Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine Research Articles

Reanimating Romantic Print and Periodical Culture through Digital Humanities: The Noctes Ambrosianae Project

Abstract: This article considers the author's digital project, an edition of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 's " Noctes Ambrosianae " series, as a test case to explore the value of digital editions for better understanding Romantic print culture. The essay provides an overview of the project, including the process of developing customized TEI typologies to capture different literary and cultural elements of the series. It argues that the process of digital editing should be considered a practice of critical making and affords deeper insights into the texts edited, particularly when those texts emerge from a complex, allusive print culture such as is found in Romantic periodicals.

Evolution and Political Revolution in Blackwood's Periodical Poetry

Abstract: In May 1861, the middlebrow British monthly Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine published a comic poem titled "The Origin of Species." While foregrounding Charles Darwin, the poem portrays evolution as teleological, progressive, and driven by the agency and desires of individual organisms—a misrepresentation of Darwin's theory. I argue that the poem undertakes this misrepresentation deliberately: the version of evolution it attributes to Darwin was associated with radical politics and threats to the social order. The Blackwood's poems call up these political associations to reduce the novelty of Darwin's theory and to hint at its dangerous social tendencies.

"Nearest Approach to Fairyland": Mythologising Scotland in Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh Periodical Travel-Writing and Tourism Advertisements

Abstract: This article investigates descriptions of the Scottish landscape in travel writing and tourism advertisements published in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine from 1800 to 1900. Its main objective is to analyze the ways in which periodical nature writing simultaneously created a vicarious interaction with the countryside for the reader and revealed the effects that increased human presence had on the land. The essay shows how the creation of landscape narratives without a distinct narrator came to contribute to the interplay between the mythologized, untouched Scottish countryside and the physical land that was steadily changing as a result of human interference.

The Eco-critical Underbelly

The Eco-critical Underbelly Dennis Denisoff (bio) Joseph Conrad first published Heart of Darkness in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1899, before republishing it as part of his book Youth: and Two Other Stories in 1902. As such, it literally appeared on the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But its opening paragraph suggests the more complex, philosophical cusp on which it also arose, one that captures the sense of fatalism and human insignificance that characterized an increasingly intense eco-critical perspective of the sixty-odd years around the turn of the century. Conrad's novella opens with an image of inertia verging on apathy: "The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide."1 The unfixed setting on the water, the quiet, windless swing of the craft, and the moment just before the recoil of the tide all situate the story about to unfold at the spatial and temporal cusp of a moment. Meanwhile, the human, in this first paragraph, is notably absent. The Nellie seems to think and act on its own motivations, if at all, resigned to its bobbing place in the landscape, afloat with nothing to do but wait. One senses an effort on Conrad's part to open his rumination on morality and free will not from a human perspective but through the more dispersed lens of an ecological network within which humans, assuming they exist, are relatively inconsequential. In The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1877), first entitled Studies in the History of the Renaissance in the 1873 edition, Walter Pater suggests we focus on a similar moment of physical life to capture the dispersive outlook of the modern age, [End Page 55] the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer heat. What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? … Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them—the passage of the blood, the waste and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain under every ray of light and sound—processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us: it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven in many currents … This at least of flamelike our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.2 Pater here captures a sense of the ecological akin to that of Conrad's opening—air, land, water, and human all melding, morphing, dissipating. Conrad writes, "Only the gloom to the west, brooding over the upper reaches, became more sombre every minute, as if angered by the approach of the sun."3 By the time of this slightly later passage from Heart of Darkness, Conrad has introduced some human characters, but they are lethargic, meditative, an extension of the larger context. The environment remains the dominant force, the anthropomorphic "anger" of the gloom the strongest evocation of any sort of energy suggestive of human vitality. While Pater, in his conclusion, captures the intermingling experience of a human's sensorial moment, by the time we get to Conrad's work, the emphasis has shifted to the insignificance of the human individual within vaster scales of time and space.4 I do not wish to suggest that this comparison captures a full transition in the modern world from a humanist perspective to a form of posthumanist existentialism, but to note the way in which both individualism and the sense of a loss of selfhood could arise from a similar ontological consideration. Conrad's and Pater's images eloquently capture this journal's name, Cusp. Especially enticing, the authors evoke the growing cultural awareness through the later nineteenth and...

