The Quarterlies and Their Background

The traditional history of nineteenth-century periodicals normally begins with the founding of the quarterly Edinburgh Review at the outset of the period, in 1802. Supported by the publisher Archibald Constable, the lawyer Francis Jeffrey and his colleagues, Francis Horner, Henry Brougham and clergyman Sydney Smith, set out to transform the practice of reviewing. They challenged the conventions evident in the organs prominent in the late eighteenth century, such as the Monthly Review, the Critical Review and the British Critic.

The earlier periodicals aimed at a very broad coverage of publications as they appeared, and themselves came out monthly. The space devoted to each text might be brief, and the approach more summative than evaluative. But the preface to the first number of the Edinburgh Review claimed to concentrate on ‘works that either have achieved, or deserve, a certain portion of celebrity’ (Butler 2006: 137): evaluation thus figured in the very choice of works to be noticed. So this first issue contained twenty-nine articles, mostly covering a single book, whereas the three monthlies mentioned above featured at least forty-four. The difference soon became more stark, with the average number of articles in the Edinburgh down to ten by 1810. This narrower scope involved, too, specialisation in certain areas linked with the Scottish universities – initially moral philosophy, political economy and the natural sciences, and then foreign relations and the geography and culture of overseas countries, notably those of the Empire (Butler 2006: 137–8). The periodical's Scottishness was also important, as it drew on Scottish traditions of debate and ‘upholding the superiority of Scottish educational and legal systems’ (Finkelstein 2016: 187).

The Edinburgh became notorious for its sardonic, often combative variety of criticism. In his study of its early years, William Christie comments on its ‘consistently clever’ kind of severity which could become ‘especially wilful and especially skilful’ and ‘sometimes even vicious and inexcusable’: fifteen of those twenty-nine articles in the first number were critical in an adverse way (Christie 2009: 20).