‘The Singular Wrought Out into the Strange and Mystical’: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the Transformation of Terror

Abstract

When Lord Byron decided in May 1819 to publish his Gothic fragment, ‘Augustus Darvell’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine seemed to him the obvious choice (Byron 1973–94, vol. 6: 126).1 Though founded only eighteen months earlier, the magazine had quickly established itself as one of the leading periodical publications of the day, and one that specialised in terror. Led by its editor, William Blackwood, and key contributors such as John Wilson and J. G. Lockhart, Blackwood’s routinely used variously aestheticised forms of violence and fear as a method of engagement with a host of social, critical and cultural issues, and as a means of promulgating its virulent version of High Toryism, as seen most clearly in its bellicose attacks on Whig enemies such as the Edinburgh Review, and its literary assassinations of ‘Cockney School’ writers like John Keats and Leigh Hunt (Schoenfield 2013).