Industrial Transport and Political Economy in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine

Industrial Transport and Political Economy in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine

Falling into Hope: Wisdom Poetry and the Reinterpretation of Suffering in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's A Drama of Exile

Falling into Hope:Wisdom Poetry and the Reinterpretation of Suffering in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's A Drama of Exile Denae Dyck (bio) Although Elizabeth Barrett Browning (hereafter, EBB) claimed in her preface to Poems (published in 1844 by Edward Moxon) that A Drama of Exile was "the longest and most important work" that she had "ever trusted into the current of publication," many of her initial readers disagreed with this assessment (WEBB 2: 567).1 Originally issued in two installments in the July and August 1844 issues of the United states Magazine and Democratic Review, A Drama of Exile featured as the lead work in this two-volume collection, which appeared only a few months later in America as A Drama of Exile: and Other Poems (1845). These widely reviewed books had the effect of making EBB "England's most internationally recognized poet," as Marjorie Stone observes; however, this recognition was not primarily because of the lead poem. While A Drama of Exile was not unilaterally disliked, reviewers dismissed it as an inferior piece, preferring EBB's sonnets and other shorter poems: this trend is evident in the Atlas, the John Bull, the sun, the Examiner, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the Critic, and the Westminster Review.2 EBB herself appears to have tempered her opinion of her work post-publication, writing to her friend and fellow poet Thomas Westwood, "I assure you I have no vain puffings up about the Drama of Exile—& I can easily believe that, as a whole, it may be a failure" (BC 9: 217). Nevertheless, her continued revisions to this poem for its republication in subsequent collections (in 1850, 1853, and 1856) imply that such disillusionment coexisted with ongoing aspirations for this piece. But then, perhaps it is strangely fitting that A Drama of Exile was seen as lacking: the poem is nothing if not a sustained engagement with the experience of limitation. Beginning where the third chapter of Genesis concludes, A Drama of Exile reinterprets the story of humankind's expulsion from Eden. This innovative starting point distinguishes A Drama of Exile from its literary [End Page 27] precursors, John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) the most obvious among them.3 Rather than retell the biblical fall narrative, EBB's dramatic poem reflects on what might be more precisely termed "the fallout of the fall," taking up challenging questions about the ordering of the cosmos and the meaning of suffering. Her revisionary engagement with biblical texts thus extends beyond the opening chapters of Genesis: EBB adapts both the topics and the forms of biblical wisdom poetry, the dialogues featured in the Book of Job in particular. Over the course of its 2,270 lines, A Drama of Exile gives voice to Adam, Eve, Lucifer, Gabriel, Christ, Eden spirits, Earth spirits, and angelic choruses. These speakers interrogate the distinction between prelapsarian and postlapsarian states, the rule that the Genesis 1 text assigns to humankind, and the idea that all suffering is punitive. If A Drama of Exile is indeed a "failure," as EBB remarked to Westwood (BC 9: 217), then it is a grandly ambitious one. To analyze the scope of EBB's ambition, this article situates the poem in relation to the interpretive debates sparked by the dissemination of biblical higher criticism in Victorian Britain. Originating in the work of German scholars including Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, and Johann Gottfried Herder, this criticism challenged accepted ideas about the Bible's divine inspiration and doctrinal unity, emphasizing instead its diverse historical contexts, theological inconsistencies, composite authorship, and generic plurality. My approach aims to supplement the growing body of scholarship that highlights the feminist energies of A Drama of Exile, from Dorothy Mermin's claiming of A Drama of Exile as "Eve's story" in 1989 to subsequent studies including those by Stone, Linda Lewis, Alexandra M. B. Wörn, Terence Allen Hoagwood, and Karen Dieleman.4 Building on Hoagwood's discussion of this poem's recourse to "the symbolic terms of the [biblical fall] myth for representation of contemporary social themes" (p. 173), I argue that EBB's engagement with what the Victorians called the Woman Question issues from her response to widespread...

From Walter Scott to John Addington Symonds: Margaret Oliphant Confronts the Nineteenth Century

During her reviewing career of over forty years (1853-97), the extraordinarily prolific Margaret Oliphant covered a wide range of writers, but has a reputation for old-fashioned attitudes towards literature. Partly challenging such a view, this chapter focuses mainly on Oliphant's publications for and about Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, and concentrates largely on British novelists. These authors span the nineteenth century, and include early figures such as Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott and Jane Austen, mid-century novelists such as Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, Thackeray and Charlotte Brontë, and later writers such as Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson. Oliphant does tend to celebrate earlier novelists, especially Scott, as having a broader conception of life than do more recent figures, who, she believes, fixate on sexual passion and/ or psychological analysis; she also views with nostalgia the early decades of the century which were actually beyond her personal experience. But at the same time, Oliphant recognizes that magazine editors and publishers of her own day are more receptive to women writers than their predecessors were. She also welcomes, in James's fiction, his treatment of life's broken threads and uncertainties, and in Stevenson's, his ability to confront the darker aspects of human potential.

