Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition (review)

Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition won the 2007 Colby Prize for the year’s most significant contribution to the study of Victorian periodicals. And no wonder. David Finkelstein has assembled ten outstanding essays on subjects associated with the House of Blackwood, but more importantly, on subjects associated with periodical publishing from 1805–1930 generally. His contributors shared each other’s work as they completed their own, and thus the finished whole is far more unified than such collections of diverse essays often are. Each of the three sections (Beginnings, Consolidating Reputations, Preserving Status) includes case studies on typical Blackwood’s contributors and causes, with extensive comments on what made them uniquely Blackwoodian. The first two sections also include broad looks at periodical publishing in the nineteenth century, with Robert Morrison’s “William Blackwood and the Dynamics of Success,” Michael Michie’s “‘On behalf of the Right’: Archibald Alison, Political Journalism, and Blackwood’s Conservative Response to Reform, 1830–1870,” Laurel Brake’s “Maga, the Shilling Monthlies, and the New Journalism,” and Robert Patten and David Finkelstein’s “Editing Blackwood’s; or, What Do Editors Do?” Themes are picked up from essay to essay, and each piece regularly refers to other essays in the collection. Thus, not only is the finished volume a free-ranging examination of the many aspects of Blackwood’s—in effect, a magazine description of a magazine—but it also maintains a unity rarely found in collections of essays over a single topic.

Much of the information is not new, of course, but had to be included for the sake of context: the early personalized battles with the Edinburgh Review; the strict conservatism; the brilliant innovation of directing a magazine (not a review) published monthly (not quarterly) and including fiction; the identities and contributions of the Noctes Ambrosiae crowd are all old news (although Morrison’s comment that Wilson, Lockhart, Maginn, Moir, David Robinson, and Archibald Alison wrote 42 percent of the magazine over the first William Blackwood’s seventeen-year management was startling information). Unsurprisingly, too, the writers—Archibald Alison, Hugh Clifford, G. W. Steevens, and Charles Whibley—and causes—phrenology, or better yet anti-phrenology, Romantic nationalism, and Scottishness—profiled in this volume emphasized the militant conservatism of the magazine throughout its history. However, those essays mostly work as case studies, providing detail to explain the long-running success story that was Blackwood’s.

For Victorian periodicals scholars and students seeking insights into the nature of nineteenth-century periodicals, the essays by Morrison (noted above), Michie, Patten and Finkelstein, and Brake will prove the most useful. These four essays carefully contextualize Blackwood’s in evolving nineteenth-century British culture and explain how Blackwood’s influenced and was influenced by other periodicals of the time. Michie’s essay on Archibald Alison’s response to reform transcends a simple case study; it examines the work of Alison and a small circle of writers from London to Edinburgh who ensured that Maga’s political tone remained consistent through the long age of reform and provides hitherto buried details of some of the personal and professional communications between the third William Blackwood and the often ego-centric divas who provided him copy. Michie also examines some of the great reform debates of the period—the rights of women, the expansion of the electorate, agricultural protectionism—and shows how, although Blackwood’s was invariably on the losing side, some of their arguments had merit. Patten and Finkelstein’s “What Do Editors Do?” is perhaps the most readable, most entertaining, and yet most informative essay on the production of periodicals extant. The collaborators look at the work of the Blackwoods, of course, especially their success at managing the highly successful fiction side of the house, balancing the political essays and other nonfiction, and selling copious advertising (and making certain the ad placement for Pears Soap didn’t land next to the advertisement for the latest work of a respected female author). They also discuss the Three...