Tory conspirators’¹ hoped to achieve. As Cutmore shows in his essay in the present volume, re-examining the formation of the Quarterly helps to challenge the myth of its ideological cohesiveness. In my essay, I will be looking both at freshly available and previously published letters to bring out the creative impulses behind this high-stakes enterprise. I have raised elsewhere the question of what it would mean for Romantic-era periodicals to be termed Romantic in the traditional aesthetic sense.² Many scholars have long considered the politically conservative Quarterly anti-Romantic because of its intemperate attacks on Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Leigh Hunt and William Hazlitt. However, certain articles in the Quarterly can be seen as contributing to even while they resist the emergence of canonical Romanticism – not so much in what they say as in how they say it. By contrast, the letters dealing with the founding of the Quarterly at first sight exemplify the nitty-gritty machinations behind the invention of a new product in the literary marketplace, appearing completely at odds with Romantic notions such as spontaneity, beauty and the ‘deep self ’. To the writers of these letters, ‘transcendent’ is merely a complimentary adjective to apply to a well-crafted article rather than a tribute to the sublimity of the imagination (QR Letter 137). Yet the ‘success’ pursued by these writers (QR Letter 1) – whether political, literary, financial or all three – verges on the mystical: success for the Quarterly in its early years constitutes, in William Wordsworth’s phrase, ‘something evermore about to be’.³

Recent criticism of early nineteenth-century periodicals has focused on the periodicals’ shaping of their audiences and on the interplay between collective discourse and individual authorship. These same two issues intersect in this fascinating collection of letters. The chief preoccupation of the founders of the Quarterly is the influence that they hope the periodical will have on its readers. As William St Clair has recently emphasized, the Romantic era saw widespread debate over the effects of reading and, in particular, the power of the printed word. St Clair’s book foregrounds sales and circulation figures to modify more text-based interpretations of Romantic-era print culture such as Jon Klancher’s book on the carving out of distinct but overlapping readerships by different periodicals.⁴ Not surprisingly since they are looking forwards rather than backwards, the founders of the Quarterly, by contrast, initially approach the creation of audiences from the point of view of production rather than reception: they imagine the responses of implied as opposed to actual readers. I am especially interested in the assumptions that they make about writing and reading as they plot to counter the (to them) lamentable brilliance of the Edinburgh. We will see that these writers slide back and forth between concerns with the propagation of political principles, literary merit, entertainment value and commercial viability. A central problem for them is whether the Quarterly should replicate the supposedly vitriolic prose of the Edinburgh. At times, the achievement of what the letter-writers euphemistically call a ‘sprightly’ style (QR Letter 8) comes to seem an end in itself.

Besides discussing how they hope to ‘create’ an ‘ardent appetite in the public’ (QR Letter 25), the letter-writers explicitly and implicitly address the relationship between establishing a corporate ethos and expressing the opinions of individual contributors. The complexities of this relationship have taxed recent commentators on Romantic-era periodical writing, many of whom use as their starting point Klancher’s notion of a depersonalized ‘transauthorial discourse’.⁵ David Latané contends that ‘any attempt to define unilateral corporate discourse’ must be balanced against the effort to ‘[resurrect] the diffuse subjectivities of noncanonical writers’.⁶ By contrast, St Clair warns against applying Romantic notions of solitary authorship, claiming that ‘When reviewers employed the royal “we”, they were implying that their views were those of the institution for which they were writing and of a constituency of the reading nation whom they claimed to represent, not just their own views’.⁷ Other critics try to reconcile Romantic conceptions of authorship with a heightened awareness of the historical conditions of periodical production. Mark Parker and Nanora Sweet, for example, both stress the ability of individual editors to manipulate the overall effect created by their anonymous contributions.⁸ As we will see, the Quarterly letter-writers are preoccupied by editorial power – both that of Francis Jeffrey, whom they regard as the almost preternaturally effective editor of the Edinburgh, and, in anticipation, that of the controversial figure of Gifford. Yet they remain aware that ‘Jeffrey’s best articles are … the result of the studies and thoughts of several friends’ (QR Letter 32). Meanwhile, we can interpret the letters themselves, though of course signed by individuals unlike the articles in the periodical, as an unfolding collaborative text, a shared work-in-progress. Weaving in and out of extensive spoken conversations, and in some cases intended for the eyes of more than one reader, these letters enact the subordination of individual to collective agency as their writers collaborate on something larger than the sum of its parts – literally, the establishment of the Quarterly, but more abstractly the quest for a sense of ‘success’ that remains always just around the corner. At the same time, attention to the language of the letters enables us to begin to recapture the human voices behind an ostensibly corporate product.

