In their efforts to attain the authority to police literary culture, reviewers in Blackwood’s and other Romantic periodicals needed models for making judgments that would stick and offering not mere opinions but verdicts which made further debate impertinent. In other words, they sought the authority to pronounce felicitous performatives, the ability to do things with words. Applying J. L. Austin’s concept of performative utterances to periodical criticism, this essay suggests that one of the models that particularly interested the Blackwood’s reviewers was that of libel law. Libel courts and book reviews, after all, engage in similar projects, aiming to regulate public discourse and define the limits of what it is acceptable to say or write in public. They do this by means of authoritative pronouncements, couched in performative speech acts: verdicts and sentences in the case of libel courts, decisive critical judgments in the case of reviews.
