John Murray's Quarterly Review: Letters 1807–1843 ed. by Jonathan Cutmore (review)

John Murray's Quarterly Review: Letters 1807–1843, edited by Jonathan Cutmore, presents a collection of 127 letters associated with the Quarterly Review, framed by an editorial introduction and full scholarly apparatus. The volume covers the period between the initial proposal of the Quarterly in 1807 and the death of John Murray II in 1843. The letters have been transcribed from manuscripts held at seventeen libraries scattered across Britain and North America, and most are previously unpublished. As scholars of the Murray firm already know, the few letters pertaining to the Quarterly during this period that have already appeared in print, such as those included in Samuel Smiles's A Publisher and His Friends: Memoir and Correspondence of the Late John Murray (1891), have been heavily edited for readability in ways that undermine their research value. Consistent with modern standards, Cutmore presents the selected letters with the bare minimum of editorial changes from the manuscript, scrupulously maintaining strikethroughs, corrections, white space, abbreviations, text written upside down, and copious errors of spelling, grammar, and syntax. Given that most of these letters were originally written rapidly and without revision, Cutmore has accomplished a remarkable feat of rendering typographically the irregularities of the manuscript. Although the resulting appearance of the letters is daunting, the many helpful footnotes (coupled with a degree of patience) make for a manageable and enlightening reading experience for the dedicated scholar. The contrast with Smiles, furthermore, reveals another of Cutmore's central contributions: whereas existing publications of nineteenth-century correspondence have focused on famous individuals, Cutmore conceives of his object of study as the journal itself, focusing on key developments in the history of the Quarterly.

In an editorial introduction, Cutmore discusses competing claims about the influence of the Quarterly Review during multiple phases of its early history. During its heyday, the Quarterly had a reputation (largely replicated in modern scholarship) for not merely reflecting but also formulating conservative ideology to the point of influencing government policy and making or breaking literary careers. Cutmore reminds us that it remains unclear whether this reputation was deserved, and he considers how scholarship might critically evaluate it. The journal's authority seemed to stem from the "house voice" that permeates many of the articles (21). As Cut-more suggests, the use of an editorial "we" also served to conceal from readers the extent to which contributors belonged to a small coterie of personal friends of the Quarterly's principal figures. Although he challenges scholarly claims about the journal's political influence, Cutmore carefully traces the mechanisms through which the mere appearance of power could have a self-fulfilling effect in early nineteenth-century British periodical culture.

In a series of tables, Cutmore presents information on sales and distribution in an effort to formulate a picture of the journal's readership and suggests some of the ways that the Quarterly's content was disseminated without the journal itself being read. Unsurprisingly, so far as we can tell the audience appears to have consisted of elite, powerful men from various professions, occasional prominent women, and a few Whigs. Cutmore suggests that we should understand the readership as a social extension of the Quarterly's inner circle of contributors. That is, he argues that the journal never intended to and did not succeed in creating new readerships or new forms of community but rather tapped into pre-existing communities and reflected their attitudes and ideas.

The letters themselves contain many surprises that sow seeds for future research. The fifth section covers a particularly rich period from 1825 to 1826, during which the long editorship of William Gifford came to an end, John Taylor Coleridge had a brief tenure in the position, and finally John Gibson Lockhart was established in the role after complicated negotiations. For those unfamiliar with this episode, its contours can just barely be traced through a careful reading of the letters and their notes. We see Murray begging Gifford to...