The Edinburgh Review, of course, was a crucial journal for the formation of enlightened public opinion during the nineteenth century: founded in 1802, it flourished under the confident Editorship of Francis Jeffrey, and with such able contributors as Sydney Smith and Henry Brougham. Its circulation rose quickly to about 10,000 copies, with one specific number selling 14,000 copies in 1815. It was a Whig Journal, rather traditional in literary matters, but not afraid of innovations in politics, so very necessary at that very beginning of the nineteenth century.
Its origin, too, virtually coincided with a new beginning in the English literature: a profound cultural response to the social harshness of the Industrial Revolution (1760‐1830), reflected in the poetry of Romanticism, with such great names as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. In literature, therefore, the country was liberated from the restrictions of the Georgian Classicism, and this was soon, after 1815, to be accompanied by the beginnings of profound and important political changes, culminating eventually in the Gladstonian Liberalism of the Victorian era (1837‐1901). In 1802, the time was certainly ripe for a suitable intellectual revolution to anticipate in effect all that was yet to come in the transformation of life, culture, and society up to the end of the nineteenth century. This was clearly “elitist”, but also definitively innovative and even radical in its advocacy of social change.
This most welcome and thought‐provoking book studies in depth the role of the Edinburgh Review in the necessary re‐definition of British culture, for the beginning of the nineteenth century. Inevitably, its focus is Scottish: the role of Scotland, in particular, within the larger community of the UK, arising from the Union of 1707. A rich assortment of British and US academic scholars has contributed here to a volume which is both enlightening and stimulating, in times when we are assailed by far too much that is trite and uninformed.
All of these varied contributions are well sustained by scholarly and exhaustive references. All of them, too, are original and well researched. Thus, the first chapter studies Francis Jeffrey’s role in the making of a new era in the Scottish literary culture; followed by a learned review of the journal’s place in the restoration of a significant Scottish voice in the development of literature within the UK. Other noteworthy essays similarly explore the journal’s part in consideration of the “Irish Problem”, travel literature of the nineteenth century, Scott, Byron, Hazlitt and Coleridge, as precursors of new ideas and formative concepts, spreading, agreeably enough, from literature to politics and social transformation. The Edinburgh Review was never afraid of initiating discussion about new ideas or possibly challenging established notions, whether in literature or in politics: hence, of course, its eventual importance, in the history of change as well as tradition, during the nineteenth century.
The final chapter of this volume concentrates upon “Women and the Edinburgh Review”, appropriately enough for a century when women authors, of various sorts, emerged decisively as a power for intelligence, integrity, and persuasion, long before their political emancipation of 1918. The Edinburgh Review gave ample attention to the important literary works of such writers as Maria Edgeworth, Felicia Hemans and Jane Austen. Up to 1829, at any rate – when Francis Jeffrey was about to retire as its Editor – the Edinburgh Review largely anticipated what was yet to come in England itself, concerning the vogue and the role of women writers, within the vast generality of the ensuing Victorian literature.
In that, as in so many other diverse aspects, the Edinburgh Review constituted and maintained a position of progressive reform, which eventually animated politics as well as literature. This important book, therefore, well deserves purchase and a place in their collections, at any rate on the part of university and public libraries of any reputable size and significance.
