Maga as Medium: Cockneys in Context

This essay examines the renowned Cockney School attacks within their most immediate context: the pages of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. It argues that the textual dynamics of Maga are more fundamental to understanding this campaign than either politics or class animus, although these are deeply implicated. Blackwood’s, over time, developed a series of rules of reading for its implied audience, a set of protocols that governs the interpretation of both the formal Cockney School series as well as the occasional references to Hunt, Keats and Hazlitt in other articles. Read against other contributions to the magazine and in terms of the individual numbers in which they emerge, the attacks on Hunt and Keats take on meaning less critical or political than institutional. The writers of Blackwood’s, at least over the course of the magazine’s first hundred numbers, created an idiosyncratic textual dynamic, which employed dialogism, self-consciousness, contradiction, performative rhetoric, hoaxing and what contributors term ‘bam’. The Cockney School articles, like another infamous extended series in Blackwood’s—the ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’—are a performance best judged by the peculiar textual rules of this magazine.

Introduction

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.

Blackwood’s Pastoralism and the Highland Clearances

This chapter shows how, through a recurring discourse of ‘pastoralism’, Blackwood’s used the lingering traumas of the Highland Clearances as an opportunity to develop new literary conventions. Rather than seeing pastoral as merely concomitant with the Blackwood’s circle’s reactionary Toryism, we should recognize that Blackwood’s and its authors were operating in a more complex ‘post-pastoral’ register that challenged modernity’s exploitation of the natural world while conceding art’s reliance on modern, exploitative, destructive impulses. Such post-pastoral tensions were especially pronounced in Blackwood’s running commentary on agrarian reform, rural economics, and the Highland Clearances.

Performing Personae in Blackwood’s and Romantic Periodicals

Perhaps more than any other Romantic periodical, Blackwood’s is known for its use of personae, specifically fictional characters masquerading as actual contributors to the magazine. Especially in the ‘Noctes Ambrosianae,’ its personae dramatize the process of creating the magazine, parading their high-minded debates, habitual procrastination, and personal foibles before the public. This essay reframes our understanding of personae in Blackwood’s and other Romantic-era periodicals by applying J.L. Austin’s speech-act concept of ‘felicity’ to representations of James Hogg’s ‘Ettrick Shepherd’ and Thomas De Quincey’s ‘English Opium-Eater’.

The Politics and Aesthetics of Extraction: Cultural Interventions in Blackwood’s and the Imperial

This chapter contrasts how two late-Romantic periodicals, Blackwood’s and the evangelical Imperial Magazine, extracted and repurposed material from other sources. It focuses first on J. H. Merivale’s 1819 Blackwood’s articles that translates strategic excerpts from Giuseppe Ballardini’s 1608 Italian miscellany, Prato fiorito. These translations suggest that superstition and religious enthusiasm are fundamental components of European Catholicism. o the Catholic cultures of the Continent. In so doing, they illustrate how a discourse composed of extracts can be simultaneously fragmentary and coherent and how extraction can be a practice of both assemblage and disarticulation. Soon thereafter, the Imperial would follow suit, intermixing extracts from older devotional works with contemporary missionary narratives. Because the focus of the travel writing is often the newest worlds of Australia and New Zealand, the Imperial specifically locates evangelicalism within a project of Tory imperialism.

‘Some Grand Secreter’: Secrecy and Exposure in Blackwood’s

The paradoxical compulsions toward both secrecy and display in early Blackwood’s exemplified the interplay between revelation and concealment that became one of the Romantic-era magazine’s standard modes. This essay shows how, from its inaugural issue of October 1817, Blackwood’s veered between secrecy, suppositions, and disclosures, epitomizing how the construction of secrecy serves as a method for the dissemination of multiple perspectives, identities, and information. Secrecy and exposure are at the heart of one of Blackwood’s—and Romantic print culture’s—fundamental rhetorical moves: the construction of secret knowledge that produces (the sensation and illusion of) shared public intimacy.

Mary Prince ‘At Home’ in Blackwood’s: Maga’s Origins and the End of Slavery

The 1831 slave narrative The History of Mary Prince caused a particular stir in Scotland. Some of the rankest attacks against Prince’s account came in a series of Blackwood’s essays by James MacQueen, a Scot who had recently returned from the slave plantations of the Caribbean. Much of MacQueen’s spleen was directed toward Prince’s chief abolitionist sponsor, Thomas Pringle, a fellow Scot and one of the co-editors of William Blackwood’s initial house periodical, the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine—when the publication was edited by fellow-Scot, Thomas Pringle. Emphasizing MacQueen’s perverse deployment of contemporary Scottish discourses of homecoming, this essay interrogates how magazines like Blackwood’s functioned as a key proving ground for late-Romantic theories of race, empire and ‘proper’ domesticity.

‘A Separate and Distinct Tribunal’: Libel Law and Reviewing in Early Issues of Blackwood’s

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.

The Challenge of Longevity: Blackwood’s as a Post-Romantic Periodical

The collection’s concluding chapter chronicles how William Blackwood’s successors strove to preserve his magazine’s trademark Toryism and miscellaneity amid fierce competition from a wave of imitators and rivals. Deploying a wide-angle lens, it traces how Blackwood’s met the challenges of longevity by repeatedly reinventing itself over the course of the Victorian age. Accordingly, it not only models the insights to be gained through the diachronic study of a single serial but also underscores how nimble any given periodical needed to be in a century of rapidly morphing audiences, formats and technologies.

Rethinking the Periodical Medium in the Digital Archive

Klancher revisits the researching and writing of his landmark work in Romantic periodical studies, The Making of English Reading Audiences (1987), asking what scholars have gained and lost in shifting from the printed archive to digital databases. Despite the manifest advantages of modern keyword searches, this chapter laments the challenges of browsing old serials in at a moment when they are increasingly being stored away in off-site archives and current online periodical databases have only hit and miss ‘browse’ capabilities. This essay also contemplates questions of periodicity and media format, exploring (a) how periodicity worked during the Romantic age; (b) the effacing of many signs of that diurnal, weekly, monthly, quarterly periodicity when those issues were bound in codex volumes; and (c) the new possibilities of digitally restoring those signs of periodical materiality.