From Walter Scott to John Addington Symonds: Margaret Oliphant Confronts the Nineteenth Century

During her reviewing career of over forty years (1853-97), the extraordinarily prolific Margaret Oliphant covered a wide range of writers, but has a reputation for old-fashioned attitudes towards literature. Partly challenging such a view, this chapter focuses mainly on Oliphant's publications for and about Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, and concentrates largely on British novelists. These authors span the nineteenth century, and include early figures such as Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott and Jane Austen, mid-century novelists such as Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, Thackeray and Charlotte Brontë, and later writers such as Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson. Oliphant does tend to celebrate earlier novelists, especially Scott, as having a broader conception of life than do more recent figures, who, she believes, fixate on sexual passion and/ or psychological analysis; she also views with nostalgia the early decades of the century which were actually beyond her personal experience. But at the same time, Oliphant recognizes that magazine editors and publishers of her own day are more receptive to women writers than their predecessors were. She also welcomes, in James's fiction, his treatment of life's broken threads and uncertainties, and in Stevenson's, his ability to confront the darker aspects of human potential.

Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1817–1858 by Megan Coyer

Reviewed by: Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1817–1858 by Megan Coyer Terry Barringer (bio) Megan Coyer, Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1817–1858 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. ix + 246, £70 hardcover, £19.99 paperback, open-access e-book. While Megan Coyer's title suggests a wide overview, the subtitle more accurately reflects the scope of her book: a detailed case study of one periodical in a tightly defined period. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Edinburgh was Britain's leading centre of medical education and research. It was also the centre of a thriving, politically contested periodical culture, where the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment, Romanticism, liberalism, political economy, utilitarianism, piety, scepticism, and science jostled and competed to shape the thinking of an intelligent and informed rising middle class. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (originally and briefly called Edinburgh Monthly Magazine) was founded in April 1817. Its leanings were Tory, and with its mixture of reviews, satire, poetry, and fiction, it was envisaged as a combative rival to the Whiggish Quarterly Review. Although its underlying ideology was a compound of Romanticism and high Toryism and its style was controversial and combative, it promoted the values of human feeling and imagination. As Coyer writes, Blackwood's "avowed mission [was] to reunite intellect and feeling in all arenas of social and intellectual life" (126). With plentiful source material in the published volumes and the extensive archive at the National Library of Scotland, Blackwood's Magazine has already been well studied, most notably by David Finkelstein in The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era (2002) and Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition, 1805–1930 (2006). Previous studies have been mostly concerned with the origins and business affairs of the periodical and its role in the literary development of such noted contributors as Thomas De Quincey, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, and Joseph Conrad. Coyer's study, the first to focus on Blackwood's medical content, was long in the making. She attributes the book's genesis to "one of several ideas scribbled in a note-book towards the end of my doctoral studies" (vii). She is currently a lecturer in English literature at the University of Glasgow, with a background in Scottish literature and medical humanities, but her first degree was in neuroscience. Drawing on this dual expertise, she examines the relationship between medical culture and the periodical press by drilling down into the writings, ideas, and careers of Blackwood's medical contributors between 1817, when the journal was established, to 1858, when the Medical Act created the General Medical [End Page 746] Council and consolidated the growing professionalism, status, and regulation of medicine in England and Scotland. Medical themes and representations can be found throughout Blackwood's pages. Coyer makes the case that Blackwood's, in this seminal period, enabled the development of new forms of popular medical writing that remained influential through two succeeding centuries. It also helped construct an idealised figure of a gentlemanly, humane, and literary medical man at a time when the medical establishment was tarnished in the popular mind by association with Burke, Hare, corpse-snatching, and the smells and sights of the dissecting room. Blackwood's was not the first periodical to engage with medical matters, and Coyer's first chapter looks in some detail at the Edinburgh context and its key medical men, especially those associated with the Edinburgh Review, published regularly from 1802. This periodical was noted for its literary criticism and standards of judgement and evaluation in the public domain. It was also popular with medical lecturers, who found that contributing to periodicals gave them increased visibility and a decided advantage in competing for students. Chapter two explores "The Tale of Terror and the 'Medico-Popular.'" Gothic tales of terror were a key genre for a periodical that saw itself as a champion of the invisible world against reductive utilitarian and materialist philosophies. Blackwood's favoured stories of intoxication (Confessions of an English Opium-Eater was originally intended for publication in Blackwood's), sleep, dreaming, phrenology, and deathbeds, often presented...

