Contributors to the Quarterly Review

A History, 1809-25

Jonathan Cutmore

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317314349
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literatura
• Categoría: Crítica literaria

The "Quarterly Review" presents a rare opportunity to Romantic scholars to test the truth of Marilyn Butler's claim that the early nineteenth-century periodical is the matrix for democratization of public writing and reading. This is the second title in this series to look at its influence.

1 Origins

The Quarterly Review was launched, on the first day of March 1809, under the imprint of the young London publisher John Murray by a consortium of powerful conservative politicians and literary men, George Canning and Walter Scott foremost among them.¹ Their avowed purpose in setting up a new periodical was to combat the ‘radically bad principles’ of Archibald Constable’s flagship journal, the Edinburgh Review.² Repelled though they were by the Edinburgh’s politics, they were at the same time attracted by its wit, its verve, and, not least, by its success with the public. In response, they created a contending journal similar to its northern rival in outward appearances but opposed to the Edinburgh in its critical, religious, and above all its political principles.³ With conservatives’ objections to the ‘Northern blast’⁴ involved in the origins of the Quarterly Review, it is therefore to the Edinburgh that we briefly turn.

The Quarterly’s doppelganger and nemesis was started in October 1802 by three young Edinburgh University graduates, Sydney Smith, Francis Jeffrey, and Francis Horner. As it was first constituted, the Edinburgh Review was not a Whig party journal. Instead, it reflected philosophic Whiggism: it was egalitarian, materialist, and anti-dogmatic.⁵ By 1808 it had as many as 8,000 subscribers, in that day a substantial number for a weighty political-literary journal. The Edinburgh’s influence extended beyond these few thousand readers, however; to judge from contemporary correspondence, the nation’s elites habitually took account of its opinions.

A reason for the Edinburgh’s extensive reputation and reach was its innovative approach to book criticism. Reviewing before the Edinburgh was conducted in journals that contained numerous brief articles top-heavy with quotations.⁶ In contrast, the Edinburgh’s writers used books as launching pads for lengthy opinionated dissertations. The editor Francis Jeffrey’s reviews in particular were regarded as ‘witty, saucy, and eloquent’ and under his direction the periodical was generally acknowledged to be ‘superior in genius and vivacity’.⁷ Even conservatives admired the Edinburgh reviewers’ ‘unquestionable talent’ and considered the journal ‘essential to the library of a literary man’.⁸

Some readers, though, found the Edinburgh’s long articles ‘egotistical’. Criticism also arose because Jeffrey settled into a standard approach to reviewing — ‘hard words and hanging’ — that was, if sometimes playful, often harshly dismissive. Yet the journal’s impact was so great that contemporaries struggled to understand its attraction and the motive behind Jeffrey’s method.⁹ Typical of many commentators, Robert Southey’s friend the civil servant Grosvenor Bedford recognized scientific rigour and disinterestedness in the Edinburgh’s criticism, but also professional preening: ‘The Scotchmen’, he wrote, ‘are like those philosophical anatomists who care not whether the dog they cut up be dead or alive, so they cut deep enough and flourish their instruments with the air of a flugelman’.¹⁰ Applying eighteenth-century standards of critical decorum, Bedford thought some of the Edinburgh’s articles ‘most unworthy of literature, and derogatory to the character of a scholar and a gentleman’.¹¹ In December 1807, Southey, the Quarterly’s future ‘sheet anchor’, declined Jeffrey’s invitation to become an Edinburgh reviewer because, reflecting a common complaint, he saw corruption of character in the Edinburgh’s approach to criticism. He wanted no part in a journal that could wound a man ‘in his feelings and injure him in his fame and fortune’. ‘Its morals and its politics’, he later declared in his usual blunt manner, ‘are equally base — its principles of taste, absolutely below contempt’.¹²

