The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain

Mammoth and Megalonyx

William Christie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315476278
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

From its first issue, published on the 10th October 1802, Francis Jeffrey's "Edinburgh Review" established a strong reputation and exerted a powerful influence. This is a literary study of the "Edinburgh Review" for over fifty years. It contextualizes the periodical within the culture wars of the Romantic era.

1 ‘STRANGE VIGOUR’: A REVIEW OF REVIEWS

The Edinburgh, in Bagehot’s words[,] ‘began the system’ and became its model. In the minds of the editors and proprietors of almost every quarterly Review founded subsequently was the ambition, admitted or not, of imitating, challenging or overthrowing its position.

Joanne Shattock¹

Analysing the state of European society in 1831 in the essay we know by the name of ‘Characteristics’, Thomas Carlyle offered a Goyaesque vision of contemporary literary culture in which the creative lacked all conviction, while the critical was propagating itself with a ‘strange vigour’, threatening to devour its weakened parent before turning on itself:

Nay, is not the diseased self-conscious state of Literature disclosed in this one fact, which lies so near us here, the prevalence of Reviewing! … Far be it from us to disparage our own craft, whereby we have our living! Only we must note these things: that Reviewing spreads with strange vigour; that such a man as Byron reckons the Reviewer and the Poet equal; that, at the Leipsic Fair, there was advertized a Review of Reviews. By and by it will be found that ‘all Literature has become one boundless self-devouring Review; and as in London routs, we have to do nothing, but only to see others do nothing’. – Thus does Literature also, like a sick thing, superabundantly ‘listen to itself ’.²

To understand how Carlyle got here we need to look briefly at the origin and institutionalization of reviewing in the eighteenth century, before attempting a characterization of what must surely remain its nineteenth-century epitome, the Edinburgh Review.

The Periodical Review

In 1668 there were 198 people working 65 presses in Britain, 25 more than the 40 recognized by the Crown. Then in 1695 the Licensing Act that gave the Crown control over printing was allowed to lapse, and what has since been identified as a publishing revolution took place. By the time of Waterloo 120 years later there were around ten times that number of presses, employing nearly twenty times the number of people – while neither the population nor its literacy had undergone changes that were even remotely comparable.³ The number of books available for purchasing from booksellers or for borrowing from the new subscription or circulating libraries that were starting up everywhere climbed steadily throughout the eighteenth century (quadrupling between 1750 and 1800). ‘Books, print, and readers were everywhere. Not everyone was a reader, but even those who could not read lived to an unprecedented degree in a culture of print, for the impact of the publishing revolution extended beyond the literate public’.⁴

Unlike most other commodities in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, books could not be adapted to a manufacturing process in which continued production is funded by those goods that have been sold. Even when manufactured in considerable numbers, that is, any one edition was the product of but one, labour-intensive sequence of operations; indeed, the ‘idea of a continuous production line’ of identical, self-financing goods was, and is (to quote John Feather), ‘wholly alien to the book trade’. Hence the need that Feather remarks ‘for maximizing sales at the time of publication’ in order to recoup investment and finance other production.⁵ The London book trade’s major strategy for meeting this need for immediate finance was the establishment and exploitation of various ‘congers’ or cooperatives, in which the trade bought from itself as wholesalers. Beyond this, however, publicity and distribution were understood to play vital roles in maximizing the immediate capital return. ‘In this anonymous marketplace’, writes Jon Klancher, ‘a whole cultural machinery had to be formed to channel books to their readers: the bookclubs, the reading societies, the carefully prepared subscription lists, the circulating libraries, and, not least, the periodical reviews’.⁶

One significant innovation of the 1730s was the Gentleman’s Magazine which, ‘with its reliable and comprehensive lists of new books and its wide circulation’, played a crucial role in publicizing printed material aft er 1732.⁷ But noticing books was only a subordinate function of the newspapers and magazines. Besides, book notices are not reviews. It was not until 1749 that the Monthly Review was established and its editor Ralph Griffithus undertook to give ‘an Account, with proper Abstracts, of the new Books, Pamphlets, …c. as they come out’, an account ‘which should, in virtue of its candour, and justness of distinction, obtain authority enough for its representations to be serviceable to such as would choose to have some idea of a book before they lay out their money or time on it’.⁸ Then (setting a precedent for the Tory Quarterly Review in 1809), seven years later, in 1756, the Tory Critical Review began under the editorship of the novelist Tobias Smollet in political reaction to the success of its Whig precursor.

Reviews (capital ‘r’) – periodical publications comprised exclusively of book reviews (small ‘r’) – already existed on the Continent and are coventionally dated from the launching of Denys de Sallo’s Journal des sçavans in 1665. The tradition established by the Journal des sçavans and its analogues and imitators was one that Antonia Forster has called ‘abstract-and-extract reviewing’, a tradition to which the Monthly conformed only initially, and even then more in theory than in practice.⁹ Moreover, these early Reviews were addressed, if not to scholars exactly, then to the learned, and the increasing market of general readers in Great Britain, the readers who did much to make the Gentleman’s Magazine and the London Magazine successful, was, until the middle of the eighteenth century, generally left to find out about most publications from the bare bones of advertisements or from word of mouth.¹⁰