Gendering an International Outlook: Irish Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century

Gendering an International Outlook:Irish Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century Nora Moroney (bio) "Oh, countrymen! oh, patriots! oh, friends!"Ye cry to one another. Echo lendsHer voice—but answering time as yet no answer sends. (Charlotte Grace O'Brien, "France," 1877) Alice Stopford Green's and Charlotte Grace O'Brien's careers in the late Victorian London periodical press, as seen through their contributions to the Nineteenth Century, are a neglected element of Irish transnational cultural production. As writers engaging in internationally focused highbrow journalism, they were tangential to the traditional orientation of Irish national narratives, yet their place at the heart of one of Britain's most influential monthly journals enabled them to articulate a vision of social injustice as a means of challenging some of the hegemonic and gendered discourses of the day. Their pieces transcended boundaries, not only between Ireland and England but also, on a broader scale, between Irish and world affairs. Pivoting on issues of emigration and empire, the articles they published throughout the 1880s and 1890s convey a sense of social conscience and responsibility that informed the wider worldview of the Nineteenth Century, as well as influencing currents of British intellectual debate. Green's and O'Brien's public interventions in political and current affairs, moreover, represent a shift in the accepted narrative of late Victorian women's careers in journalism. Their presence in London's publishing scene and their pioneering work on victims of transatlantic migrancy and the Boer War were a highly visible form of investigative reporting. In their periodical writings, they counteracted notions of Irish provincialism (still evident at this time in the cartoons of Punch, for instance) and brought questions of gender to bear on issues of serious political and national [End Page 504] import. A consideration of these women writers, then, involves placing them in the context of both Irish literary developments and the British periodical market during the late nineteenth century in order to understand the varieties of borders—geographical, gendered, and journalistic—that they worked to undercut. W. T. Stead, writing as a champion of female journalists in 1892, advised aspiring applicants that "if [they] are to get on in journalism, or in anything else, they must trample under foot that most dishonouring conception of their work as mere woman's work."1 The methodology espoused here by Stead was, in F. Elizabeth Gray's words, one front of the broader phenomenon of "women journalists' search for new sources of recognition and new forms of identity through their writing for periodicals."2 Green and O'Brien fulfilled this criterion by cultivating distinctive voices in their respective Nineteenth Century articles. Through the social and political activism of these pieces, both women sought a public profile for their work, a task that was beset by challenges amid the late Victorian explosion in periodical enterprises. Writing anonymously for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in June 1893, another Irish littérateur in London, Charlotte O'Conor Eccles, described how in attempting to find a break on Fleet Street "one is horribly handicapped as a woman. A man meets other men at his club; he can be out and about at all hours; he can insist without being thought bold and forward; he is not presumed to be capable of undertaking only a limited class of subjects, but is set to anything."3 O'Brien and Green may have been cushioned somewhat from the urgent material needs of Eccles, but her experience points to the frustrations inherent in the construction of a professional identity as a woman writer within the elite press. For Irish women, especially, access to influential networks and the ability to socialize in the right circles were crucial for success in the publishing world. Operating at a remove from the male-dominated political discourse of the day, these women faced challenges that testify to the contingencies of periodical writing. Both Green and O'Brien relied on contacts within political and journalistic spheres: O'Brien's humanitarian articles were defended in Parliament by Charles Stewart Parnell, for instance, while Green was in regular correspondence with the Colonial Office regarding her South African visits. These institutional networks provided an important...

Blackwood's Byron: The Lakers, the Cockneys, and the ‘throne of poetical supremacy’

Blackwood's in its earliest numbers was a staunch admirer of Lord Byron. But when he published Beppo, it damned him in a June 1818 review as a hypocrite and a reveller, and thereafter the magazine lurched between celebrating him for his genius and castigating him for his perversion of it. Byron objected to the uneven treatment he received at the hands of the Blackwood's critics, but in ‘Some Observations Upon an Article in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine’ he echoes their views on several contemporary poets, and seems to reconcile himself to the exuberant unpredictability of the magazine.

‘The malignity of Reviewers’: Coleridge, Wilson, and Blackwood's

The first number of the refashioned Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine opens with a review of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biographia Literaria which is still regarded as one of the most virulent ‘attacks’ in the history of periodical reviewing. What could have motivated John Wilson to disparage Coleridge so personally and at such length? One factor may have been the treatment of Francis Jeffrey in the Biographia. Jeffrey's presence in both the Biographia and Wilson's review reveals a complicated debate regarding reviewing practices in the 1810s at the same time as it illuminates the boisterous, unpredictable tone of the new magazine.

