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ROMANTIC PERIODICALS AND PRINT
CULTURE
 BOOKS OF RELATED INTEREST
MEDIEVALISM AND THE QUEST FOR THE “REAL” MIDDLE AGES
Edited by Clare A Simmons
WINSTANLEY AND THE DIGGERS, 1649–1999
Edited by Andrew Bradstock
NEWS, NEWSPAPERS AND SOCIETY IN EARLY MODERN BRITAIN
Edited by Joad Raymond
THE INTERSECTIONS OF THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SPHERES IN
EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
Edited by Paula R.Backscheider and Timothy Dykstal
 ROMANTIC
PERIODICALS AND
PRINT CULTURE
Editor

Kim Wheatley
With a foreword by Stephen C.Behrendt

FRANK CASS
LONDON • PORTLAND, OR
 First published in 2003 in Great Britain by
FRANK CASS AND COMPANY LIMITED
Crown House, 47 Chase Side, London N14 5BP, England
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection
of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
and in the United States of America by
FRANK CASS
c/o International Specialized Book Services, Inc.
920 NE 58th Avenue, Suite 300, Portland, OR 97213–3786
Copyright © 2003 Frank Cass & Co. Ltd.
Website: www.frankcass.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Romantic periodicals and print culture
1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism
2. English literature—18th century—History and criticism
3. Romanticism—Great Britain 4. Gender identity in
literature 5. Periodicals—Great Britain—History—19th
century 6. Periodicals—Great Britain—History—18th
century 7. Great Britain—Intellectual life—19th century
8. Great Britain—Intellectual life—18th century
I. Wheatley, Kim, 1960–
820.9′145

ISBN 0-203-01099-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0 7146 5437 X (Print Edition) (cloth)

ISBN 0 7146 8437 6 (paper)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Romantic periodicals and print culture/editor Kim Wheatley.
p. cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7146-5437-X (hardback)—ISBN 0-7146-8437-6 (pbk.)
1. English prose literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2.
English literature—19th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc.
3. Periodicals—Publishing—Great Britain—History—19th century. 4.
Criticism—Great Britain—History—19th century. 6. English
 v

periodicals—History—19th century. 8. Romanticism—Great Britain. I.

Wheatley, Kim, 1960– II. Title.
PR773.R66 2003
820.9′007–dc21 2003011291
This group of studies first appeared in a Special Issue of Prose Studies
(ISSN 0144-0357), 25/1 (April 2002)
[Romantic Periodicals and Print Culture].
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise without the prior written permission of Frank Cass and Company Limited.
 Contents

Foreword viii
Stephen C.Behrendt

Introduction 1
Kim Wheatley
Mary Robinson, the Monthly Magazine, and the Free Press 20
Adriana Craciun
Correcting Mrs Opie’s Powers: The Edinburgh Review of Amelia 45
Opie’s Poems (1802)
Andrea Bradley
Novel Marriages, Romantic Labor, and the Quarterly Press 68
Mark Schoenfield
Reading the Rhetoric of Resistance in William Cobbett’s Two-Penny 92
Trash
Bonnie J.Gunzenhauser
“May the married be single, and the single happy:” Blackwood’s, the 112
Maga for the Single Man
Lisa Niles
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the Construction of 135
Wordsworth’s Genius
David Higgins
Detaching Lamb’s Thoughts 152
Peter J.Manning
The New Monthly Magazine and the Liberalism of the 1820s 163
Nanora Sweet

Abstracts 181
 vii

Notes on Contributors 184

Index 186
 Foreword
STEPHEN C.BEHRENDT

Ours is not the first age to fuss about the role and function of “the media” in public
—and therefore political—life. In the twenty-first century “the media” is
increasingly both “mass” and electronic, but its powers—and the fears about
them that arise from seemingly all quarters—bear some remarkable similarities
to the situation that existed in Great Britain two centuries ago. The Romantic
era witnessed a wholesale redefinition of the relationships of individual citizens
to the various and sometimes (but not always) overlapping communities to
which they belonged—including the nation. Typically defined by the religious,
economic, ideological, intellectual, or aesthetic convictions of their members,
these communities were invariably partisan, reflecting the volatility of any
culture during times of social and political revolution and extended war-
making. Vital to all such partisanship is a mechanism for rallying support and
enthusiasm behind any group’s principles and spokespersons and for demonizing
its opponents and their spokespersons.
Periodical literature provided much of that mechanism during these years.
While earlier periodicals had begun to transform the public sphere along the
lines suggested some years ago by Jürgen Habermas, enfranchising increasing
numbers of variously configured and largely male “publics” in a burgeoning
discourse about ideas, the state, and civil institutions, the mid-eighteenth
century periodical was nevertheless largely an eclectic, urbane, and masculinist
organ that both presumed and therefore shaped a middle- to upper-class
readership of well-rounded, largely cosmopolitan Britons. By the century’s end,
however, the situation was much altered. Rocked by political and ideological
revolution, Western Europe presented new and eager audiences whose tastes
ran far from the staid standard set by those earlier periodicals. Already were
emerging in England what modern media studies call “niche publications,”
periodicals whose contents were defined by the particular readerships to which
they were directed. This meant greater specialization and a partitioning of the
general public readership into what are now called interest groups, a
phenomenon against which William Godwin had warned already in Political
 ix

Justice (1793). Partisanship became both more widespread and more aggressive
under these conditions, as the total number of periodicals—and therefore of real
or imagined sub-readerships—multiplied. Indeed, periodical literature at the
dawn of the nineteenth century was remarkably adversarial in every sense, from
the often witty conservatism of the Anti-Jacobin to the paid party politics of
journals like the Whig Edinburgh Review and the Tory Quarterly Review. From
there it was a natural step to the success during the Regency of the shrewd
marketing (and carefully crafted idiom) of Cobbett’s Two-Penny Trash or the
wildly performative rhetoric of T.J.Wooler’s radical weekly Black Dwarf, both
of which aimed at demolishing the ideas and icons of the Establishment while
raising up a more perceptive, self-aware citizenry capable of penetrating cant of
whatever sort and finding its way to some apparently measurable “truth.”
That truth lay, of course, largely in the convictions of the beholder.
Periodicals existed, therefore, as instruments for shaping the competing
versions of truth that they wished their readers to seem to discover for
themselves—with the periodical’s help, naturally. The success of the “new”
Romantic periodical lay both in its enfranchisement of significantly larger
numbers of readers—including the working classes—and in its consequent
contribution to the spread of literacy among portions of the populace whose
pretensions to literacy had routinely been repudiated by the political
establishment. Now that establishment recognized—and not just from the
example of revolutionary France—what it had to fear from an informed and
therefore empowered citizenry. This helps to account for the energy expended
in the more “traditional” (read “ideologically conservative”) periodicals on
decrying impropriety of one sort or another. For impropriety is inherently an
attack on the privileged status quo and its institutions. It is “excess,” apparent
alike from its unconventional thinking and its rhetorical vigor. This is one reason
why Cobbett and Wooler were so successful, and why William Hone and
George Cruikshank’s Political House that Jack Built (1819), like James Gillray’s
caricatures of two decades earlier, possessed such devastating impact.
Still, in the long view, perhaps the most important contribution of Romantic
periodicals, and the one that has escaped serious notice for so long, was their
unmistakable contribution to the “conversation in print” that is the
distinguishing hallmark of British Romantic writing. Literary history long
nourished an image of the Romantic writer (usually a poet) as a solitary, flower-
sniffing devotee of unspoiled Nature. This myth entirely misses the reality that
Romantic writers were characteristically directly involved in the leading social,
political, economic, and ideological contests of their era. They immersed
themselves in these issues and spoke their minds about them, both in the overtly
“literary” works by which we remember a William Wordsworth or a Mary
Robinson, a Percy Shelley or a Felicia Hemans, and in the surprising number of
x

their contributions to the periodicals which they—along with their

contemporaries—avidly read. Moreover, they knew one another’s works well
enough to respond to them—to engage them, intellectually and rhetorically—
both in the periodical press and in their more conventionally published works.
Further still, careful examination reveals that both the few canonical Romantic
writers and many less familiar but equally active and committed writers knew
the periodicals—and the authors who wrote for them—well enough to engage in
a no less interactive conversation in print with them. This was true no less for
women authors than for men: Mary Wollstonecraft contributed to Joseph
Johnson’s Analytical Review; Mary Hays to the Monthly Magazine; and Mary
Robinson to the Morning Post and the Monthly Magazine in the 1790s, while
Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon were popular contributors to Regency and
post-Regency periodicals.
The essays in this volume reveal some of how the vast and varied periodical
literature of the Romantic era both shaped and energized literary, social,
economic, spiritual, intellectual, and aesthetic discourse among large numbers
of readers and writers whose contributions—whether they took the form of
submissions (from genuine or spurious letters, squibs, poems, and essays)—or
purchases fueled a conversation in print—and therefore a dynamic and
diversified community of public discourse—that proved to be as irresistible (in
every sense of the word) as it was unstoppable. Not the collection of isolated
misanthropes and disaffected dreamers they have sometimes been styled, the
Romantics were a fractious, well-read, and socially committed community of
writers and thinkers who sought to empower their readers by validating their
individual and collective independence of vision and of mind. This is their
legacy, to which the body of Romantic periodical literature provides
incontrovertible evidence.
 Introduction
KIM WHEATLEY

