Romanticism and Blackwood's Magazine

'An Unprecedented Phenomenon'

R. Morrison, D. Roberts, R. Morrison, D. Roberts

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230304413
• eBook ISBN: 9781137303851
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection of essays throws vast new light on the most significant literary-political journal of the Romantic age. Its chapters analyze Blackwood's wide-ranging contributions on some of the most topical issues in Romantic studies, including celebrity, British versus Scottish nationalism, and the rise of terror and detective fiction.

Part I

Blackwood’s and the Periodical Press

1

Beginning Blackwood’s: The Right Mix of Dulce and Ùtile

Philip Flynn

A Berkshire Rector has been pleased to wonder Why we’ve dismissed the primitive arrangement. He hates, he says, from verse to prose to blunder. Our quick transitions seem to him derangement.

Begging our good friend’s pardon, We prefer To mix the dulce with the Ùtile, And think it has in fact a charming air Such different things in the same page to see.

These iambic pentameter quatrains were part of the ‘Notices to Contributors’ that opened the March 1818 number of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Their tone is cocky, the tone of a publication that finally had found its several voices. It had not been easy. Eight months before, William Blackwood had written to Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, London publishers of his Edinburgh Monthly Magazine (April–September 1817), to warn them of their joint venture’s imminent demise: ‘I am sorry to inform you that I have been obliged to resolve upon stopping the Magazine with No. 6. I have been much disappointed in my editors who have done little in the way of writing or procuring Contributions. Ever since the work began I have had myself almost the whole burden of procuring contributions which by great exertions I got from my own friends, while at the same time I had it not in my power to pay for them, as by our agreement the Editors were to furnish me with the whole of the materials for which and their Editorial labours they were to receive half of the profits of the work’.¹

Blackwood’s feckless editors were Thomas Pringle and James Cleghorn, who had organized the contents of the Magazine under formal headings – Original Communications, Antiquarian Repertory, Original Poetry, Review of New Publications, Literary and Scientific Intelligence, and so on – ‘the primitive arrangement’ mentioned in the quatrain. Despite those formal categories, the miscellany teetered through incoherence into self-contradiction, providing activities of the Royal Family, narratives of crimes, reports of coroners’ inquests, and any ‘Singular Occurrence’, ‘Shocking Story’, ‘Melancholy Accident’, or ‘Dreadful Catastrophe’ that could be gleaned from other publications, while mixing William Blackwood’s own Tory sentiments with summaries of articles in the Whig Edinburgh Review. The early numbers were flat – no fizz, no flash, nothing to catch the public’s eye and distinguish the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine from other British monthlies such as Archibald Constable’s The Scots Magazine. In June 1817 Blackwood informed Pringle and Cleghorn that their services might no longer be required after the sixth number.² They retaliated by issuing a public announcement that the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine would cease publication after the sixth number and then signed on as the new editors of the rival Scots Magazine. ‘By our agreement neither party can continue it under the same title’, Blackwood explained to Baldwin, Cradock and Joy. ‘I have however made arrangements with a gentleman of first-rate talents by which I will begin a new work of a far superior kind’.³

The gentleman of first-rate talents was probably John Wilson, who had contributed to early numbers of the Magazine, becoming unofficial literary adviser in September. While idling in Blackwood’s bookshop/publishing house/literary salon at 17 Princes Street – ‘the only great lounging bookshop in the New Town of Edinburgh’ – Wilson had developed his friendship with John Gibson Lockhart.⁴ Both men had studied at Glasgow College, excelled at Oxford, and been admitted to the Scottish bar in 1816. Despite those shared experiences the two were odd companions. Wilson was nine years older than Lockhart, relentlessly robust in his athletic interests, spontaneous, gregarious, given to excess in emotion and expression, inclined to such bewildering volte-faces of opinion that Lockhart sometimes thought him ‘mad’.⁵ Lockhart himself was fastidious, reserved, noticeably handsome in the dark, slim style, with a stiletto wit instead of Wilson’s broadsword. Lockhart’s knowledge of German literature was a relatively rare accomplishment in Britain in 1817, and Blackwood supported Lockhart in his literary ambitions, providing funds for Lockhart’s visit to Weimar to meet Goethe.

Blackwood’s encouragement of Lockhart and Wilson had a sharp business edge. As Pringle’s and Cleghorn’s editorial failure became manifest, Blackwood revised his plan. After the sixth number (and the departure of Pringle and Cleghorn), he would publish Number 7 (October 1817) with a new title: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. He would be his own editor, the acknowledged final voice in questions of what would be published and when. But his responsibilities as bookseller and publisher would absorb much of his time, so he would need assistants, sub-editors in fact, if not in title, energetic young men-of-letters with personal style and impressive university degrees who could provide lively or profound copy on demand.

Although the title of the monthly had been changed, Cleghorn and Pringle initiated legal proceedings against Blackwood for violating the terms of their agreement by continuing without them. Blackwood was not deterred. Not only was the title of the Magazine different. Number 7 looked different, noticeably less crowded: Cleghorn’s and Pringle’s formal divisions of Original Communications, Antiquarian Repertory, Original Poetry, and Review of New Publications were dropped. Poems now separated scientific essays; comic pieces followed serious. Reading Number 7 was an exercise in the unexpected, and James Hogg approved: ‘By the by of all things connected with the Magazine I like that best of intermixing all things through other … I like such bold and manly freedom. [H]ow superior is that to Analytical notices and Antiquarian repertory forsooth’.⁶ Hogg might have noticed that the ‘intermixing’ was strategically organized, with provocative pieces placed at the beginning, one-third and two-thirds within, and at the conclusion. Between those provocative pieces were placed more sober and defensible essays: John Wilson on Christopher Marlowe, William Alison on Dugald Stewart’s philosophical writings, and an essay ‘On the Optical Properties of Mother of Pearl’ by David Brewster. Interspersed were a humorous essay by Walter Scott, poetry by Hogg and others, and the generic filler of Scottish periodicals: ‘Curious Meteorological Phenomena Observed in Argyllshire’, ‘Curious Facts Relative to the Abdication of Queen Mary’, and a ‘Memoir of Rob Roy MacGregor’.

