Hazlitt, De Quincey, and the Politics of Slang

2020 ◽  
Vol 71 (302) ◽  
pp. 921-936
Author(s):  
Roxanne Covelo
Keyword(s):  
Resistance To Change ◽  
Professional Culture ◽  
Thomas De Quincey ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
William Hazlitt ◽  
Literary Periodicals ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Quarterly Review

Abstract Literary periodicals like the Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s Magazine were the crucible in which Romantic reputations were made and unmade, debated, compared, and sometimes cruelly slandered. Today, it is often the cruellest of these reviews that survive, cited smilingly by modern critics to demonstrate the originality of the authors in question and their reviewers’ ineptitude or resistance to change. The study of William Hazlitt (who receives what is admittedly some of the harshest treatment of the Romantic periodical press) is often approached in this manner. But without sufficient context, the mere recounting of these attacks may elide the subtleties of Romantic-era reviewing and its particular rules of engagement. The present study attempts a more even-handed approach. By focusing on a specific criticism of Hazlitt’s work—namely, his alleged over-use of slang—and by tracing this criticism through its different iterations across magazines, it provides a more nuanced account of Hazlitt’s reception and, by extension, of the professional culture of reviewing. To the same end, the study also considers the writing of Hazlitt’s contemporary and fellow essayist Thomas De Quincey, whose own use of slang is more frequent and more conspicuous than Hazlitt’s but who, for reasons both professional and political, is spared the same critical vitriol.

Balaam and Bedlam

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Romantic Poetry ◽  
Edinburgh Review ◽  
Moral Management ◽  
Quarterly Review ◽  
Forensic Rhetoric

This chapter shows how contemporary reviews of Romantic poetry, and the hostile rhetoric of insanity they used, both stigmatized and popularized the Romantic mad poet. A forensic rhetoric, drawing directly on medical ideas of partial insanity and critical ‘moral management’, was deployed by the periodical press in the first quarter of the nineteenth century—first the quarterlies like the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review, then later new capricious and aggressive magazines such as Blackwood’s, and more quotidian or staid journals—against all of the major Romantic poets. The chapter shows, moreover, how the polemical terms in which Romantic poets were dismissed also held the seeds of their later canonization. The periodical critics, while they used slurs of meaningless insanity to dismiss poetry for political and reactionary ends, also spread the fame of ‘mad genius’, turning a marginalized opinion on the link between creativity and disorder into a cultural phenomenon.

scholarly journals Image Analytics and the Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Newspaper

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Fyfe ◽  
Qian Ge
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Quantitative Methods ◽  
Digital Archive ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Daily Mail ◽  
Computational Approaches ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Exponential Expansion ◽  
Quarterly Review

The nineteenth-century British periodical press took textual production to a scale that, for many commentators then and now, summoned the sublime. It was a “flood” which was “too vast to be dealt with as a whole,” in the words of the British Quarterly Review in 1859. It remained “a vast wilderness … its extent unknown, its ramifications unfathomed” for subsequent researchers, according to Michael Wolff in a 1971 issue of the Victorian Periodicals Newsletter. By the numbers for newspapers alone, stamped titles increased almost five-fold from 550 in 1846 to 2,440 in 1906. Simon Eliot estimates the number of copies those newspapers rising from 16 million in 1801 to over 78 million by 1849. By the end of the era, the Daily Mail claimed to circulate a million copies of each issue on its own. The periodical archive has sprawled even more with its gradual digitization which, while representing only a fraction of nineteenth-century print, still astonishes its researchers. “We are now on the brink of a further, exponential expansion … as vast new quantities of hitherto inaccessible records and texts become available for digital searching,” Patrick Leary claimed in 2004. In many ways, nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals set the very terms for not simply “digital searching” but quantitative methods, having only ever existed as “numbers” (a term for individual issues) in a state of impossible profusion, seeming to welcome computational approaches to the unruly digital archive.

Controversies in the Periodical Press

2021 ◽  
pp. 164-205
Author(s):  
Stefano Evangelista
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Henry James ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Literary Periodicals ◽  
The World ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Class Privilege

This chapter argues that the periodical medium played a fundamental role in the construction of literary cosmopolitanism as a discursive phenomenon. It focuses on two periodicals launched in the fin de siècle: the American Cosmopolitan and the European Cosmopolis. The commercially oriented and middle-brow Cosmopolitan promoted cosmopolitanism as a female-gendered social identity linked to class privilege, as testified by the serialization of Elizabeth Bisland’s round-the-world trip in 1889. However, it also interrogated the cosmopolitan tendencies of modern American literature embodied by the writings of Henry James. By contrast, the short-lived Cosmopolis was a high-brow periodical that aimed to revive Kant’s Enlightenment ideal and Goethe’s notion of world literature. It was committed to multilingualism and to fighting nationalism. The chapter closes with an analysis of Cosmopolis as a competitor to the iconic 1890s English literary periodicals, the Yellow Book and The Savoy.