Aesthetic concerns and human idiosyncrasies admittedly at first glance seem nowhere in sight in the earliest letter proposing the creation of the yet-to-be-named new Review,⁹ a plea for ‘high patronage’ from Murray to the Tory politician George Canning (25 September 1807; QR Letter 1). Yet much of the letter dwells on the near-magical success of the Edinburgh, a topic that recurs obsessively in the letters that follow. Tellingly, Murray does not begin his letter by mentioning his proposed new periodical, but by informing Canning of what he surely already knows – that ‘a work entitled the Edinburgh Review’ has ‘obtained an extent of circulation not equaled by any similar publication’ (QR Letter 1). Throughout their letters, Murray and the other founders of the Quarterly will wrestle with the question of how to define their publication against the Edinburgh, sometimes referred to simply as ‘our rivals’ (QR Letter 7) or ‘the enemy’ (QR Letter 4). The letter-writers will also anxiously aspire to match or surpass the Edinburgh’s circulation figures, for a mixture of ideological and economic reasons. For the moment, ideological concerns are in the forefront as Murray conjures up a spectre of almost demonic efficiency: ‘The principles of this work are … so radically bad, that I have been led to consider the effect which such sentiments so generally diffused, are likely to produce; and to think that some means equally popular ought to be adopted to counteract their dangerous tendency’ (QR Letter 1). Couching political opposition in moral terms in his September 1807 letter to Canning, Murray does not pause to define the ‘effect’ or to identify the exact correlation between a large audience and the propagation of ‘dangerous’ ideas.

In that letter, Murray continues to elevate the ‘publication in question’ by describing it as ‘written with … unquestionable talent’ and ‘conducted with … high and decisive authority’. These phrases leave no room for debate: the writers for the Edinburgh would seem too supremely powerful to challenge, except that this letter at the same time belittles the Edinburgh as a mere party ‘organ’. Murray initially leaves vague the nature of his proposed counterattack: ‘some means equally popular’ may be easier imagined than accomplished. Yet in the course of the letter he shifts from the humble suggestion that his plan ‘is not perhaps undeserving of one moment of [Canning’s] attention’ to an announcement of the extent of his ambition: ‘my object is nothing short of producing a work of the greatest talent and importance’. The magisterial Edinburgh will it seems be surpassed. The same switch from humility to self-aggrandizement can be seen in Murray’s comments on himself: his attitude to Canning is deferential throughout, but he closes the letter with a display of his credentials: ‘the person who thus addresses you is no adventurer, but a man of some property inheriting a business that has been established for nearly a century’. The connection between the achievement of a ‘work of the greatest talent and importance’ and the long-standing nature of Murray’s ‘business’ is left to be inferred, although the implication is that talent can be bought and respectability can be borrowed. The hint of a conflict between individual self-assertion and submission to a collective entity – the publisher defers not only to Canning but to his unnamed ‘friends’ – will be developed in later letters by writers other than Murray.

