The review essay emerged in the seventeenth century and entered the publishing mainstream in the middle of the eighteenth, when Ralph Griffiths founded his Monthly Review, the first journal devoted entirely to book reviewing. But it was The Edinburgh Review that electrified the publishing world and put the review essay at the centre of British cultural and political life. Established in 1802, and edited by Francis Jeffrey, the Edinburgh exuded confidence, bristled with vitriol, celebrated Whiggism, and condemned injustice. Seven years later, Tories fought back with the founding of The Quarterly Review, edited by William Gifford, which set itself in opposition to the Edinburgh on all the major issues of the day. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine was a more agile and belligerent Tory alternative to the Quarterly, but it gradually grew more moderate and in the 1830s was eclipsed by its most raucous imitator, Fraser’s Magazine.

William Maginn made the transition from a learned Cork schoolmaster corresponding anonymously with British periodical editors to one of the central figures of the London press. He began by writing gratis for Blackwood’s Magazine, and then, fearful of the ‘cheerless prospect’ of Cork in the ‘Captain Rock’ years, moving to London as a working professional. While he avoided the trap of writing chiefly on the ‘Irish question’ as some expected, he was enveloped in the persona of ‘Morgan Odoherty’, a comic Irish figure invented in Blackwood’s by others. Maginn and Odoherty for some became one – a similar situation to that faced by James Hogg with the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’. In his last fifteen years, Maginn used multiple periodicals to both practise the art of humbug and attack, especially in politics, the humbugs of the age. His founding in 1830 of Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country was his central innovation in literary magazines and Tory politics during the Reform era.