Conflicted Life: William Jerdan, 1782–1869, London Editor, Author and Critic (review)

The title of Susan Matoff’s biography might lead one to think that William Jerdan’s life was marked by internalized conflicts of aspiration or desire, yet in fact there is little evidence presented here to suggest that Jerdan was “conflicted” in a modern psychological sense. To the contrary, the professional preoccupations, allegiances, and even personal foibles that Matoff documents in exceptional detail appear strikingly consistent throughout his long literary career. The book’s title is perhaps best taken, then, as referring to the various external conflicts or controversies in which Jerdan’s work as a prominent literary editor and journalist during the first half of the nineteenth century inevitably embroiled him. Jerdan was primarily known for his involvement with the Literary Gazette, a weekly periodical devoted to book reviews, topical literary debate, and the publication of original poetry, which he helped to establish in 1817 and edited continuously for a period of thirty-four years until financial insolvency eventually forced him to relinquish control in November 1850. Nearly two thirds of Matoff’s biography is occupied by the period of Jerdan’s editorship of the Literary Gazette, a periodical that she views as innovative in its demarcation of an ostensibly neutral, mid-market forum for literary discussion (defined broadly), in contrast to the more highbrow and politically partisan monthly reviews that dominated the first two decades of the century. Jerdan himself began his career in political journalism as the editor of the Sun newspaper from 1813 to 1817, a Tory daily opposed to the Whig Morning Chronicle. Although he consciously sought to exclude politics from the Literary Gazette, a similar pattern of commercial cum ideological rivalry developed with the liberal Athenaeum, a weekly journal which began in imitation of the Literary Gazette but eventually came to supplant it in popularity. From his central position within the notoriously factional journalistic culture of the Regency and early-Victorian periods, Jerdan became a highly visible arbiter of literary taste (number one in Fraser’s Magazine’s “Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters” [1830–38], as Matoff points out), who attracted as many enemies as friends.

As an editor Jerdan struggled to maintain the independence, both critical and financial, of his judgements. The Literary Gazette was frequently attacked by its rivals for puffing books published by its co-owners, Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, a charge which Jerdan persistently rejected. His decision to buy out Colburn and become sole owner of the Literary Gazette in 1841 allowed Jerdan definitively to refute the charge of being compromised by trade interests, but at the cost of an increasingly exposed financial liability. This casts an interesting light on the conflicting responsibilities of the literary editor, a role that combined the functions of disinterested critic, commercial businessman, and professional advisor. Matoff shows that Jerdan took the latter responsibility seriously, to the point of acting as an informal literary agent on behalf of some of the Literary Gazette’s contributors and correspondents. Most notably, he mentored the early career of Letitia Landon, whose poetry was first published in the Literary Gazette and became an important factor in its popular appeal during the 1820s and 30s. This biography provides valuable material for scholars of Landon as well as of its primary figure, owing to the intimacy of their professional and personal relationship during this period. That said, Matoff’s assertion that their relationship “provides the ‘master-key’ to unlocking the real meaning of the vast quantity of work that Landon produced” reduces the poetry of L. E. L. (a self-conscious poetic persona, as Matoff acknowledges) to a transparently autobiographical self-expression (100). Her suggestion that “all of Landon’s poetic output” from the early 1820s “was written with Jerdan in mind, and addressed to him directly,” while addressing the fascinatingly illicit aspects of their private-public relationship, risks underestimating the poet’s creative agency (119).

Jerdan remained faithful to Landon—in an...