It is an ‘age of personality’, wrote Robert Southey in 1817, taking up a phrase of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s. William Wordsworth agreed: for the Lake Poets, the post-Waterloo period represented the burgeoning of a print culture that preferred ‘literary gossiping’ to works of genius and unveiled poets’ private lives rather than extolled their publications. Dismayed by this trend, they understood its cause to be a boom of cheap periodical print aimed at an expanded reading public. During the 1820s, the steam press made printing tenfold faster; the stereotype cut the cost of typesetting; the Fourdrinier machine slashed the price of paper. By 1832, it was possible to market a magazine for a penny and see it bought by 200,000 people, a tiny fraction of the price of the leading journals of 1820 – the Edinburgh and the Quarterly – which sold fewer than 10,000 copies each. The new mass readership was more plebeian and more likely to buy, ‘in monthly parts, at cheap prices’, encyclopaedias, annuals, novels and magazines than they were the expensive volumes of poetry of Wordsworth and his friends. New periodicals such as Blackwood's Magazine profited from publishing intimate conversation between fictional versions of literary characters and from making personal attacks on the poets whose works they disliked. In 1829, Southey noted the change: ‘All classes are now brought within the reach of your current literature … on the quality of which, according as it may be salubrious or noxious, the health of the public mind depends.’

Despite the proliferation of print, the democratisation of taste and the modest sales of their verse, the 1820s was the decade in which the Lake Poets’ reputation was made. The cause of this seeming paradox is explained by Matthew Sangster on the basis of the decade's fetishisation of personality. The old poets, Sangster suggests, were marketed to mass audiences in periodicals such as Blackwood's on the basis of intimate portraits. Purchasers could buy, through magazine articles, privileged access to the private man, and could thereby eavesdrop on a ‘genius’, vicariously sharing a relationship that was portrayed as being above the commercial fray that pertained everywhere else. Without having to read anything as demanding as The Excursion, Thalaba the Destroyer or The Friend, the magazine buyers consumed the essential poet, as revealed in his conversation.