If the Edinburgh gave offence with some of its literary reviews, many of its readers were scandalized by the journal’s anti-religious tone. Jeffrey’s reviews of the evangelical poets Cowper and Montgomery especially caused wide-spread consternation among subscribers. Between 1802 and 1808, religious readers were also angered by a series of articles Sydney Smith contributed on Methodism and on Christian foreign missions, by a review of the sermons of the leader of the Scottish evangelical party, Sir Henry Moncreiff, by an article on Hoyle’s poem ‘Exodus’, by Sir William Drummond’s review of the evangelical matriarch Hannah More’s Hints to a Princess, and by Smith’s sarcastic article on a bill before Parliament to increase the salaries of Church of England curates.¹³

Jeffrey’s slashing criticism and the Edinburgh Review’s materialist ethos, however, did not alone inspire the creation of a rival that might ‘exhibit the Ability without the Acrimony of the Northern Lights’,¹⁴ for it was the appearance in the Edinburgh of proto-radical sentiments on foreign and domestic policy that ultimately led ‘many ingenious men’ to support the creation of a journal that might counter its ‘dangerous tendency’.¹⁵ Jeffrey and his chief political writer, Henry Brougham, published reviews that hinted at alternative constitutional arrangements, they trenchantly criticized the Continental war effort in a period when British policy was going awry, and they impudently celebrated the 1808 Spanish insurrection against French occupation as a populist uprising of the ‘lower orders … a warning to all oligarchies’.

Three political articles in the Edinburgh are way points in the formation of the Quarterly Review. Jeffrey’s July 1807 review of Cobbett’s Political Register was the first article in the Edinburgh to contain political sentiments liberal enough to raise the ire even of the Whig denizens of Holland House.¹⁶ In the Edinburgh’s July 1808 number, in a review of Whitbread’s anti-war pamphlet Letter on Spain, Brougham challenged the British government’s optimism that the Spaniards could succeed in their rebellion.¹⁷ Most offensive, though, was Brougham’s October 1808 review ‘Don Pedro Cevallos on the French Usurpation of Spain’, in which he interpreted the Spanish uprising as a rebellion against oligarchic oppression that held lessons for aristocrats and reformers closer to home.¹⁸ A writer in the Courier for 2 December 1808 speculated that the Edinburgh reviewers dared utter such sentiments because their ‘uncontrolled power [had] led to a degree of insolence, tyranny, and caprice … to respect no objects, and fear no punishments’. ‘Thomas Paine’, the writer concluded, had ‘never published any thing more seditious than the last number of the Edinburgh Review’.

Although these political articles, notably ‘Don Pedro Cevallos’, galvanized opposition to the Edinburgh and were used by the Quarterly Review’s projectors in late 1808 and early 1809 to consolidate support for a new journal that might curb the Edinburgh’s ‘uncontrolled power’, it is telling that the initial effort to set up a rival publication was started before they appeared. Even in the absence of transparently liberal political articles in the Edinburgh Review, some of that periodical’s quondam admirers, offended by its attacks on the nation’s religious and literary ‘establishments’, set the starting blocks for a new conservative journal.¹⁹

As is often the case with revolutions, a group of young people were in the vanguard. In about mid-June, during a walk together along Pall Mall, Stratford Canning, then only twenty years old, with two of his Eton and Cambridge friends, Gally Knight and Richard Wellesley, originated the idea of the Quarterly Review.²⁰ One of the students proposed the publication of ‘a counter review here’. The friends came up with the name the journal was later known by, further serious discussion followed and they drew up ‘the sketch of a prospectus’. Sometime that summer Stratford Canning walked the prospectus over to the Foreign Affairs office in Downing Street to present it to his powerful cousin George Canning, then the Foreign Secretary and the dominant personality in Cabinet.²¹ Canning then introduced his cousin to William Gifford, ‘the first Satirist of the day’,²² the man who in 1797—8 had, with Canning, conducted a brilliant Pittite political newspaper, the Anti-Jacobin; or, Weekly Examiner. Gifford ‘in his turn approved the proposal’.²³