James Hogg, ‘the beginner, and almost sole instigator' of Blackwood's – Not Once, but Twice

James Hogg claims to have been instrumental in initiating both versions of William Blackwood's venture into magazine publishing in 1817. This essay examines Hogg's role in beginning the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine and its successor, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, and discusses the significance of his contributions to the Edinburgh Monthly and the early numbers of Blackwood's in terms of his influence on the direction of the magazine and the magazine's impact on him. Attention is given to key works in both versions, especially ‘Tales and Anecdotes of the Pastoral Life’ and ‘Shakspeare Club of Alloa’ in the Edinburgh Monthly and the ‘Chaldee Manuscript’ and ‘Elegy’ in Blackwood's. Also important for Hogg's relationship with Blackwood's were Hogg's submissions that Blackwood did not publish. This essay looks particularly at Hogg's failed effort to enter the attacks on the Cockney School and how he also became a victim of the social and intellectual disdain leveled against the Cockneys.

The Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant, Parts V and VI: Major Novels ed. by Joanne Shattock and Elisabeth Jay

Reviewed by: The Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant, Parts V and VI: Major Novels ed. by Joanne Shattock and Elisabeth Jay Solveig C. Robinson (bio) Joanne Shattock and Elisabeth Jay, general editors, The Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant, Parts V and VI: Major Novels, 6 vols. (London: Routledge, 2015–17) pp. 2400, £335/$545 (each part) cloth. The publication of The Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant concludes with Parts V and VI, the latter of which was finally released in early 2017. Presented by general editors Joanne Shattock and Elisabeth Jay and now published by Routledge (since Part IV), these final volumes in the series contain six major stand-alone novels that represent the second half of Oliphant's prolific writing career. Part V comprises Hester (1883), The Wizard's Son (1884), and Kirsteen (1890), while Part VI includes At His Gates (1872), The Ladies Lindores (1883), and Oliphant's last novel, Old Mr. Tredgold (1896). Oliphant fans may be familiar with the novels Hester, Kirsteen, and possibly The Ladies Lindores, but the other works will likely strike many readers as being fresh—and thus very welcome—new material for a range of nineteenth-century fiction courses. In keeping with previous installments of this selected edition, each part includes a general introduction that provides valuable context for the works under consideration, introductions and bibliographies for each novel, and a wealth of useful endnotes. Elisabeth Jay edited two of the six novels presented here, and the others were edited by Gail Marshall, Valerie Sanders, Josie Billington, and Joanne Wilkes. The goal in these final volumes was to represent the rich variety of Oliphant's fiction in her later life and to show how these works both build upon and depart from her earlier fiction, particularly the Chronicles of Carlingford (which make up Part IV of the series). The novels in Part V represent Oliphant's work in the realms of domestic realism, historical fiction, and the supernatural, while those in Part VI demonstrate how Oliphant strengthened her realist (as opposed to idealist) view of human nature over the course of her career. Taken together, the publication histories of these six novels reveal the full range of the ways in which fiction was purveyed to the late Victorian public. Hester was published as a standard three-decker by Macmillan, while the others appeared first in serial form: The Ladies Lindores in Oliphant's most regular venue, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine; The Wizard's Son and Kirsteen in Macmillan's Magazine; At His Gates in Good Words; and Old Mr. Tredgold in Longman's Magazine. As Jay and Shattock observe in the general introduction to Part VI, the variety of publishing venues testifies both to "how adept MOWO became at placing her work, and the popularity of a name upon which editors could count to attract readers" (25:xi). Several of these works also had overlapping writing and publication schedules. Sanders notes that [End Page 670] while writing Hester Oliphant was also serializing The Ladies Lindores, The Wizard's Son, and two other novels, while also evidently moving along another three-volume novel and a volume on Sheridan for Macmillan's Men of Letters series. This output demonstrates Oliphant's capacity for maintaining a terrifying pace of literary production, even well into her golden years (20:xxiii–xxiv). As with the earlier volumes of this series, readers of Victorian Periodicals Review are likely to find much of interest in the editorial apparatus accompanying each novel, particularly behind-the-scenes information about how periodical editors came to fill their pages. For example, in her introduction to The Wizard's Son, Jay describes how John Morley, who took over the editorship of Macmillan's after six installments of Oliphant's novel had been published in the magazine, decided to reduce the length of each number—a decision which meant Oliphant's page allowance was cut from a generous twenty-five to just thirteen. "This," Jay notes wryly, "told against her normally expansive style" and explains why the text varies so much between the serialized and three-volume editions (21:1). Similarly, in her introduction to At His Gates, Wilkes notes that Oliphant originally offered the...

"The infirmity of his age": Shakespeare's 400th anniversary.