“We must please to live, and therefore should live to please,” asserted William
Hazlitt in his 1823 article “The Periodical Press,” an attempt to assuage—or
possibly to intensify—contemporary anxieties about the expansion of periodical
writing. “Therefore, let Reviews flourish—” Hazlitt added with a rhetorical
flourish of his own, “let Magazines increase and multiply—let the Daily and
Weekly Newspapers live for ever!”1 Each of the categories of publication
identified by Hazlitt had already taken on a new lease of life during the first two
decades of the nineteenth century, in what amounts to a series of paradigm
shifts within British print culture. Substantial “Reviews” or reviewing
periodicals, lighter and more miscellaneous magazines, and of course
newspapers had already increased and multiplied during the eighteenth century,
especially the 1790s, but three developments in particular helped to shape the
distinctive periodical culture of the Romantic era.
The first was the creation in 1802 of the Whig Edinburgh Review, which
dispensed with the universal coverage and ostensibly objective criticism of the
earlier Critical Review and Monthly Review and the more recent Analytical Review.
The success of the selective and opinionated Edinburgh provoked the
establishment of a Tory counterblast (some would say counterpart), the
Quarterly Review, in 1809; these two elite quarterlies in turn would spark
competition in the form of the radical Westminster Review in 1824.
The second major development lay in the heightening of the literary
pretensions of the miscellaneous magazine, through the arrival on the scene of
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1817. The creativity of this playful and
instantly notorious monthly publication generated imitators such as the London
Magazine (founded in 1820) and the New Monthly Magazine (which began its
second series in 1821).2 (In contrast, the Monthly Magazine, founded in 1796,
and associated with a radical dissenting milieu, had a much less literary bent.)
A third new departure can be seen in the directions taken by the weekly, if
not the daily, newspaper.3 At an ideological distance from the politically
conservative Blackwood’s, two weekly newspapers of the 1810s, Leigh Hunt’s
2 ROMANTIC PERIODICALS AND PRINT CULTURE

Examiner and William Cobbett’s more populist Political Register, made reformist
journalism more belletristic in one case, and more accessible in the other.4
Relatively low in status yet fast gaining respectability, periodicals in early
nineteenth-century Britain claimed a new degree of cultural influence at once
admired and feared. Yet, as befits a genre that by definition never “live[s]
forever,” many of these publications have disappeared over the last two centuries
into a sort of literary-historical oblivion. Nevertheless, their contents remain
highly readable, entertaining, and illuminating, as many specialists in Romantic
literature are now discovering. The present collection of essays builds on recent
research on the Romantic-era periodical press and extends that research into
some new directions.
Romanticists long neglected the periodicals that proliferated during the early
nineteenth century, for specific reasons. What Jerome McGann has labeled the
“Romantic ideology” stands for everything that periodical writing does not.5 It
elevates, among other things, inspired (and solitary) authorship over routine
(and collaborative) composition; self-exploration or an ahistorical aestheticism
over immersion in commodity culture; and immortal fame over transient
publicity. The tendency to treat canonical Romantic writers as transcending
their historical moment is itself a Romantic legacy.6 The present revival of
scholarly interest in the periodicals coincides with the prevalence of new
historicist criticism, one of the initial impulses of which was to show how
Romantic poetry, however idealistic, registers and helps to form its cultural—
and especially political—context. One way of recovering that context is
through the periodicals that reviewed the work of Romantic writers when it
first appeared and in which many of the writers themselves published essays,
poems and reviews. What might be called “old historicist” scholarship—in
which history is unfurled as a sort of backdrop to literary history—paid sporadic
attention to early nineteenth-century periodical writing, but always with the
assumption that knowledge of such writing constituted “background.”
Moving that background to the foreground, the first wave of Romantic new
historicists undertook the important work of resituating well-known poems and
essays within or against the periodicals in which they were originally published
or reviewed. These critics tended to be attracted to the various feuds between
the canonical Romantic poets and their reviewers, especially the campaign of
Blackwood’s Magazine against the “Cockney School,” including John Keats and
Leigh Hunt. Such feuds continue to fascinate present-day critics: the campaign of
the Edinburgh Review against the “Lake School” of poets—Robert Southey,
William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge—is attracting renewed
attention, as is the intriguingly ambivalent attitude of contemporary reviewers
to the “Satanic School,” namely Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron.
 INTRODUCTION 3

However, research on Romantic-era periodicals now also reflects new

historicist scholarship’s expanded scope—its aspiration to study the full
spectrum of print culture, rather than literature narrowly defined. Much of this
research depends on ongoing archival recuperation. The rediscovery of
Romantic women writers, the main growth area in Romantic studies, goes hand-
in-hand with the study of periodicals, since much work by women writers first
appeared in periodicals and ephemeral annuals. Likewise, the recovery of
Romantic-era working-class writers (male and female) inevitably proceeds
alongside research into the populist political journalism of the period. The
decentering of canonical literary texts can also be seen in criticism taking the
periodicals as objects of study in their own right—criticism as likely to interpret
a jeu d’esprit in Blackwood’s as a review of Keats, or, if a review, as likely to address
one of a long-forgotten work of non-fiction prose as one of a canonical poem.
Lest a new hierarchy arise, privileging the Edinburgh Review over (say) the
Literary Gazette, continuing new excavation work becomes necessary. In this
introduction I will discuss how the contributions in this collection fit in with these
various related approaches. First, though, I shall survey earlier criticism of
Romantic-era periodicals, which tends to focus on the upmarket Reviews and
magazines rather than the lower-status weekly or daily publications. I shall begin
by mentioning some of the periodicals’ own self-evaluations and appraisals of
each other, which are frequently used as starting points for discussion.7 Nothing
if not reflexive, Romantic-era periodical writing offers an array of self-analyses
to guide scholarly investigation.8
Recurring themes appear in early nineteenth-century comments on the
periodical press: the idea that periodicals are detrimental to higher literary
pursuits (partly because of the quality of their writing and partly because of
their potentially all-encroaching extensiveness), their relentless politicization of
discourse, their reliance on (and abuse of) anonymity, their indulgence in so-
called “personality” or personal attacks and, last but not least, their sway over
public opinion. The assemblage of such charges bestknown to Romanticists
appears in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817)—not, of course, itself a
periodical, but containing a chapter entitled “Remarks on the Present Mode of
Conducting Critical Journals.” The chapter purports to be a general analysis of
reviewing practices, but is actually an attack on the Edinburgh, and in particular
its editor, Francis Jeffrey, for his hostile reviews of Wordsworth’s poetry. In a
less serious vein, an 1818 article in Blackwood’s, “Remarks on the Periodical
Criticism of England,” denounced the fierce partisanship of the two major
quarterlies, claiming that “The author is a mere puppet in the hands of the
critic.”9 The ostensible author, a fictitious German nobleman, characterized the
Edinburgh as balefully influential, a danger to public morals. In the same year,
Hazlitt published in the Examiner a far more scathing attack on the Quarterly
4 ROMANTIC PERIODICALS AND PRINT CULTURE

editor William Gifford, an attack elaborated upon in Hazlitt’s magnificent Letter