A scant few weeks later, John Murray sent a letter, dated 27 September 1807, to the Foreign Secretary in which he suggested a plan remarkably similar to that of Stratford Canning’s.²⁴ The statesman did not reply but instead opened a back channel to Murray through his cousin.²⁵ Given John Murray’s and Stratford Canning’s identical intentions, designating Murray as the projected journal’s publisher was an obvious move, one no doubt seconded by the younger Canning as he owed Murray a debt of gratitude. In April—October 1805 the publisher had rescued Canning, Knight, Wellesley, and one of their friends, Thomas Rennell, from complications that had arisen over their Etonian publication, ‘The Miniature’. As Murray had come to know Stratford Canning through the agency of his neighbour the elder Thomas Rennell, and as every effect has a cause, Murray almost certainly learned via Rennell about the friends’ project of setting up a counter review; he then wrote to Canning in the expectation that the Foreign Secretary would suggest him as the project’s publisher. Intervening to take over ‘The Miniature’ from the publisher Charles Knight was a watershed event in Murray’s history: it led to his introduction to George Canning, indirectly to the formation of the Quarterly, and thus to his becoming the ‘Prince of Booksellers’. Years later, in comments to Knight’s son Murray epitomized its importance. ‘Your father helped to make my fortune’, Murray wrote:

When I kept a little trumpery shop in Fleet St., Dr Rennell, the Master of the Temple, told me one day that his son and young Canning owed an account for printing the ‘Miniature’, to their publisher, who held a good many unsold copies. I took the stock; paid the account, made waste paper of the numbers; brought out a smart edition which had few buyers; got the reputation of being a clever publisher; was introduced to George Canning, in consequence of the service I had rendered to his cousin; and in a few years set up the Quarterly Review.²⁶

Progress toward the formation of the journal was brought to a temporary halt in October 1807 when Stratford Canning was sent to Europe on a diplomatic mission. Shortly after he returned, at the end of the year, he introduced John Murray to William Gifford, no doubt on the suggestion of the Foreign Secretary. The two men who fourteen months later would become the Quarterly’s publisher and editor first met in Westminster at Gifford’s residence, 6 James Street, Buckingham Gate, on Friday, 8 January 1808.²⁷ In the first months of that year, Murray occasionally consulted Gifford on the best course to take in setting up a new journal.²⁸ Meanwhile, Stratford Canning attempted to arrange additional political sponsorship and to identify a body of potential contributors.

In the late winter or early spring of 1808, probably under George Canning’s auspices, Murray met the old Anti-Jacobin clique at the Spring Gardens home of the Canningite diplomat George Hammond. Given the Quarterly’s future association with government and the civil service, it was a fitting location as Spring Gardens, between Pall Mall and Whitehall, is at the geographical heart of British political and administrative power. No record has emerged of the meeting’s attendees beyond a statement that Gifford and Hammond were present and that Murray was introduced there to the diplomat John Hookham Frere. It is likely, though, that some of the following men were also present: Stratford Canning, Charles Long, George Ellis, Charles Bagot, John Charles Herries, Charles Paget, Henry William Paget, George Rose, William Huskisson, and Lords Aberdeen, Hawkesbury, and Palmerston. Along with George Canning, Robert Dundas, and Archibald Campbell-Colquhoun, these Pittite-Canningite politicians and diplomats were the journal’s charter political sponsors.²⁹

In the span of a year there had been introductions, much discussion, mutual lamentation, and readily proffered advice, but, except on Murray’s part, no commitments. When in early May 1808 Canning was again sent to Europe on a diplomatic mission, progress appeared to stall. With liberals characterizing the Spanish uprising as democratic resistance, on 19 October 1808 Canning, who like other conservatives saw the insurrection as nationalist support for the ancien régime, wrote in frustration to Wellesley, ‘If I were in England I think I should set to scribbling in mere despair … I doubt whether you will find a better opportunity … for putting our old desig...