Romanticism and Blackwood’s Magazine: “An Unprecedented Phenomenon.” ed. by Robert Morrison and Daniel S. Roberts (review)

From its beginnings in 1817, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (Maga) was a miscellany—as one of its slyer contributors, William Maginn, put it in 1822, “a real Magazine of mirth, misanthropy, wit, wisdom, folly, fiction, fun, festivity, theology, bruising, and thingumbob” (Blackwood’s, vol. 12, p. 103). But along with this variety and jollification came a remarkably self-conscious attitude. Contributors might contradict themselves—at times infamously so—and they might write nonsense (or, as they put it, “balaam”), but they often turned their considerable wit and erudition toward their situation and circumstances as paid writers in a monthly magazine. Blackwood’s is an antiphonal blast to the soaring strains of idealism that characterize so much Romantic literature. This collection of essays echoes the variety of Maginn’s formulation, but few of the contributions display Maga’s self-consciousness. Considerations of critical method are fitful, and, despite its title, the volume does not address the magazine’s relation to Romanticism. A doughty empiricism prevails throughout, in which established facts are recounted and a few new ones provided.

Happily, there are, as Maginn boasted of Blackwood’s, moments in this collection where “the effect is instantaneous” (Blackwood’s, xii, 105). Nick Mason’s “Communal Reception, Mary Shelley, and the ‘Blackwood’s school’ of Criticism” moves swiftly from a discussion of what Blackwood’s says to how it says it. Blackwood’s writers did not evaluate Shelley as an “autonomous authorial subject”; she was read through an “ever changing set of presumptions about her authorial identity and the literary communities in which she was imagined to be participating” (p. 104). By recovering these critical presumptions, we learn in addition much about how we might read Blackwood’s. The magazine’s critical project seems more careful and less reckless than scholars have perceived it.

Similarly, Mark Schoenfield’s “The Taste for Violence in Blackwood’s Magazine” traces a complex genealogy within Maga for De Quincey’s “On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts.” Schoenfield’s careful documentation of articles in the magazine that anticipate De Quincey’s points, like Mason’s article earlier, demonstrates that the dialogism, restaging, and parody characteristic of Maga can not only entertain but also allow spacious and incremental development of an idea. According to Schoenfield, De Quincey’s piece “less rehearses the history of murder than its textualization in the periodicals” (p. 198), a distinction that resonates with Mason’s postulation of communal reception.

Three other essays provide brisk, summary accounts of some of the magazine’s salient features: its reliance on and redefinition of personality, its racy and capacious play of allusion, and its encouragement of crucial experiments in the emerging form of the short story. Tom Mole’s “Blackwood’s ‘Personalities’” defines this key term ably, using the sophisticated (and often sophistical) words of the writers themselves, and giving them the weight they deserve. Concluding his account with John Gibson Lockhart’s formulations in Noctes 1 and 3, Mole notes that Maga effectively redefined the term over the first five years of its run. Most welcome here is the attention to temporality, the changes in the affect of Blackwood’s over time. Spatial metaphors long dominant in the study of periodicals are long overdue for reconsideration. David Stewart’s “Blackwoodian Allusion and the Culture of Miscellaneity” also neatly sets out the rules to the game of allusion so prevalent in the magazine. “Blackwood’s,” Stewart notes, “was disgusted by its age, and allusion provided the writers with an especially effective tool to express contradictory sensations” (p. 121). Contributors, largely unconcerned with consistency, eschewed logic for affect and preferred reversal to an orderly construction of a case. Unlike the allusions in other magazines, which celebrated a common culture, Blackwood’s allusions sprang from the obscure quizzes and fascinations of Blackwood’s itself. Their opacity to readers mirrors the...