to William Gifford, Esq (1819) and reprised in The Spirit of the Age (1825). The
piece in the Examiner opens: “This little person is a considerable catspaw: and so
far worthy of some slight notice. He is the Government Critic, a character nicely
differing from that of a Government spy—an invisible link, that connects
literature with the police.”10 Here as elsewhere Hazlitt succeeds in matching the
Quarterly’s own vitriolic prose.
Hazlitt’s 1823 “Periodical Press” article, which I quoted from earlier, is
rather unusual in defending instead of attacking the genre, but it deals with the
same topics as some earlier and later critiques of particular periodicals.
Published anonymously in the Edinburgh, the article cannot really possess the
critical distance to which it lays claim. Hazlitt begins with the question, “Whether
Periodical Criticism is, upon the whole, beneficial to the cause of literature?” (349) and
sidesteps the issue by “announcing a truism:” “viz. That periodical criticism is
favourable—to periodical criticism” (349–50, his italics). Given the prevalence of
such concerns, Hazlitt’s “truism” can be read as a threat. In the course of his
defense of periodicals, Hazlitt admits that reviewing is “too often made the
engine of party-spirit and personal invective” (358) but, according to him, this
“only shows the extent and importance of this branch of literature” in that “it has
become the organ of every thing else” (359).11 He does, however, assail the
“base system of mean and malignant defamation” (378) associated for him with
the Tory press, Blackwood’s in particular. His article thus inevitably partakes of
the partisanship to which he takes a laissez-faire attitude. A year after the
publication of Hazlitt’s article, a more detailed attack on the Edinburgh and the
Quarterly appeared in the first numbers of the Westminster Review: in three long
articles, James Mill and John Stuart Mill accused both major periodicals of
supporting the status quo and deplored their hold over public opinion.12 James
Mill accused the Quarterly in particular of “dirt-flinging”—a standard allegation
against periodicals from across the political spectrum.13 More defensively, a
lengthy Preface to the 1826 volume of Blackwood’s attempted to refute the
charges, so often raised against its writers, of “personality, insolence,
impertinence, assassination, with many other crimes of similar atrocity”—the
sources, many might think, of this magazine’s reputation for brilliance.14 The
same Preface insisted that the political effect of Blackwood’s was superior to that
of the great quarterlies: “we Tories beat the Whigs in argument all to sticks,
and…all the world acknowledged it” (x). As we shall see, early nineteenth-
century writers’ preoccupation—whether anxious or enthusiastic—with the
power of periodicals has become a central concern of present-day studies of
periodical writing.
The first full-length studies of Romantic-era periodicals, by contrast, were
more concerned with the periodicals’ content and self-presentation than with
 INTRODUCTION 5

their effect on their readers—if logos and ethos can really be distinguished from
pathos. These studies can be seen as an outgrowth of the periodicals’ self-
reflexive tendencies, being in-house productions. Samuel Smiles’ A Publisher and
His Friends (1891), a less-than-disinterested history of John Murray’s publishing
house, recounts the fascinating behindthe-scenes tale of the creation of the
Quarterly Review and its subsequent success.15 Taking a similar approach in Annals
of a Publishing House: William Blackwood and His Sons (1897), Margaret Oliphant,
herself a copious contributor to Blackwood’s, enthusiastically described the
advent of Maga and some of the early controversies that it incited.16 Despite or
because of their biases, these histories remain essential reading for students of
the Quarterly and Blackwood’s: both books bring to life the colorful personalities
associated with the two major Tory periodicals. Later more scholarly studies
continued Smiles’ and Oliphant’s diachronic approach, recounting the
development of specific periodicals across time. Walter Graham’s survey,
English Literary Periodicals (1930), has a chapter on the early nineteenth-century
Reviews and another on the magazines, placing them in the larger context of the
history of British periodicals.17 John Clive’s Scotch Reviewers (1957) relates the
founding of the Edinburgh and the fluctuation of its stances on political and
economic issues.18 Clive also gives a lively summary of the various schools of
thought concerning Francis Jeffrey’s feud with Wordsworth. No comparable
study exists of the Quarterly Review.19 In a different line of scholarly endeavor,
over the course of the twentieth century work proceeded on the attribution of
the authorship of the mostly anonymous articles in the periodicals—work
culminating in the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals (1966).20 Meanwhile,
scholars of reception history assembled collections of reviews of the major
Romantic writers, at first with only limited contextualization.21 The biggest
undertaking of this kind, Donald Reiman’s multi-volume The Romantics Reviewed
(1972), includes reviews of minor writers such as Southey, Charles Lamb,
Hazlitt, and Hunt, and prints the reviews in facsimile, a mode of presentation
that gives a taste of the periodicals in which the articles first appeared.
Reiman’s collection helped to spark new historicist studies on the
relationship between canonical Romantic poetry and the periodicals. Jerome
McGann was extremely influential in insisting on the importance of taking into
account the circumstances of a text’s initial publication—circumstances that in
turn affect the manner of reception. His essay “Keats and the Historical Method
in Literary Criticism” (1979) discusses the differences between the versions of
Keats’ ballad “La Belle Dame sans Merci” first published by Keats in Leigh
Hunt’s weekly literary periodical the Indicator, and the better-known version
published posthumously in 1848. McGann suggests that “Keats means to share a
mildly insolent attitude towards the literary establishment with his readers in
The Indicator” an attitude responding to the attacks on Keats by Tory
6 ROMANTIC PERIODICALS AND PRINT CULTURE

reviewers.22 Following in the footsteps of McGann, Theresa Kelley, in “Poetics

and the Politics of Reception: Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci,’” argues that
the sources behind and revisions to the poem show that Keats’ attitude to his
contemporary reviewers was both defiant and conciliatory.23 Marjorie
Levinson’s Keats’s Life of Allegory was especially decisive in resituating Keats in the
context of the hostile reception of the Cockney School.24 Levinson sees the
extravagant language of the reviewers—notably John Gibson Lockhart writing
for Blackwood’s—as reflecting anxieties concerning class status. Levinson’s
brilliant study inspired a stream of interpretations of the Cockney School
attacks.25 In inviting critics to historicize and thus politicize the Romantic poet
whose work most explicitly aspires to a timeless beauty, the Cockney School
attacks would seem to exert an almost irresistible appeal. But Keats is of course
not the only Romantic poet whose contemporary reviews reward close reading.
Karen Swann’s 1985 essay “Literary Gentlemen and Lovely Ladies: The Debate
on the Character of Christabel” argues that early attacks on Coleridge’s poem
betray—and seek to allay—anxieties about the boundaries between high culture
and mass culture (in this case, the Gothic). Like Kelley and Levinson, Swann
brings in questions of gender definition and sexual identity, putting a feminist
twist on the line of argument initiated by McGann.26 Such questions have not
always been pursued as vigorously as one might expect in subsequent work on
the periodicals.
Studies approaching Romantic writers by way of periodical culture continue
into the present decade. At the same time, as mentioned earlier, a related line
of research takes the periodicals themselves as its primary focus. Jon Klancher’s
highly respected and widely cited The Making of English Reading Audiences 1790–
1832 (1987) was a groundbreaking achievement both in the breadth of its
coverage and in its premise that periodicals are worthy of interpretation in their
own right, although even Klancher does not entirely lose sight of the canonical
Romantic writers.27 Klancher examines periodicals from the 1790s, popular
magazines of the 1820s like the Penny Magazine, and post-Waterloo radical
newspapers, as well as the elite quarterlies and monthlies that had been the
subject of earlier studies. This material at once de-emphasizes and reanimates
the subject of his final chapter: Wordsworth’s, Coleridge’s and Shelley’s
idealistic theories of reading. Two of Klancher’s arguments have proved
particularly influential. The first is that the periodicals create various separate
readerships with different assumptions about how to interpret words and the
world. In his chapter on the major Reviews and magazines, for example,
Klancher argues that these periodicals at once function to create middle-class
intellectual desire and teach the social codes that help to define that class. The
notion of disparate (even if overlapping) audiences has proved especially
appealing to scholars working on reformist journalism, attempting to modify
 INTRODUCTION 7

