The Edinburgh of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and James Hogg’s Fiction

Abstract

Until 1905 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine proudly bore the name of its city of origin. The title given to William Blackwood’s magazine in October 1817 was a reflection of civic pride in the Scottish capital’s recently-acquired status as a major British and European publishing centre. J. G. Lockhart, in Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk, compared early nineteenth-century Edinburgh advantageously as a ‘great mart of literature’ to the Weimar of Wieland, Schiller, and Goethe, pointing out that although books were written in Weimar in abundance the true centre of their publication was Leipzig. A similar situation in Edinburgh had been changed by the advent of Archibald Constable, ‘without doubt, by far the greatest publisher Scotland ever has produced’, and the publisher both of the innovative Edinburgh Review and of the works of Walter Scott.1 Now instead of Scottish authors sending their books to London for publication, English authors send their work to Edinburgh, ‘to be published in a city, than which Memphis or Palmyra could scarcely have appeared a more absurd place of publication to any English author thirty years ago’ (II, 166). The comparison is revealing, both the Syrian city-state of Palmyra and Egyptian Memphis eventually losing their vitality when incorporated in the Roman Empire. Lockhart’s praise of William Blackwood’s chief rival in the Edinburgh publishing trade is motivated by national pride in the intellectual resurgence of the formerly independent capital of Scotland.