In 1819 an article in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine asserted that William Shakespeare's four greatest plays were Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear. A century later, the influential critic A C Bradley reinforced this opinion by devoting his published lectures Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) to these plays, calling them “the big four”. As we celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, they have retained their pre-eminence. Although the comedies and history plays are popular, it is the great tragedies that are most admired. Two major new productions of both King Lear and Hamlet have just opened in the UK; more are on the way. For every outing of Antony and Cleopatra or Coriolanus, there are a dozen of Othello and Macbeth. What has made these plays seem the apex of Shakespeare's achievement? Shakespeare: the bard at the bedsideIn his preface to the inaugural issue of The Lancet, editor Thomas Wakley promised not only to report medical intelligence, but also literature. Accordingly, that first issue included a review of Much Ado about Nothing. Writing in 1823 to a medical audience, there was no need to mention the playwright's name: William Shakespeare, the 400th anniversary of whose death is marked today. Since then, Shakespeare has appeared in 1200 Lancet publications, including the theatre review of Hamlet by Niall Boyce in today's issue. Full-Text PDF

“We wed not with the stranger”: Disjunctive Histories, Fluid Geographies, and Contested Nationalities in Romantic Fictions of Wales

I. Perfect IN A STRIKING SCENE FROM JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART'S 1819 NOVEL PETER'S Letters to His Kinsfolk, the eponymous Welsh protagonist Peter Morris meets a fictionalized version of William Blackwood, who immediately attempts to recruit Morris as a correspondent. Dr. Morris! said he You must really be a contributor--we've a set of wild fellows about; we are much in want of a few sensible, intelligent writers, like you, sir, to counterbalance them--and then what a fine field you would have in Wales--quite untouched--a perfect (1) At first glance, Blackwood's casting of Wales as a new the silver mining town in modern Bolivia that furnished imperial Spain with much of its mineral wealth, reads as a straightforward commentary on Wales's colonial potential. For Blackwood, real-life proprietor of the arch-conservative and massively influential Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and doyen of the Scottish Tory literary scene, Wales's potential wealth is not mineral, but sociopolitical. Untouched by contemporary commentators, Wales offers the enterprising Tory cultural critic deep deposits of hitherto-untouched material. There is, however, another way to read Lockhart's metaphorical conception of Wales as a new Potosi. Although Potosi remained a powerful symbol of Spanish imperial wealth throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it also came to represent the corrupting influence of greed and the destabilizing potential of colonial mismanagement. In 1776, Adam Smith cited Potosi in his seminal The Wealth of Nations as a source of serious economic trouble, not only for the imperial Spanish government, but for the global economy as a whole. (2) Smith was hardly alone in his symbolic appropriation: later writers conceived of Potosi as a dire precedent for avarice and colonial disaster that Britain would do well to avoid, and the very name of the city itself became a shorthand for political waste and corruption. (3) Given his familiarity with the works of Smith, Lockhart and informed readers of the period would have been aware of this figural use for Potosi. When the fictional Blackwood advises that Wales is a potential Potosi, then, he is (perhaps unknowingly) calling attention not only to its rich stores of cultural and political wealth, but also to the frightening prospect that its wealth might be misappropriated and, as a result, destabilize an empire. This essay seeks to determine just what about Wales so threatened Lockhart and other writers like him, who figured the principality as both inviting and dangerous. Critics like Katie Trumpener and Ina Ferris have shown that the nationalist historical novel was the dominant fictional subgenre in Scotland and Ireland specifically, and the so-called Celtic periphery of Britain more generally, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By comparison, novels written or set in the third country of the Celtic fringe, Wales, have received little critical attention. (4) Whatever the reasons behind the relative lack of critical interest in the Welsh Romantic novel, I hope to demonstrate here that this neglect has obscured an important and original tradition of conceiving nationality and national history. Furthermore, this underexplored tradition disrupts extant critical models of the Romantic national novel that cast Celtic Romantic literature as somehow complied in or readily appropriated by an Anglocentric British nationalist and imperialist cultural initiative. As Trumpener and Saree Makdisi among others have argued, Romantic-era apologists for British nation-building and empire-building frequently invoked historical precedent (alongside economic pragmatism and other factual arguments) as empirical justification for or legitimation of the centralization and expansion of the British state. (5) In practice, as Trumpener shows, this justification often took the form of argument by way of historical literary analogy: for example, English critics repeatedly and explicitly compared the British literary tradition to the literary traditions of ancient Greece and/or Rome. …

DeQuincey's “On Murder“: The Generic Conflict

Previous articleNext article No AccessDeQuincey's “On Murder“: The Generic ConflictSusan OliverSusan Oliver Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 44, Number 1Winter 2013Wordsworth Summer Conference Papers, A Selection: 2012 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24045876 Views: 6Total views on this site © 2013 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination, 1789–1832 by Jonathan Sachs