Jürgen Habermas’ theory of the public sphere by elaborating the notion of a

counter-public sphere.28 Klancher follows earlier scholars such as Graham and
Clive, however, in attempting to characterize readerships by way of the
periodicals and not vice versa, though his emphasis is on “the collective
audience” (11) rather than on the individual reader, actual or implied. Second,
Klancher has also changed the way scholars think about Romanticera periodicals
through his contention that the Reviews and magazines offer a “transauthorial
discourse” (52), a term that can also apply to the more popular journalism that
he discusses. Instead of thinking in terms of separate writers for the periodical,
Klancher treats the periodical itself as an agent, diffusing its influence through
such characteristic practices as anonymity and collaborative authorship. Earlier
critics had seen each periodical as stamped with a single voice: that of the
editor.29 Klancher takes this assumption and flips it over, seeing the monolithic
voice as a corporate one, the magisterial “we” that subsumes the work of any
individual contributor. One might object that each periodical has a distinctive
voice because of the editorial practice of altering contributions to fit in with the
ethos of the periodical. Yet the fact remains that, independent of editorial
interference, individual writers’ voices change in a periodical context: Southey,
for instance, sounds more reactionary in the Quarterly than in his own Letters from
England (1807), despite writing anonymously in both cases. David Latané
commends Klancher for submerging the individual author but points out, “The
question begged, of course, is to what extent… the anonymous author…really
speaks as or for [a particular periodical].”30 Latane calls for more, not less,
information about specific contributors.
Several subsequent studies build on Klancher’s claims about periodicals’
carving out of Romantic-era audiences and about periodical writing having a
“transauthorial” agency of its own. Marilyn Butler’s 1993 account of the
spectrum of Romantic-era periodicals stresses the role of the quarterlies—the
Edinburgh in particular—in dividing up fields of knowledge in ways that affected
writers as well as excluding certain classes of reader in the course of defining a
new middle-class audience. Discussing James Mill’s radical attack on the
Edinburgh in the Westminster Review, Butler observes that “his point was partly
subverted by the design and tone of the new journal—twelve long analytical
articles, written in a voice of effortless superiority, in perfect mimicry of the
prestigious quarterlies.”31 The format of the Westminster thus implicitly conceded
the quarterlies’ dominance. Mark Schoenfield, in an article on the Edinburgh
published in the same year as Butler’s overview, also stresses the disciplinary
function of the quarterlies, while conceding that “The Westminster’s analysis
exaggerates the Edinburgh’s hegemony” (148).32 Like Klancher, Schoenfield sees
the voice of the periodical as subsuming the voices of individual contributors. In
an earlier essay on the London Magazine, he had stressed the value of considering
8 ROMANTIC PERIODICALS AND PRINT CULTURE

the dialogue between contributions in a single issue of a periodical: “voices

together” sound different from voices apart.33 Jerome Christensen’s 1996 essay,
“The Detection of the Romantic Conspiracy in Britain,” complicates this
assumption in examining the glaring contradiction between two review-articles
in the opening number of the Edinburgh: Christensen asks, “is it a self-
contradiction? What does it mean to think of a periodical in terms of a ‘self’?…
Does anonymity excuse contradictory articles, or should it operate as a stronger
constraint upon contradiction?”34 Such questions become even trickier when
one considers the periodicals’ seemingly self-conscious manipulation of the
tensions between anonymous collective discourse and individual authorship.
The best discussion of this issue as it applies to the monthly magazines is in
Margaret Russett’s book on Thomas De Quincey.35
Entire books are now being devoted to topics dealt with by Klancher in
individual chapters or only in passing. Kevin Gilmartin’s excellent study of
popular journalism, Print Politics (1996), focuses unapologetically on nonliterary
print culture, including radical weekly periodicals such as the Black Dwarf (1817–
24) and the Republican (1819–26). Downplaying the effect of radical discourse
on its original readers in favor of sustained analysis of its rhetorical strategies and
self-awareness concerning form, Gilmartin argues that Romantic-era radical
journalism was at once constrained and energized by its oppositional stance.36
Stephen Behrendt’s 1997 collection, Romanticism, Radicalism, and the Press, aims
to demonstrate “the extent to which the Radical press figured directly in the
‘writing culture’ we associate with both the canonized and the marginalized
writers of British Romanticism.”37 One of Behrendt’s contributors, Steven
Jones, calls his essay on the Black Dwarf an “extended meditation on Klancher’s
astute observations” concerning the language of satire in Thomas Wooler’s
radical weekly.38
Addressing a different area of Romantic-era periodical culture, Mark
Parker’s Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (2000) takes the primary
monthlies, Blackwood’s, the London, and the New Monthly, to exemplify the
contention that periodical discourse repays detailed attention of the kind formerly
reserved for literary texts.39 Parker accepts the argument of Klancher and
Butler that the class-inflected discourse of the periodicals creates a particular
kind of audience: he claims, for example, that the New Monthly helps to invent a
bourgeois aestheticism, while at the same time its writers implicitly
acknowledge the socioeconomic conditions that make possible such escapism.
Parker modifies Klancher’s concept of transauthorial discourse by reintroducing
individual agency, that of the editor rather than the writer: showing how
different contributions within a single issue of a magazine resonate against each
other, he sees such resonances as the result of editorial manipulation. Parker
admits that readers do not necessarily approach the contents of any given issue of
 INTRODUCTION 9

a periodical in sequence but claims that “the historical record” offers no

“evidence of such readerly freedom” (15). In the absence of such evidence,
seemingly escapist essays by Charles Lamb (“Elia”) can be seen as politicized by
the circumstances of their original publication in the London. There is almost a
Romantic pathos in Parker’s retelling of the story of how John Scott of the
London—for him, the exemplary strong editor—met his untimely end in a duel
resulting from his attacks on Blackwood’s.40 Parker’s book thus combines the kind
of new historicist criticism inspired by McGann—resituating well-known
Romantic authors within the context of production and reception—with the
more recent impulse to demonstrate that periodical writing possesses an
intrinsic interest.41
Klancher’s argument that the periodicals helped shape their audiences carries
over into recent work on Romantic-era women’s magazines such as the Lady’s
Magazine (1770–1819), La Belle Assemblée (1806–32), and the British Lady’s
Magazine (1815–19). Edward Copeland writes that the Lady’s Magazine helped
to create “a narrative of shifting ideologies devoted to explaining just what it meant
to be female and middle-class in a market economy.”42 Sonia Hofkosh, in her
1998 essay, “Commodities Among Themselves,” sees such magazines as offering
their female readers a “transformative potential,” a space of exchange for
women within and yet beyond patriarchal commercial culture.43 Hofkosh
discusses women’s magazines again in her book Sexual Politics and the Romantic
Author (1998), bringing out their intertwining of domestic and economic issues.
In doing so, she sheds fresh light on the much-discussed Cockney School articles
in Blackwood’s, exploring connections between “Z”’s attacks on Leigh Hunt as a
“tea-sipping milliner girl” and contributions to women’s magazines of the period
on the fraught subject of the working woman. Hofkosh argues that the
Romantic so-called “deep self” itself depends on fantasies of female desire,
articulated both in periodical writing and elsewhere. Analyzing essays by Hunt
on female fashions and work in the Examiner and in his more literary periodical
the Indicator, Hofkosh suggests that Hunt can be seen as invested in an
autonomous Romantic individual self which excludes women. Other critics
working on periodical literature written by male authors have been slower to
address those authors’ role in constructing and contesting gender identities.
Following Hofkosh’s lead, three of the contributors to the present collection,
Andrea Bradley, Mark Schoenfield, and Lisa Niles, analyze figurations of gender
in the mainstream periodicals, namely, the Edinburgh, the Quarterly, and
Blackwood’s.
Hofkosh states that her study “participates in the ongoing effort to elaborate a
new romanticism being undertaken from a number of different perspectives:
feminist, historical, materialist.”44 Whether continuing to recontextualize
Romantic writers by way of the periodicals or treating periodicals as their
10 ROMANTIC PERIODICALS AND PRINT CULTURE