This conflict between corporate and individual enterprise is much more evident in a long letter of advice from Scott to Gifford written more than a year later (25 October 1808; QR Letter 4) once arrangements for the new Review were underway. As a defector from the Edinburgh, Scott was one of the Quarterly’s most enthusiastic proponents. According to his biographer John Sutherland, ‘He wanted to control the operation, but he did not want to be seen to be in control’^.10 T e topics covered in Scott’s letter include financial matters, the political character of the new periodical and the duties of the editor, as well as the arguably more mundane matters of the publication’s name (‘any one which has little pretension might serve the turn’) and how of en it should appear (quarterly, like the Edinburgh, is the predictable suggestion). Claiming that he does not have ‘the vanity to hope I can point out any thing of consequence’, Scott purports to offer merely a ‘few observations’ in obedience to ‘the commands of our distinguished friends’. On one side, the ‘distinguished friends’ are at the helm; on the other, Gifford’s own ‘literary experience and eminence’ rule the day. Yet Scott’s downplaying of his own agency is belied by the length of his letter (almost 2,500 words) and its apparently comprehensive scope. Similarly, his self-deprecating reference to his ‘miscellaneous’ thoughts is belied by the clear organization of the letter. Scott even wrote a full draft of the letter (QR Letter 4A), which he sent to Ellis, and the differences between the two versions reveal the intensity of his involvement with the new Review. Scott circulated his revised version of the letter to the Scottish Lord Advocate Archibald Campbell-Colquhoun and to the future Quarterly contributor William Erskine as well as to Canning. The letter thus appears less a one-on-one communication than a contribution to an ongoing group discussion. In line with the ostensible ceding of control, eventually Scott’s letter drifts, like those of some other correspondents, into figurative language hinting at an aggression that may unsettle the group’s shared agenda.

The achievement of ‘success’, according to Scott, will rely on emulation of the Edinburgh’s financial practices, which turn out to be fundamentally, though not unproblematically, bound up with deeper concerns. Scott begins his advice with an assertion that is questionable despite its parade of inside knowledge:

The extensive reputation and circulation of the Edinburgh Review is chiefly owing to two circumstances. First that it is entirely uninfluenced by the Booksellers who have contrived to make most of the other reviews mere vehicles for advertising and puffing off their own publications or running down those of their rivals. Secondly the very handsome recompense which the Editor not only holds forth to his regular assistants but actually forces upon those whose rank and fortune make it a matter of indifference to them. (QR Letter 4)

Objectivity is of course part of the ethos of the Edinburgh, but the idea that the Quarterly could be considered as independent of ‘bookselling-interference’, as Murray later put it, may seem far-fetched given Murray’s own admission that ‘It were silly to suppress that I shall not be sorry to derive from it as much profit as I can satisfactorily enjoy’ (QR Letter 8), though of course he was merely suggesting that he would not puff his own works in the new journal.¹¹ Two years afterwards, Murray downplayed his concern for profit, telling Gifford, ‘I would rather it excelled all other Journals and I gained nothing by it than gain £300 a year by it without trouble if it were thought inferior to any other. – This Sir is true’ (QR Letter 59). Profitable or not, the Quarterly would long be defined by its connection to Murray’s publishing house. James Mill, in a searing attack on the Quarterly, would accuse it of having ‘always displayed much more of the character of a bookseller’s catch-penny, than the Edinburgh Review’.¹² Scott’s other point, that the Quarterly contributors, like those of the Edinburgh, should be ‘handsomely recompensed’ rests on the premise that high pay guarantees a high quality of writing – or rather that the perception that this is so will appeal to the reading (and purchasing) public. The image of writers being ‘force[d]’ into accepting payment supposedly reinforces the ideal of objectivity, but the mention of ‘rank’ in connection with ‘fortune’ betrays the possibility of social bias, anticipating the Quarterly’s reputation for deference to the aristocracy (QR Letter 4).

Further on in his letter of advice, Scott offers another questionable reason for the Edinburgh’s wide circulation:

From eight to nine thousand copies of that review are quarterly dispersed and with all deference to the information and high talents of the Editor (which nobody can think of more highly than I do) much of this popularity is owing to their <its> being the only respectable and independant publication of the kind. In Edinburgh or I may say in Scotland there is not one out of twenty who reads the work that agrees ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Plotting the Success of the Quarterly Review
• 2 'Sardonic grins' and 'paranoid politics': Religion, Economics, and Public Policy in the Quarterly Review
• 3 A Plurality of Voices in the Quarterly Review
• 4 Politics, Culture, and Scholarship: Classics in the Quarterly Review
• 5 Walter Scott and the Quarterly Review
• 6 John Barrow, the Quarterly Review's Imperial Reviewer
• 7 Hung, Drawn and Quarterlyed: Robert Southey, Poetry, Poets and the Quarterly Review
• 8 Robert Southey's Contribution to the Quarterly Review
• Appendix A: List of Letters
• Appendix B: Transcription of Key Letters
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index