“Nae mortal man should be entrusted wi’ sic an ingine”: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the Tory Problem of Romantic Genius

When Matthew Arnold articulated his call for the “free play of the mind” in literary criticism, he drew a stark contrast between Continental “organ[s] like the Revue des Deux Mondes” and a vibrant culture of British periodical reviews that had emerged by the early nineteenth century.¹ These British “organs of criticism,” he reflects, “are organs of men and parties having practical ends to serve, and with them those practical ends are the first thing and the play of the mind second.”² Arnold enumerates these journals and their corresponding factions: the Times is “an organ of the common, satisfied, well-to-do Englishman”; the British Quarterly Review belongs to the “political Dissenters”; the Edinburgh Review remains the “organ of the old Whigs”; and the Quarterly Review is “an organ of the Tories, and for as much play of mind as may suit its being that.”³Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, however, the Tory periodical notorious for “its record of critical irresponsibility, political bias, and personal slander,” is noticeably absent from the list.⁴ Undoubtedly, the omission of Blackwood’s from Arnold’s tidy list of partisan journals has much to do with what Peter T. Murphy identifies as the “hermeneutically challenging situation” of Blackwood’s writing.⁵ The problem for Arnold, reviewing at midcentury, was largely the same problem faced by Blackwood’s contemporary readers—and targets—throughout its early years. The Blackwood’s style, always more than reductively partisan, was notoriously difficult to define. The Tory journal’s pages combined a serious “free play of the [critical] mind” with a highly polemical, wildly imaginative, and often violent “free play” of fiction, pseudonymous authorship, and metatextual sleight of hand.

By avoiding Blackwood’s, though, Arnold’s critique ignores the pivotal role that the journal played in the early nineteenth century’s virulent debates about the relationship between political culture, literature, and individual expression. As Richard Cronin remarks, Waterloo’s cultural aftermath gave rise to three distinct literary phenomena: the “extraordinary celebrity of Lord Byron”; the “development of a new and distinctively modern variety of literary magazine,” best exemplified by journals like Blackwood’s; and the enormous popularity of Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels, which “according to William St. Clair’s extraordinary calculation, outsold the work of all other novelists put together.”⁶Blackwood’s writers routinely chose the private lives and public personae of literary celebrities as their subject matter, alternately describing, praising, and attacking figures like Byron and Wordsworth and inveighing against “Cockney School” writers like John Keats and Leigh Hunt in a series of scathing satires. Invariably, the Blackwood’s reviews complicated their readers’ sense of what it meant to be a writer of “genius” in the Romantic period. Higgins notes that in the case of Wordsworth, for example, Blackwood’s “interest in ‘personality’ both underpinned and ironized its account of [the poet] as . . . transcendent genius. For although this account was based, in part, on representations of him as a private man, the very existence of those representations in the pages of the magazine complicated its claim that he stood above the literary marketplace.”⁷

While critics since Arnold have recognized Blackwood’s importance as a site where a new periodical form interrogated a new ideal of Romantic authorship, little attention has been paid to the importance of Cronin’s third literary phenomenon, the Waverly effect, in Blackwood’s approach to the problem of Romantic genius. Blackwood’s promoted literary figures like Sir Walter Scott and Edmund Burke as model writers whose emphasis on the dialogic, corporate, and inherited nature of cultural tradition placed them in stark contrast to the individualistic lyric personae of Romantic writers like Lord Byron. While this preference aligns neatly with the Tory cultural sensibility of Blackwood’s, steeped in the backward glances of Scottish Romanticism, it also reveals much about how principal contributors like John Gibson Lockhart and James Hogg wrestled with the emergent forms of periodical writing that allowed individual authors to both build and maintain the collective imaginative project of Blackwood...