primary texts, the essays in this collection all collaborate upon that effort. But
what would it mean to see periodical writing as itself Romantic? For Hofkosh,
periodical writing, whether by or for men or women, is not part of a
countertradition but implicated in Romanticism as we know it. While some of
the criticism that I have discussed assumes that Romanticism and the periodicals
are at odds, a few earlier commentators had addressed what Parker terms
“continuities” between the periodicals and “what we have come to call
Romanticism” (182), mainly involving appreciation of Romantic innovation by
the reviewers.45 More recently, critics combining new historicist and formalist
approaches have begun to attend to the literariness of periodical discourse.
Christensen, for example, detects a Romantic element that he calls “dark
Romanticism” in the “wild sarcasm” of the Edinburgh Review, a sarcasm that
“marks the felt incapacity of the Review to comprehend its own social being and
force.”46 It may now be time to pursue a broader quest for the Romantic in the
Romantic-era periodical.
The first essay in the present collection gives us an example of how a new,
expanded Romanticism can be seen to engage in dialogue with what has
traditionally been thought of as Romanticism. Adriana Craciun’s examination of
Mary Robinson’s four-part article on the “Present State of the Manners,
Society, &c&c of the Metropolis of England” contributes to the vital ongoing
project of establishing the extent of women writers’ participation in turn-of-the-
century literary culture. Robinson’s hitherto almost entirely neglected defense
of London print culture appeared in consecutive installments in the Monthly
Magazine at the time when Wordsworth was composing his famous Preface to
the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1800). Craciun argues that Robinson’s
“Metropolis” article challenges various tenets of Romanticism as defined by
Wordsworth. Its vision of a burgeoning free press energized by the voices of
continental and female writers runs counter to Wordsworth’s anxiety about the
corrupting effects of popular culture. Like the radical writers discussed by
Gilmartin, Robinson sees the freedom of the press as liberating, not dangerous.
Robinson’s celebration of metropolitan culture in her Monthly Magazine piece
also contrasts markedly with Wordsworth’s negative depiction of urban life in
the Preface and elsewhere in his poetry. Robinson’s conception of art as public
rather than private is similarly un Wordsworthian (although like other
Romantic-era poets, she values thoughts that arise in solitude). Craciun’s
description of the eventful afterlife of Robinson’s “Metropolis” article in several
cultural guidebooks to London attests to its appeal to the kinds of readers that
Wordsworth’s Preface refuses to take into account.
Andrea Bradley’s and Mark Schoenfield’s essays examine male reviewers’
appraisals of women writers popular in their own time but only relatively
recently being reconsidered as part of the Romantic canon. Both essays
 INTRODUCTION 11

reconsider the disciplinary and supervisory role of the great quarterlies,

revealing their stratification of writers—and, by implication, readers—along
gender as well as class lines. Bradley sees the Edinburgh’s review of Amelia
Opie’s 1802 Poems, the only review of a woman poet in its inaugural issue, as
exemplifying this periodical’s gendered hierarchizing of literary genres. On the
one hand, Opie is chosen for review because her popularity unsettles the
Edinburgh’s sense of what should constitute “celebrity;” on the other hand, the
reviewer exploits her vulnerability to chastisement. Bradley offers a detailed
analysis of the rhetorical strategies through which an anonymous male Edinburgh
reviewer keeps a woman writer in her place. Taking both a synchronic and a
diachronic approach, she compares the first Opie review with a better-known
article in the same number, Jeffrey’s first attack on the Lake School of poetry in
his review of Southey’s Thalaba, as well as with a later Edinburgh review of
Opie. Bradley identifies an unexpected connection between the Edinburgh’s
aesthetic priorities and Wordsworth’s version of Romanticism in that the first
review of Opie values psychological depth; yet, as she notes, the Edinburgh may
uphold the deep self in order to monitor it all the more thoroughly. Bradley
follows Klancher in stressing the seamless corporate voice of the Edinburgh over
the individual voices of its contributors, but suggests at the end of her essay that
the hyper-confident tone of the Edinburgh masks its editor’s own sense of
insecurity about the periodical’s financial and ideological success.
While Bradley catches the Edinburgh in the act of defining its role as the
professional arbiter of print culture, Mark Schoenfield confirms the later
solidification of that role although, as he notes, the quarterlies’ hegemony
would in due course be challenged by the monthly magazines, as well as by
radical writers such as Cobbett. In examining responses in the Edinburgh and the
Quarterly to two novels by women, Frances Burney’s The Wanderer and Maria
Edgeworth’s Patronage (both published in 1814), Schoenfield analyzes particular
maneuvers by which both major reviewing periodicals exert a quasi-legalistic
power through their (gendered) aesthetic judgments. Situating the reviews of
these two novels historically with reference to changing legal and economic
definitions of marriage during the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth
century, Schoenfield argues that Burney’s and Edgeworth’s resistance to
patriarchal economic arrangements can be seen in scenes of female labor which
the reviewers attempt to divest of their political critique. His essay suggests
that, despite the Edinburgh’s reputation as more enlightened and skeptical and
the Quarterly’s reputation as more reactionary and regressive, the two
quarterlies, as Hazlitt put it in the Preface to his Political Essays (1819), “both
travel the same road and arrive at the same destination.”47
Bonnie Gunzenhauser shares her fellow-contributors’ assumption that
periodical writing repays careful rhetorical analysis, but in dealing with a very
12 ROMANTIC PERIODICALS AND PRINT CULTURE

different kind of periodical, she makes a contrasting argument about its purpose
and effects. She examines Cobbett’s Political Register in the period from late
1816 to early 1817 when Cobbett transformed this middle-class radical weekly
newspaper into the mass-circulation Two-Penny Trash. Rather than seeing this
periodical as engaged in cultural definition, Gunzenhauser emphasizes Cobbett’s
effort to send out readers to change the (political) world. According to her,
Cobbett is not just one more (loud) voice in a counter-public sphere; his
commitment to the political objective of overthrowing “Corruption” places his
publication outside commercial culture. In making this argument, she
distinguishes Cobbett’s reformulation of the novelistic discourse of sympathetic
identification from that of Wordsworth, claiming that the readers of
Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads are posited as mere consumers
while Cobbett’s readers are constituted as political actors. Nevertheless,
Gunzenhauser contends that Cobbett exploits the notion of sympathy rather
than rejecting it entirely; even his writing, then, aligns itself to some extent
with contemporary literary discourse. She goes on to suggest that despite his well-
known egotism and the fact that he was taken to personify radical politics,
Cobbett, anticipating later critics, takes his periodical itself rather than the
author to be an agent, one which blurs the boundaries between writer and
reader. Gunzenhauser concludes that the Two-Penny Trash succeeded in creating
a new political community. It would be easy to object that the efficacy of
reading remains elusive, and that the implied opposition between consumption
and action is idealistic. Yet even in inviting such objections, Gunzenhauser raises
questions that all critics working on the political aspects of the periodicals must
continue to confront.
The remaining essays in this collection concentrate on the genre that came to
dominate the periodical market in the late 1810s and 1820s: the monthly
magazine. Like Bradley and Schoenfield, Lisa Niles investigates the treatment of
gender in periodical discourse. Rather than reviews of women writers, the texts
she addresses are playful articles on feminized topics such as fashion and marriage,
purportedly addressed to a female audience. Niles uses the gender dynamics
within and around these articles, published between 1817 and 1819, to argue
that Blackwood’s Magazine serves primarily as the site of homosocial male
relationships mediated by women both figurative and real. This site will take its
most powerful imaginary shape in the series Noctes Ambrosianae (1822–35), set in
Ambrose’s tavern. The space of male bonding that is Blackwood’s is presided over
by the figure of the bachelor, who becomes, according to Niles—looking back
to the eighteenth-century coffeehouse periodical, the Spectator—“a trope for
periodical culture itself.” In this analysis, periodical culture in the innovative
form of Blackwood’s remains as male-dominated as the world of the Edinburgh and
 INTRODUCTION 13