The first essay, John Wilson’s review of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817), revealed Wilson’s full power of evisceration: ‘Mr Coleridge has written copiously on the Association of Ideas, but his own do not seem to be connected either by time, place, cause and effect, resemblance, or contrast, and accordingly it is no easy matter to follow him through all the vagaries of his Literary Life’.⁷ More savage than the ad hominem attacks of the Quarterly and Edinburgh reviews, Wilson then moved from the work to the man, citing Coleridge’s failed university career, his political inconsistencies, and his abandonment of his wife and children. ‘We have not been speaking in the cause of Literature only, but, we conceive, in the cause of Morality and Religion’, Wilson declares:

For it is not fitting that he should be held up as an example to the rising generation … who has alternately embraced, defended, and thrown aside all systems of Philosophy, and all creeds of Religion … and who, while he would subvert and scatter into dust those structures of knowledge, reared by the wise men of this and other generations, has nothing to erect in their room but the baseless and air-built fabrics of a dreaming imagination. (18)

In contrast to Walter Scott, whose generous and gregarious imagination ‘has peopled our hills with heroes’, Coleridge’s solipsistic muse could not escape the prison of Coleridge’s ego, ‘and instead of his mind reflecting the beauty and glory of nature, he seems to consider the mighty universe as nothing better than a mirror, in which, with a grinning and idiot selfcomplacency, he may contemplate the Physiognomy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’ (6, 5).⁸

Apparently Coleridge was Wilson’s designated target in this number. He returned to the attack in a subsequent essay on Christopher Marlowe; then, with either cynicism or impartiality, he privately invited De Quincey to submit an article defending Coleridge.⁹ Lockhart’s designated targets were ‘the Cockney School’, Leigh Hunt and his London-based associates. Lockhart’s several criticisms of ‘the Cockney School’ (signed ‘Z.’), and Jeffrey’s earlier anonymous criticisms of ‘the Lake School’ in the Edinburgh Review, are documents in the English Bards and Scotch Reviewers phase of British criticism. Jeffrey’s attacks were based upon an associationist aesthetic theory that he explained most clearly in his May 1811 review of the second edition of Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1810). Lockhart’s criticisms were more obviously part of a British culture war, a war fought on moral, religious, political, and sociological fronts: ‘All the great poets of our country have been men of some rank in society, and there is no vulgarity in any of their writings; but Mr Hunt cannot utter a dedication, or even a note, without betraying the Shibboleth of low birth and low habits’.¹⁰

Born of a rootless man from Barbados, an editor and essayist whose papers attacked institutional religion, the monarchy, and Parliament as then constituted, a libertine poet of incest in his Story of Rimini (1816), a poser without a university degree who feigned familiarity with classical and modern European literatures, the patron of an apothecary-poet named Keats, of the pimpled hack Hazlitt, and of other poorly educated literary parvenus, Leigh Hunt was the cultural Outsider, the enemy of all that Blackwood’s Britons held dear: ‘The two great elements of all dignified poetry, religious feeling, and patriotic feeling, have no place in his writings. His religion is a poor tame dilution of the blasphemies of the Encyclopaedie [sic] – his patriotism a crude, vague, ineffectual, and sour Jacobinism. His works exhibit no reverence either for God or man; neither altar nor throne have any dignity in his eyes’ (39).¹¹ After reading this essay Keats wrote to Benjamin Bailey, ‘I never read any thing so virulent’.¹²

The best or worst was saved for last. At the conclusion of the main body of this experimental number came the ‘Translation From An Ancient Chaldee Manuscript’. The editorial prefix explained that ‘we have been favoured with the following translation of a Chaldee MS. which is preserved in the great Library of Paris (Salle 2d, No 53, B. A. M. M.) by a gentleman whose attainments in Oriental Learning are well known to the public’.¹³ Also well known to the public was the slang term ‘bam’: ‘a jocular imposition, the same as humbug’, a term easily confused with the B. A. M. M. unit within Salle 53.¹⁴ Blackwood’s readers would recognize the style of the MS as the style of biblical apocalyptic vision, organized in chapter and verse: ‘And I saw in my dream, and behold one like the messenger of a King came toward me from the east, and he took me up and carried me into the midst of the great city that looketh toward the north and toward the east’ (25).

The great city was not Rome or Babylon. It was Edinburgh, seat of literature; and the vision was of a literary Armageddon, a struggle between the forces of Good, led by a man in plain apparel ‘in the place of Princes’ (33) whose name ‘was as it had been the colour of ebony’ (25), and the forces of Evil, led by a man ‘who was crafty in counsel, and cunning in all manner of working’ (26). Arrayed in the forces of Good were ‘the beautiful leopard, from the valley of the palm trees’; ‘the scorpion, which delighteth to sting the faces of men’; and ‘the great wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbrevations
• Note on the Referencing of Blackwood’s Articles
• Notes on Contributors
• ‘A character so various, and yet so indisputably its own’: A Passage to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine Robert Morrison and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts
• Part I: Blackwood’s and the Periodical Press
• Part II: Blackwood’s Culture and Criticism
• Part III: Blackwood’s Fictions
• Part IV: Blackwood’s at Home
• Part V: Blackwood’s Abroad
• Selected Bibliography
• Index