William Hazlitt, The Periodical Press

2021 ◽  
pp. 117-120
Author(s):  
Joanne Shattock ◽  
Joanne Wilkes ◽  
Katherine Newey ◽  
Valerie Sanders
Keyword(s):  
Periodical Press ◽  
William Hazlitt

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Nicholas Mason ◽  
Tom Mole
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Periodical Literature ◽  
Introductory Essay ◽  
Literary Periodicals ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dynamic Moment ◽  
Academic Study

This introductory essay opens by establishing the gap between the richness of Romantic-era literary periodicals and this genre’s ongoing marginality in the academic study of the period. Pushing back against a growing tendency to consign the era’s periodical literature to the margins of the “long eighteenth” or “long nineteenth” century, it stakes the Romantic period’s claim as a distinct and unusually dynamic moment in the history of British literary periodicals. Before concluding with a brief synopsis of the volume’s contents and organization, it also explains the rationale for using a single magazine, Blackwood’s, to illustrate the brilliance, range, and sophistication of the age’s great periodicals.

‘She has her ladies too’: Women and Scottish Periodical Culture in Blackwood's Early Years

Romanticism ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 253-261
Author(s):  
Pam Perkins
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Mary Shelley ◽  
Early Years ◽  
First Year ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Felicia Hemans ◽  
Madame De Stael ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Romantic Era

This essay looks at some of the women who were published in and reviewed by Blackwood's Magazine in its early years. While the important contributions of women to the Blackwood's of the Victorian period have always been recognised, the Romantic-era magazine is better remembered for a sometimes aggressively ‘masculine’ tone. Women appeared in Blackwood's from the beginning, however, even if only in small numbers. Focusing first on reviews of major women writers – including Madame de Staël and Mary Shelley – and then turning to Felicia Hemans and Anne Grant, both of whom had poems published in the first year of the magazine's run, the essay argues that comments on these women and their work can illuminate the ways in which Blackwood's positioned itself in the competitive world of the Scottish periodical press.

Reading Antiquity, Mapping History

Shadow Sites ◽  
2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kitty Hauser
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Journalism ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
The Past ◽  
Quarterly Review ◽  
New Republic ◽  
One Magazine ◽  
The Times ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Interwar Britain

When, in 1978, the poet, critic, and editor Geoffrey Grigson (1905–85) was asked by the Times Literary Supplement which journals had influenced him when young, he answered that one magazine, Antiquity, founded and edited then by O. G. S. Crawford, still seems to me to have been the flower of all periodicals familiar to me in my day. In that treasury, so decently laid out (and so well printed . . . ), prehistory, and history, rather as it was understood by Marc Bloch in France, and later by W. G. Hoskins, and imagination, received a stimulus such as no periodical administered to literature. Antiquity was begun in 1927 by the field archaeologist O. G. S. Crawford (1886–1957) as a quarterly review aiming to disseminate the findings of a new generation of archaeologists in an accessible style and a visually attractive format. For Grigson, this journal most fitted the bill, in the late 1920s and 1930s, of what he calls the ‘periodical of Utopia’ that Tolstoy had called for in 1858. Tolstoy wanted a journal proclaiming the ‘independence and eternity of art’, where art would be saved from the politics that was engulfing nineteenth-century Russia, threatening to destroy or defile art. Such a journal was Grigson’s ideal, too. Drawing an implicit parallel between Tolstoy’s Moscow of 1858 and politicized interwar Britain, he decried the endemic admixture of politics with art in the periodical press at this time, when every ‘shrewd editor’ had an ‘axe to grind’. One of his favourites, the New Republic, while excellent, ‘came under the curse . . . which ordains that most literary journalism in our language must be for ever mixed with politics’. T. S. Eliot’s journal The Criterion was tainted by the same ‘curse’: ‘covert politics’, claimed Grigson, ‘slightly defiled its superiority’. Only in Antiquity, it seems, could Grigson discern art—‘independent and eternal’—without the defiling politics or the dullness that accompanied it in other journals and weeklies. Only in a publication that did not claim to deal with art could he find what he was looking for, as he viewed this archaeological journal through the lens of poetry. Antiquity, he wrote, made ‘all the past with firework colours burn’—a line he borrowed from Wyndham Lewis’s poem about Sir Thomas Browne’s antiquarian tract Urne Buriall.

The Rise of Public Health in the Popular Periodical Press: The Political Medicine of W. P. Alison, Robert Gooch, and Robert Ferguson

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Coyer
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Policy ◽  
Public Health Policy ◽  
Law Reform ◽  
The Political ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
The Social ◽  
Quarterly Review ◽  
Paternalistic Approach

This chapter examines the construction of the ‘political medicine’ of William Pulteney Alison (1790–1859) and Robert Gooch (1784–1830) and its development and popular dissemination through Blackwood’s. This humanistic ‘political medicine’ critiqued liberal political economists and utilitarianism and promoted the importance of moral feelings and Christian sentiments in informing public health policy. Alison’s contribution to the debates regarding poor law reform and Gooch’s proposal for a religious order of nurses – a project supported by his friend Robert Southey – are discussed as components within a progressive Tory social medicine. By way of contrast, the chapter closes with an examination of Robert Ferguson (1799–1865), the key medical contributor to the Quarterly Review from 1829 to 1854. Although Ferguson also contributed to what David Roberts terms ‘the social conscience of Tory periodicals’, writing on issues relevant to public health and promoting a paternalistic approach, his writings more clearly reflect the counter-revolutionary agenda of the Quarterly, as opposed to the more explicit humanism of Blackwood’s.

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