the Quarterly, even when, or especially when, appealing to female readers and
reminding those readers that it includes the work of actual female writers.
The next two essays continue the task, begun by a number of earlier new
historicist critics, of re-entangling Romantic writers with the periodicals that
helped to establish their reputations. David Higgins explores an episode in the
development of William Wordsworth’s fame, while Peter Manning returns
Charles Lamb to the context of magazine publishing. Higgins discusses the
multiple reasons for Blackwood’s Magazine’s support of Wordsworth around
1820, one of which, he claims, was an attempt to distinguish the literary
criticism of Blackwood’s from that of the Edinburgh, as epitomized by Jeffrey’s
notorious hostility to Wordsworth. Higgins’ essay puts an 1819 tribute to
Wordsworth by John Wilson in the context of earlier and later attacks on
Wordsworth in Blackwood’s, which were also written by Wilson. This ambivalence
reflects the Blackwood’s ethos of inconsistency, but it is also shown to have a
personal dimension, expressing Wilson’s own mixed feelings towards
Wordsworth. Higgins is thus concerned with the interplay between the input of
an individual contributor and the collaborative discourse of the magazine.
Higgins gives us a Romantic Blackwood’s in that he stresses its promotion of the
Romantic conception of genius. Yet, writing from a materialist perspective, he
sees this cult of genius as in service of the self-conscious commercialism of the
magazine. His essay points to a dark side of Romantic biography: the adulation
of genius, like the culture of personality, involves the publicizing of private life.
Even a panegyrical account of a poet can therefore be read as an insult.
Following in the footsteps of Schoenfield (“Voices Together”) and Parker,
Peter Manning restores essays by Lamb to their original context in the London
Magazine, but unlike those previous critics, he suggests how Lamb’s personality
as a writer ultimately can be seen to transcend that context. Manning sets
Lamb’s “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” which appeared in the
London in 1822, against an anonymous article “On Magazine Writers” published
in the same issue. One of his quotations from the latter piece reads like a
comment on Klancher’s notion of transauthorial discourse:

The general run of contributors [appear] in the least danger of suffering

from any modifications in the character of magazines; inasmuch, as having
no fixed and certain colours of their own, they imbibe, like the
cameleon, the hues of their domiciles.48

The individual magazinist, that is to say, disappears into the periodical that is his
(or her) home, while writing for the magazines becomes just another form of
manufacturing. Manning contends that putting this article alongside Lamb’s
enables us “to see what appears most personal and spontaneous in Lamb as most
14 ROMANTIC PERIODICALS AND PRINT CULTURE

typical and predetermined, an exercise in the form most favored by the

conditions of publication.” Yet according to Manning, Lamb preserves a unique
self partly by invoking a world of books rather than magazines, and partly by
inviting readers to speculate as to the identity of his persona, Elia. Lamb inhabits
a space beyond “the accounts of materialist explanation” even if he needs Elia in
order to do so.
Our final essay, by Nanora Sweet, turns to the major competitor of
Blackwood’s and the London: the second series of the New Monthly Magazine. The
New Monthly has attracted less critical attention in the past than these other
magazines, perhaps because they have been identified more with well-known
Romantic writers. Given the prominence of Felicia Hemans in our ever-
expanding picture of Romantic-era literary production, Sweet’s essay could be
seen as offering valuable background information concerning the periodical with
which Hemans was most associated. But in addressing the huge text that is the New
Monthly of the 1820s, Sweet, like other contributors to this collection, moves
beyond any foregroundbackground distinction. The world that she conjures up
bears a striking resemblance to Mary Robinson’s vision of metropolitan culture
in the article discussed by Craciun—open to female and continental contributors
and with plenty of room for divergent political opinions. Sweet places the New
Monthly in the context of reform-era politics, stressing its accommodationism
rather than its ostensibly apolitical stance. Her essay brings out the tension
between what Klancher calls “an essentially authorless text” (51) and the way in
which the New Monthly took its identity from its editor, the Whig poet Thomas
Campbell. The self-described “calm spot” in the periodical market was further
ruffled, Sweet shows, by the differing agendas, political and otherwise, of the
New Monthly’s other two “coadjutors:” its publisher Henry Colburn and its sub-
editor Cyrus Redding. Beneath the surface of the commercially successful
anonymous text, individual motivations swirl and jostle. Sweet’s essay offers a
reminder of the fact that, in studying the Romantic-era periodical, there are
large numbers of people with whom we still need to become better acquainted.
Perhaps the most central Romantic assumption shared by the critics in this
collection, as well as by the texts they have written on, is that the printed word
has an effect on its audiences. These critics tend to discuss the impact of
periodicals on implied readers rather than actual ones, however, which is
understandable, since reactions by actual Romantic-era readers are not easy to
come by. The occasional mention of a periodical in a diary entry or letter seems
a slender basis on which to develop arguments about the extent to which
periodicals enact or evade cultural tensions.49 Nevertheless, even passing
references to periodical reading in works of fiction or poetry may be worth
taking into account. In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), for instance, some
of the main characters at one point “lounge away the time as they could with
 INTRODUCTION 15

sofas, and chit-chat, and Quarterly Reviews,” a statement that implies an

indiscriminate as well as idle perusal of the Edinburgh and the Quarterly.50
Further research into non-canonical literary texts will presumably increase our
understanding of Romantic-era periodicals—though I do not mean to imply
that, in a mere reversal of priorities, we should unearth more literature simply
in order to study the reception of the periodicals. Given the vast body of
material, attention to the historical and fictional readers of periodicals
represents only one potential avenue of future scholarly endeavor. Work on the
daily newspapers of the Romantic period should yield more insights into the
kinds of periodicals dealt with here, and vice versa. On a general level,
improved access to periodical texts both in facsimile and online will inevitably
stimulate more scholarship in this field.51 Whether taking periodicals as primary
or secondary objects of investigation, Romanticists will no doubt continue to
attempt to present the fullest possible historical record even when returning to
the Romantic possibility of transcendence.

NOTES
Editorial work on this special issue was supported by a summer grant from the
College of William and Mary.

1. William Hazlitt, “The Periodical Press,” Edinburgh Review 38 (1823), 349–78

(358). Further references in parentheses. For an analysis of this article, see
Charles Mahoney, “Periodical Indigestion: Hazlitt’s Unpalatable Politics,”
Romantic Praxis 1 (1997), 19 paras. Available online at: http://www.rc.umd.edu
(9 July 2002). Mahoney suggests that the line about pleasing serves to “model the
contemporary critic on the coquette” (para.6).
2. Of the monthly magazines, Hazlitt wrote, “if all their names were to be written
down, one Article or one Number would hardly contain them.” “Periodical
Press,” 369. Hazlitt dismissively mentioned another category of publication: “As
to the Weekly Literary Journals, Gazettes, &c. they are a truly insignificant race…
—insects in letters… We cannot condescend to enumerate them” (369).
3. Regrettably, the subject of daily newspapers in the Romantic era lies beyond the
scope of this collection. For a discussion of the daily newspaper as a commercial
phenomenon in the early nineteenth century, see Jonathan Mulrooney, “Reading
the Romantic-period Daily News,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 24/4 (2002), 351–
77.
4. In his 1823 essay, Hazlitt called the Examiner the “ablest” weekly periodical while
unfortunately, in his view, “Cobbett stands first in power and popularity”
(“Periodical Press,” 368).
5. Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1983).
16 ROMANTIC PERIODICALS AND PRINT CULTURE

