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Victorian Periodicals Review 39.2 (2006) 136-157


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Beginning Blackwood's:

The Right Mix of Dulce and Ùtile

Philip Flynn

University of Delaware
A Berkshire Rector has been pleased to wonder
Why we've dismissed the primitive arrangement.
He hates, he says, from verse to prose to blunder.
Our quick transitions seem to him derangement.

Begging our good friends pardon, We prefer
To mix the dulce with the utile,
And think it has in fact a charming air
Such different things in the same page to see.

These iambic pentameter quatrains were part of the "Notices to Contributors" that opened the March 1818 number of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Their tone is cocky, the tone of a publication that finally had found its several voices. It had not been easy. Eight months before, William Blackwood had written to Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, London publishers of his Edinburgh Monthly Magazine (April-September 1817), to warn them of their joint venture's imminent demise: "I am sorry to inform you that I have been obliged to resolve upon stopping the Magazine with No. 6. I have been much disappointed in my editors who have done little in the way of writing or procuring Contributions. Ever since the work began I have had myself almost the whole burden of procuring contributions which by great exertions I got from my own friends, while at the same time I had it not in my power to pay for them, as by our agreement the Editors were to furnish me with the whole of the materials for which and their Editorial labours they were to receive half of the profits of the work."1

Blackwood's feckless editors were Thomas Pringle and James Cleghorn, [End Page 136] who had organized the contents of the Magazine under formal headings – Original Communications, Antiquarian Repertory, Original Poetry, Review of New Publications, Literary and Scientific Intelligence, etc. – "the primitive arrangement" mentioned in the quatrain. Despite those formal categories, the miscellany teetered through incoherence into self-contradiction, providing activities of the Royal Family, narratives of crimes, reports of coroners' inquests, and any "Singular Occurrence," "Shocking Story," "Melancholy Accident," or "Dreadful Catastrophe" that could be gleaned from other publications, while mixing William Blackwood's own Tory sentiments with summaries of articles in the Whig Edinburgh Review. The early numbers were flat–no fizz, no flash, nothing to catch the public's eye and distinguish the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine from other British monthlies such as Archibald Constable's Scots Magazine. In June 1817 Blackwood informed Pringle and Cleghorn that their services might no longer be required after the sixth number.2 They retaliated by issuing a public announcement that the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine would cease publication after the sixth number and then signed on as the new editors of the rival Scots Magazine. "By our agreement neither party can continue it under the same title," Blackwood explained to Baldwin, Cradock and Joy. "I have however made arrangements with a gentleman of first-rate talents by which I will begin a new work of a far superior kind. I mention this to you however in the strictest confidence as I am not at liberty yet to say anything more particularly about it."3

The gentleman of first-rate talents was probably John Wilson, who had contributed to early numbers of the Magazine, becoming unofficial literary adviser in September. While idling in Blackwood's bookshop/pub-lishing house/literary salon at 17 Princes Street – "the only great lounging book-shop in the New Town of Edinburgh" – Wilson had developed his friendship with John Gibson Lockhart.4 Both men had studied at Glasgow College, excelled at Oxford, and been admitted to the Scottish bar in 1816. Despite those shared experiences the two were odd companions. Wilson was nine years older than Lockhart, relentlessly robust in his athletic interests, spontaneous, gregarious, given to excess in emotion and expression, inclined to such bewildering volte-faces of opinion that Lockhart sometimes thought him "mad."5 Lockhart himself was fastidious, reserved, noticeably handsome in the dark, slim style, with...

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