Blackwood's Magazine and the “Schooling” of Taste

Abstract

Writers for periodical magazines and reviews in the late Romantic period became increasingly aware of the role that such publications played in actively shaping public taste. This article turns to Blackwood's Magazine and investigates how it uses writing about food to reflect on the shaping of literary tastes. I argue that the magazine uses gastronomy both to justify its judgments of taste as naturalized, universal truths, and to reflect upon the processes of periodical production that belie such naturalness. Particularly through the logic of schooling – classifying writers into groups like the Cockney School or the less famous Leg of Mutton School – Blackwood's asserts a pre-existing, fixed standard of taste that the magazine at other moments claims to create, amend and defend against threats to its stability. Food culture's shifting significations offer means for writers to negotiate between taste as either a necessary precondition for literary production or a contingent product of those processes. Like the amorphous but vividly realized subjects authoring the magazine, taste is alternately poised between fixity and flux.