Jonathan Sachs. Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination, 1789-1832. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. x+304. $85. In Antiquity, Jonathan Sachs has produced a learned, wide-ranging, and compelling account of the numerous ways in which British writers debated the legacy of Rome, using history to shape their understanding of British political and literary modernity. Central to Sachs's argument is the contention that Romantic is less Greek than Roman. Though classicism has traditionary been represented in terms of its Hellenism (one immediately thinks of Shelley's declaration in the preface to Hellas, We are all Greeks), Sachs persuasively argues that republican Rome becomes increasingly relevant in Britain in a period of political unrest and imperial expansion, the appositeness of the for Britain provides a conceptual enhancement of what Rome means (3). Attending throughout to the generic diversity of Roman example available to British writers, Sachs maintains that a better understanding of Romanticism's use of antiquity will ultimately refine our understanding of Romanticism itself (36). To put this another way, Rome is both by and transformative for Romanticism: transformed in the sense that new models of historical understanding produced a changed conceptualization of the past for certain thinkers and transformative Rome became the locus of new conceptualizations of historicity itself (5). Because of Rome, that is to say, the sense of history can be seen to be critically different from that of its predecessors. The historical parameters of Antiquity are 1789 and 1832. While these dates immediately resonate for their political overtones, Sachs reminds us that they have important cultural ramifications as well: 1789 was the year that John Philip Kemble debuted his production of Coriolanus with himself in what quickly became his signature role, and in 1832 Thomas de Quincey published the first of his important essays on the Caesars in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Thus the dates are simultaneously political and literary and underscore Sachs's commitment to drawing out the volatile interpellation of and literature during this period. Emphasizing that we need to look for engagement with history beyond the production of historical narrative (6), Sachs configures Antiquity in terms of a series of literary events: because literature has been a prominent locus for the critical discussion of historicism, it provides a privileged site for thinking about the relationship between cultural production, history, and politics (6). Part one, on political writing and the novel, first examines the role of Rome in the English controversy over the French Revolution (Burke as well as Thelwall and Godwin), then turns to the invocation of historical models in the Jacobin novels of Godwin, Holcroft, Inchbald, and Hays. Part two takes up poetry and considers how Byron and Shelley debated the meaning of the legacy in their thinking about the relations between poetics and politics, literature and history. Part three, also situated in the 1810s, analyzes the dramatization of the republic and the role of the theater in representing Rome to audiences that may not have had a classical education. Central to these chapters is Kemble's Coriolanus, and the impact of this production on matters as various as Hazlitt's criticism, Kean's career, and later plays by John Howard Payne, J. S. Knowles, and George Croly. As is evident even in the brief synopsis provided here, Sachs addresses a significant number of texts, writers, and cultural productions in Antiquity. In doing so, he necessarily runs the risk of writing a largely episodic history rather than a sustained argument concerning the mediation of classical Rome. …

Transcendental Buffoonery: Jacob Dousterswivel and the Romantic Irony of Blackwood's

IN OCTOBER 1818, THE ANONYMOUSLY-PUBLISHED PAMPHLET HYPOCRISY Unveiled, and Calumny Detected proclaimed that Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine was vilest production that ever disfigured and soiled the annals of literature--an impressive accomplishment for periodical that was barely one year old. While the indignant author (whom we now know to be Macvey Napier) condemned the magazine for the unmixed love of evil evident in the magazine's personal attacks and harsh reviews, he also criticized its unorthodox style: [T]here is something in the style and manner of the two principal writers that has contributed to give temporary consequence to this Magazine. Nobody will say that this something is comprehension, or judgment, or sincerity, or any other of the virtues either of style or morals.... With good memories, some fancy, and an overflowing bitterness of heart, these writers have hitherto contrived to please the malicious,--to dazzle and astonish the less informed, or, in other words, the greater portion of their readers. They have employed by turns the florid, the prurient, and the obscure style, each of which is calculated to impose upon pretty numerous class.... In these compositions the design seems to be, like that recommended in the art of sinking in poetry, to form labyrinth out of which nobody can get clear but the authors themselves. (1) Conceding that the outrageous and glittering artifice of Blackwood's attracted the attention of considerable (if undesirable) audience, Napier charged that the magazine intentionally defied comprehension and moral standards in favor of stylistic flash; his reference to Alexander Pope's Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry stressed the perceived superficiality and confusion. Two years later, the editor of the London Magazine, John Scott, voiced similar concerns about the baffling style of Maya (as Blackwood's was called), declaring that Blackwood's forms the most foul and livid spot, indicative of an accursed taint in the literature of the day. Like Napier, Scott objected in part to Blackwood's' confounding humor, claiming that the journal assumed the externals of harlequinade and buffoonery and, through its frequent publication of anonymous and pseudonymous pieces, created a mystification ... for dishonest purposes, and under cowardly motives. (2) For readers like Napier and Scott, then, Blackwood's was objectionable not only because its humor treated subjects roughly, but also because its elaborate jokes and ironic tone--the lack of sincerity noted by Napier--intentionally confused its audience. In this essay, I explore the ways that Blackwood's defended its controversial style against such critiques. Although the magazine often resorted to mocking its critics, I contend that striking and systematic vindication of its methods appears in June 1822 review of the German philosopher Jacob Dousterswivel's treatise Theorie der Betrug, or Theory of Imposture. This piece defends the elusive style of Blackwood's by suggesting that it trains readers to stay alert to and aware of the possibility of other, more serious impostures, and in so doing makes them better interpreters of both texts and people. According to the reviewer, Blackwood's' hoaxes are educational tools, not dangerous deceptions. Yet the Dousterswivel review is not straightforward defense of Blackwood's: it is hoax, phony review of book that was never written. The Theory of Imposture is itself an imposture. Not only was there no German philosopher called Jacob Dousterswivel, but the surname alludes to Hermann Dousterswivel, charlatan from Walter Scott's 1816 novel The Antiquary. The sophisticated defense of Maga's style is thus embedded within an especially mystifying example of that style. The complexity of the Dousterswivel hoax and other mystifications perpetuated by Blackwood's leads me to my second claim, which is that the purpose and significance of the magazine's obscure humor and elaborate jokes are best understood within the framework of the aesthetic concept known as Romantic irony. …