Throughout the period that saw the establishment of the Monthly and the Critical, the question of rights to copy had remained legally unclear. Then in 1774 the case of Donaldson v. Becket came before the House of Lords, which firmly rejected the idea that a work of literature could be a form of common-law property, held in perpetuity by either an author or a bookseller. Aft er twenty years of intensive litigation in the English and Scottish courts, a statute of 1710 which limited exclusive publication rights finally became effective. How far the decision represented an idealistic resistance to the commodification of literature, and how far a liberal resistance to virtual monopolies, remains a moot point. Was it a victorious battle in the long war that ‘civic humanism’ ultimately would lose to ‘possessive individualism’? Fortunately, the precise significance of the decision need not detain us here. It is enough for our purposes that the decision marked ‘the end of an era in the formerly ordered world of London publishing’,¹¹ the long era of protectionism, that ‘unlawful combination’ to quote Alexander Donaldson, ‘whereby the London booksellers have conspired to beat down all opposition’.¹² No longer were the big London booksellers able to finance their activities by the exclusive reprinting of guaranteed bestsellers: ‘The works of Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Bunyan, and others’, writes Mark Rose, ‘all the great properties of the trade that the booksellers had been accustomed to treat as private landed estates, were suddenly declared open commons’.¹³

The whole booktrade was obliged to become more innovative. Unable to perpetuate old literary property, booksellers needed to discover and protect new literary property. In short, as John Feather remarks bluntly, ‘booksellers needed authors to write books for them’.¹⁴ They always had, of course, but without the fallback offered by an exclusive reprint trade the living author became more viable, arguably indispensable, as a commercial proposition. And to reduce the obvious gamble of marketing the latest book, especially one by an unknown author, publishing became more reliant upon book reviews – favourable book reviews, preferably, or at least controversial, as Marilyn Butler observes: ‘The chief means of marketing and a key to the perception of books in the late eighteenth century is the journal or, increasingly, the specialized literary Review’.¹⁵

Had the reviewer not existed, in other words, print culture would have had to invent him. With the rise of printing and the demand for printed material came the rise of (amongst other cultural forms) the entrepreneurial Reviews and magazines as part of a massive bureaucracy organizing reading, and reading about reading. ‘The reality of “literature”’, to quote Alvin Kernan, ‘was authenticated and reinforced by various secondary legitimations – criticism, literary history and biography, standard editions, anthologies and collections – which the printers now found profitable to produce and sell’.¹⁶ Goldsmith compared the publication of an original or ‘primary’ work of literature to a Persian army going into battle with numerous attendants for every one soldier.¹⁷ ‘The age of original genius, and of comprehensive and independent reasoning, seems to be over’, wrote Francis Jeffrey in 1813: ‘Instead of such works as those of Bacon, and Shakespeare, and Taylor, and Hooker, we have Encyclopedias, and geographical compilations, and county histories, and new editions of black letter authors’.¹⁸ And, of course (though Jeffrey does not venture it), periodical Reviews.

Reviews were an important part of this proliferating network of ‘secondary’ genres – or, better still, of supplementary genres, in the paradoxical senses explored by Jacques Derrida of both ‘augmenting’ and ‘substituting for’.¹⁹ The evolution of the idea of original, imaginative literature during the Romantic period was, in part at least, a way of distinguishing functionally between primary and secondary texts in a print culture beginning to gag on supplementary genres. Between 1790 and 1832 alone, over 4,000 periodicals were launched in Britain.²⁰ Only some were Reviews, of course, and the vast majority were short-lived ventures, but most of them contained book reviews and the number relative to the literate adult population is a large one. Critical commentary, reproducing exponentially and threatening to consume its host, the primary text, before being driven to consume itself – this is the stuff of Carlyle’s Goyaesque nightmare in ‘Characteristics’.

The Edinburgh Review; or, Critical Journal

Carlyle’s culturally self-reflexive complaint about the voracious cultural self-reflexiveness of Reviews first appeared in the Edinburgh Review, of all places.²¹ Published just two years after Jeffrey retired from its editorship in 1829, it could only have been written after the advent of the Edinburgh in 1802, and it confirms claims made by the Edinburgh itself for its own revolutionary contribution to periodical reviewing. ‘To trace the history of a revolution’, however, as J. G. A. Pocock has said, ‘is to start with a straw man’:

The rhetoric of the exercise compels the construction of an account of the way things stood before change began which neglects the extent to which change had begun already and the activities of men under the old regime resembled the activities which were to receive emphasis as a result of transformation.²²

Erupting self-consciously into periodical Review practice, the Edinburgh created such an effective straw man of its predecessors in the eighteenth century t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: Recent Whig Interpretations of Romantic Literary History
• 1 ‘Strange Vigour’: A Review of Reviews
• 2 ‘The Modern Athenians’: The Edinburgh Enterprise
• 3 ‘The Self-Indulgence and Self-Admiration of Genius’: Jeffrey, Wordsworth and the Common Apprehension
• 4 ‘That Superior Tribunal’: Jeffrey and Wordsworth on the People and the Public
• 5 ‘A Mortal Antipathy to Scotchmen’: The Biographia and the Edinburgh Review
• 6 ‘Running with the English Hares and Hunting with the Scotch Bloodhounds’: Jeffrey and Byron
• 7 ‘Wars of the Tongue’: Blackwood’s against the Edinburgh Review in Post-War Edinburgh
• 8 ‘Beware, O Teufelsdröckh, of Spiritual Pride!’: Jeffrey and Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index