Antinomian Reviewers: Hogg's Critique of Romantic-era Magazine Culture in The Confessions of a Justified Sinner

In recent years a number historically minded critics have construed portions James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions a Justified Sinner as a loosely allegorical expression the author's uneasy and ungentle relationship with the print culture Romantic-era Edinburgh, and especially with Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. (See Duncan, Fanaticism and Scott's Shadow; Fang 66-104; Mack; Richardson lxvii). This was the periodical that for some time gave that rural, working-class outsider a public voice but that later hijacked and travestied that same voice for the sake its own pretentions to cultural prestige. My object is not to quarrel with these readings but rather to expand them in a new direction. What has largely been absent from previous attempts to read Confessions a Justified Sinner as a coded account Hogg's painfully ambivalent relationship with the great literary periodicals his era is, on the one hand, something central to his novel--the specific doctrines Antinomianism--and something definitional about magazines Blackwood's ilk: the savagely partisan-political nature their review-articles concerning contemporary literature. It is my contention that by viewing the former as an implicit critique the latter, we will discover that Hogg's assessment Romantic-era literary criticism is both wider and sharper than it has yet been credited as being. For while it is well known that in writing Justified Sinner Hogg was taking a swing at his Tory friends and...persecutors in the Blackwood's group (Campbell 181), it has not yet been appreciated that his most telling jab originated in the heretical religious tenets his deluded protagonist, and that the blow was aimed squarely at the ideological extremism the nation's cultural gatekeepers, both those he knew personally and those farther afield. As we shall see, in Hogg's hands Antinomianism becomes a metaphorical weapon by means which he critiques two intimately related practices Romantic periodicals: intemperate denunciations the literary productions those organs' perceived ideological foes, and shameless puffing the works their political allies and personal friends. When we remember that it was an allegorical work--the Manuscript--that first brought Hogg to national attention, and that he was fond touting the impact upon readers of [his] celebrated allegories (Letters 363, Miller 224), it should not surprise us that his most enduring text contains allegorical elements, or that recognizing them should help untangle some Justified Sinner's notorious obstacles to coherent interpretation. When read in this light, Hogg's novel emerges as a rebus-like rendering the ethical temptations that chronically beset writers literary criticism at the dawn mass-circulation journalism. We must commence with a brief review some familiar facts, the first among them being James Hogg's key role in shepherding (the pun is inevitable) Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine safely through its difficult birth in 1817. Its owner and publisher, William Blackwood, had wished to found a Tory periodical that would stand as a rival to the Whig-directed Edinburgh Review, but the first issue his new venture proved unpopular with the public, and the pair editors Blackwood originally engaged proved not to share his zealous Toryism (Schoenfield, British Periodicals 217-18). After intensifying disputes with Blackwood, these editors jumped ship in favor a Whig publication and Blackwood hired in their places John Wilson and John Gibson Lockhart, talented if arrogant and choleric literary figures under whose leadership the magazine would eventually enjoy immense cultural influence. Hogg wrote a satirical sketch a clef about the contentious change editorial personnel entitled Translation an Ancient Chaldee Manuscript which, though it involved the infant magazine in several lawsuits, got it off to a magnificent start in terms circulation numbers. …