6. The exemplary Romantic text in this regard is Percy Bysshe Shelley’s elegy on
John Keats, Adonais (1821), in which the wretched reviewer who had—according
to Shelley—killed Keats is condemned to a mere earthly existence while the dead
poet becomes a “portion of the Eternal” (1.340).
7. Several of the essays that follow address the periodicals’ various statements of
purpose and manifestos, so I will not linger over them here. These include the
Edinburgh Review’s “Advertisement” to the first number which promised to take
note only of deserving works (ER 1 [1802]); the London Magazine’s vow in its
Prospectus to “convey the very ‘image, form, and pressure'” of the “mighty heart”
of the metropolis (LM 1 [Jan. 1820], iv)—a jab at the alleged provincialism of the
Edinburgh and Blackwood’s; and Thomas Campbell’s Preface to the 1821 New
Monthly Magazine announcing the “purely literary character” of the new series
(NMM 1/1 [Jan. 1821], v).
8. See Margaret Beetham, “Open and Closed: The Periodical as a Publishing
Genre,” Victorian Periodicals Review 22 (Fall 1989), 96–100, on the
“characteristically self-referring” nature of the genre (97). Beetham also discusses
some of the methodological problems involved in studying periodicals.
9. Baron von Lauerwinkel [John Gibson Lockhart], “Remarks on the Periodical
Criticism of England—in a Letter to a Friend,” Blackwood’s Magazine 2 (March
1818), 670–79 (671).
10. “The Editor of The Quarterly Review,” Examiner 546 (14 June 1818), 378–9
(378).
11. For the same reason, Hazlitt claims, “the only authors who, as a class, are not
starving, are periodical essayists.” “Periodical Press,” 359. Hazlitt takes up so
much space paradoxically celebrating what he calls the “mediocrity of the age”
(356) that after characterizing first the major newspapers, then magazines, he
leaves himself no room to embark on “the ticklish chapter of Reviews” (378).
12. See James Mill, “Periodical Literature: 1. The Edinburgh Review, Vol. 1, 2, &c,”
Westminster Review 1 (Jan. 1824), 206–49; John Stuart Mill, “Periodical
Literature: The Edinburgh Review,” Westminster Review 1 (April 1824), 505–41;
and James Mill, “Periodical Literature: The Quarterly Review,” Westminster Review
2 (Oct. 1824), 463–503.
13. Mill, “Periodical Literature: The Quarterly Review,” 467.
14. John Wilson et al., “Preface,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 19 (1826), i-xxx
(xi); further reference in parentheses. I have mentioned here some of the most
often cited general discussions of the major periodicals; the periodicals’ more
specific attacks on each other are innumerable.
15. Samuel Smiles, A Publisher and His Friends, 2 Vols. (London: John Murray, 1891).
Smiles also briefly discusses John Murray’s connections with Blackwood’s.
16. Margaret Oliphant, Annals of a Publishing House: William Blackwood and His Sons, 2
Vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897).
17. Walter Graham, English Literary Periodicals ([1930] New York: Octagon Books,
1966). As the title of his book suggests, Graham is interested in particular
periodicals’ impact on literary history—and with none of a latter-day critic’s
 INTRODUCTION 17

skepticism about what the literary might be. Other studies of specific periodicals
include Edmund Blunden’s Leigh Hunt’s “Examiner” Examined, 1808–1825 (New
York and London: Harper, 1928), which focuses on the more literary aspects of
Hunt’s weekly, and Josephine Bauer, The London Magazine (Copenhagen:
Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1953).
18. John Clive, Scotch Reviewers: The Edinburgh Review, 1802–1815 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1957).
19. Donald Reiman notes that the “history” of the Quarterly Review “has yet to be
written, not because there is too little information but because there is too
much.” See Reiman (ed.), The Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British
Romantic Writers, 9 Vols. (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1972),
Part C, 2:751. Walter Graham’s Tory Criticism in the Quarterly Review 1809–1853
([1921] New York: AMS Press, 1970) discusses the political, social, and literary
leanings of the Quarterly, but this study is brief. For an account of the day-to-day
workings of both major quarterlies during the mid-Victorian era, however, see
Joanne Shattock, Politics and Reviewers: The Edinburgh and the Quarterly (Leicester:
Leicester University Press, 1989).
20. See W.A.Copinger, On the Authorship of the First Hundred Numbers of the Edinburgh
Review (Manchester: privately published at the Priory Press, 1895); Hill Shine and
Helen Chadwick Shine, The Quarterly Review Under Gifford: Identification of
Contributors 1809–1824 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
1949); and The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900; tables of contents
and identification of contributors, with bibliographies of their articles and stories, ed.
Walter Edwards Houghton, 5 Vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1966–89). The work of the Shines has also been supplemented by a website, The
Quarterly Review 1809–1824: Notes, Contents, and Identification of Contributors,
available online at: http://www.dreamwater.com/edu/earlyqr/ (16 July 2002).
Since the Wellesley begins its coverage of Blackwood’s in 1824, Alan Lang Strout’s
Bibliography of Articles in Blackwood’s Magazine, 1817–1825 (Lubbock, TX: Texas
Tech University Press, 1959) remains useful. Despite the date in its title, the
Wellesley offers full coverage of the early years of the Edinburgh.
21. See, for example, Newman Ivey White, The Unextinguished Hearth: Shelley and his
Contemporary Critics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1938). As Marilyn
Butler points out, “To assemble together the reviews of one poet (as in, say, the
Critical Heritage volume on Coleridge or Keats) is to disjoin each review from an
expressive and very pertinent original location.” Butler, “Culture’s Medium: The
Role of the Review,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Stuart
Curran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 120–47 (147).
22. Jerome McGann, “Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism,” Modern
Language Notes 94 (1979), 988–1032 (1002). For more recent work along these
lines see, for example, John Kandl, “Private Lyrics in the Public Sphere: Leigh
Hunt’s Examiner and the Construction of a Public ‘John Keats,’” Keats-Shelley
Journal 44 (1995), 84–101; Paul Magnuson, Reading Public Romanticism
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 167–210.
18 ROMANTIC PERIODICALS AND PRINT CULTURE

23. Theresa M. Kelley, “Poetics and the Politics of Reception: Keats’s ‘La Belle
Dame sans Merci,’” ELH 54 (1987), 333–62.
24. Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1988). Levinson builds on the insights of William Keach, “Cockney
Couplets: Keats and the Politics of Style,” Studies in Romanticism 25 (1986), 182–
96.
25. See, for example, Kim Wheatley, “The Blackwood’s Attacks on Leigh Hunt,”
Nineteenth-Century Literature 47 (June 1992), 1–31; Nicholas Roe, John Keats and
the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Emily Lorraine de
Montluzin, “Killing the Cockneys: Blackwood’s Weapons of Choice Against Hunt,
Hazlitt, and Keats,” Keats-Shelley Journal 47 (1998), 87–107; Jeffrey Cox, Poetry
and Politics in the Cockney School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
26. Karen Swann, “Literary Gentlemen and Lovely Ladies: The Debate on the
Character of Christabel ELH 52 (1985), 394–418.
27. Jon P.Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences 1790–1832 (Madison,
WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). Further references in parentheses.
28. See, for example, Kevin Gilmartin, “Popular Radicalism and the Public Sphere,”
Studies in Romanticism 33 (1994), 549–57. For the notion of the early nineteenth-
century English public sphere as divided into “multiple and contestatory publics,”
see also Jon Klancher’s “Introduction” to the forum, “Romanticism and its
Publics,” in Studies in Romanticism 33 (1994), 523–5 (523).
29. Russell Noyes, for example, in Wordsworth and Jeffrey in Controversy (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Publications, 1941) assumes that the Edinburgh spoke for
Jeffrey.
30. David Latané, “The Birth of the Author in the Victorian Archive,” Victorian
Periodicals Review 22/3 (Fall 1989), 114.
31. Butler, “Culture’s Medium,” 137. The quarterlies’ construction of their
audience, then, would seem to be more social than political: Shattock, in Politics
and Reviewers, suggests that people did not tend to read one of the two major
quarterlies to the exclusion of the other (13); see also Butler, “Culture’s
Medium,” 140.
32. Mark Schoenfield, “Regulating Standards: The Edinburgh Review and the
Circulations of Judgment,” The Wordsworth Circle 24/3 (1993), 148–51.
33. Mark Schoenfield, “Voices Together: Lamb, Hazlitt, and the London,” Studies in
Romanticism 29 (1990), 257–72.
34. Jerome Christensen, “The Detection of the Romantic Conspiracy in Britain,”
South Atlantic Quarterly 95 (1996), 603–27 (609–10). See also Jerome
Christensen, Lord Byron’s Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 28–31.
35. Margaret Russett, De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of
Transmission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 92–134. See also
Peter Murphy’s article on Blackwood’s, “Impersonation and Authorship in
Romantic Britain,” ELH 59 (1992), 625–49, discussed by David Higgins in the
present collection.
 INTRODUCTION 19

36. Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-
Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See also
Michael Scrivener, Poetry and Reform: Periodical Verse from the English Democratic
Press, 1792–1824 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1992).
37. Stephen C.Behrendt (ed.), Romanticism, Radicalism, and the Press (Detroit, MI:
Wayne State University Press, 1997), 19.
38. Steven Jones, “The Black Dwarf as Satiric Performance,” in Behrendt, Romanticism,
Radicalism, and the Press, 203–14 (213).
39. Mark Parker, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000). Further references in parentheses.
40. See, for example, [John Scott], “The Mohock Magazine,” London Magazine 2
(Nov. 1820), 666–85.
41. See also Massimiliano Demata and Duncan Wu (ed.), British Romanticism and the
Edinburgh Review (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), which did not appear in
time for me to be able to discuss it here.
42. Edward Copeland, Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–
1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). See also Margaret
Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? (London: Routledge, 1996).
43. Sonia Hofkosh, “Commodities Among Themselves: Reading/Desire in Early
Women’s Magazines,” Essays and Studies 51 (1998), 78–92 (86).
44. Sonia Hofkosh, Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), 9–10.
45. See, for example, J.H.Alexander, “Blackwood’s: Magazine as Romantic Form,” The
Wordsworth Circle 15/2 (1984), 57–68. This essay focuses on the literary criticism
of Blackwood’s.
46. Christensen, “Detection of the Romantic Conspiracy,” 625–6.
47. William Hazlitt, Works, ed. P.P.Howe, 21 Vols. (London: J.M.Dent and Sons,
1930–34), 11:127.
48. Peter G.Patmore, “On Magazine Writers,” London Magazine 6 (July 1822), 23.
49. The Romantic-era diarist Henry Crabb Robinson, for example, sometimes
mentions his reactions to periodicals. See Edith J.Morley (ed.), Henry Crabb
Robinson on Books and their Writers, 3 Vols. (London, J.M.Dent, 1938), 1:279.
Clive, in Scotch Reviewers, quotes an example of a diarist disagreeing with the
Edinburgh (12). Lyn Pykett, in “Reading the Periodical Press: Text and Context,”
Victorian Periodicals Review 22 (1989), 100–8, calls for more information about
actual readers of periodicals.
50. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. Claudia L.Johnson (New York: Norton, 1998),
74.
51. See, for example, The Examiner 1808–1822, 15 Vols. (London: Pickering &
Chatto, 1996–98), a facsimile edition of a text long available to many scholars
only on microfilm.
 Mary Robinson, the Monthly Magazine, and the
Free Press
ADRIANA CRACIUN

Does not the liberty of the press present a thousand avenues for
just and natural retaliation?
Mary Robinson, Walsingham; or, The Pupil of Nature (1797)

Mary Robinson’s essay on the “Present State of the Manners, Society, &c&c of
the Metropolis of England,”1 published in the Monthly Magazine shortly before
the author’s death in 1800, makes a significant statement on the volatile state of
British print culture at the turn of the nineteenth century.2 Robinson is now
widely recognized as a major figure of the Romantic period, when her volumes
of poetry, popular novels, and polemical pamphlets attracted both critical
esteem and controversy. Robinson’s large body of work is known to have
influenced and been influenced by contemporaries such as Robert Southey,
William Wordsworth, and especially Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who called
Robinson “a woman of undoubted genius.”3 Robinson’s little-known essay on the
“Present State of the Manners and Society of the Metropolis” (hereafter
“Metropolis”), as the first half of this essay will demonstrate, represents the
increasingly radical author’s contribution to the turn-of-the-century debate over
the direction of print culture and fate of the free press. Perhaps the best-known
contribution to this debate (at least to modern readers) is William
Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800). In the second half of this
essay I examine the possibility that Wordsworth may have been influenced by
Robinson’s authoritative overview of British public culture, and perhaps
composed his own countervision of art—nativist, introspective, and masculine
—in some respects as an alternative to Robinson’s celebration of London as a
cosmopolitan and (proto) feminist sphere of public art. Regardless of any
possible direct influence, the coeval origin of these two major manifestos attests
to the urgency with which Romantic writers addressed the crisis in print and
popular culture.
 MARY ROBINSON, THE MONTHLY MAGAZINE, AND THE FREE PRESS 21

Published in four monthly installments, Robinson’s “Metropolis” gives an

overview of the rise of London print culture and its politically liberating effects
through such institutions as libraries, publishing houses, newspapers,
periodicals, and theaters, despite politically repressive measures and lack of
aristocratic patronage. According to Robinson, whose early stage
career remained central to her understanding of art, the theaters in particular
(“open schools of public manners, which exhibit at all times the touchstone of
the public mind” [36]) are central to metropolitan culture.4 Moving through
different kinds of public spectacles, in the second installment Robinson catalogs
a series of fashionable vices and urban hazards: the late night suppers of “the
effeminized race of modern nobility” (139); the “barbarity” of cattle driven
through the city on their way to the slaughterhouses at Smithfield; the contrasts
between modern British medicine and the sorry state of underfunded charity
hospitals for the poor. Robinson’s panoramic account is unflinching in its
attention to the interconnectedness of civility and squalor, splendor and misery
(a characteristic theme of her poems and novels). The nobility in particular are
severely rebuked here and throughout the essay for their indifference to the
suffering of the poor (and of artists), yet Robinson also resolutely defends the
cultural fruits of leisure, refinement, and wealth.
Focusing on the phenomenon of what she terms the “Aristocratic Democrat,”
Robinson in the third installment launches her most vitriolic attack on the
leisured classes’ hypocritical relationship to public culture and its democratizing
potential. Robinson critiques the hypocrisy of those who claim to embrace the
democratic principles of cross-class contact available uniquely in the metropolis.
An Aristocratic Democrat “talks loudly of the rights of mankind; extols the
blessings of universal liberty,” and “ridicules the distinctions” of inherited wealth
and titles, yet only superficially (219). “If a man of the less exalted classes of
society meets the ARISTOCRATIC DEMOCRAT in the public streets,” writes
Robinson, “he is coldly saluted, or perhaps, wilfully unseen” (219), much like
the former prostitute Jemima was ignored by the enlightened philosopher in
Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman (1798). The Aristocratic Democrat is
thus a travesty of the (ostensibly disinterested) cosmopolitan citizen of the
public sphere, enjoying the praise he might gain from championing a
meritocracy, but reinforcing the hierarchies of rank for his own selfish ends. By
not allowing “his wife or daughters, or any of the female branches of his family”
to associate with women of inferior rank, he reveals himself as the most
retrograde of patriarchs as well, strictly policing women’s access to the benefits
of the public sphere (219). As we will see, women were central to Robinson’s
metropolitan manifesto.
The aristocracy remains a formidable barrier to this metropolitan,
cosmopolitan ideal that Robinson elaborates, a significant departure from earlier
22 ROMANTIC PERIODICALS AND PRINT CULTURE

eighteenth-century notions of cosmopolitanism. In the final installment of

Robinson’s essay, she returns to the central argument regarding the
democratizing, cross-class potential of metropolitan culture, despite the
hypocrisy and debauchery of its elite. Robinson attempts to carve out of the
overwhelming heterogeneity of metropolitan London a version of the public
sphere that more closely resembles her ideal, borrowing from continental models
as alternatives, and focusing on the free press as the chief means of reform:

There never were so many monthly and diurnal publications as at the

present period; and to the perpetual novelty which issues from the press
may in great measure, be attributed the expansion of mind, which daily
evinces itself among all classes of the people. The monthly miscellanies
are read by the middling orders of society, by the literati, and sometimes
by the loftiest of our nobility. The daily prints fall into the hands of all
classes: they display the temper of the times; the intricacies of political
manoeuvre; the opinions of the learned, the enlightened, and the
patriotic…. The press is the mirror where folly may see its own likeness,
and vice contemplate the magnitude of its deformity [305].

This self-referential gesture makes visible the cultural matrix in which Robinson’s
manifesto takes shape, and the actual audience she hopes to reach in the Monthly
Magazine—“the middling orders of society,…the literati, and sometimes…the
loftiest of our nobility.”
The contrast between Robinson’s celebration of public and print culture as
democratizing and Wordsworth’s anxiety regarding popular culture is
instructive. Wordsworth in his Preface famously engages in a literally
reactionary project to establish (he might say restore) imaginative literature—
Milton, Shakespeare, and by extension Wordsworth himself—as a bulwark
against the dehumanization caused by “the increasing accumulation of men in
cities.”5 As Jon Klancher argues:

This Romantic writer yearns to return to the space of “reception” (symbolic

exchange) from the historical ground of “consumption” (commodity
exchange). Yet to restore the reading of Milton and thus to save literature
itself, Wordsworth must ultimately produce the most paradoxical sense
of “literature”—a discourse which can be “received” only in the absence of
a real social audience.6

Robinson’s “Metropolis” essay offers an alternative model for Romantic

“literature,” one that reveals what Wordsworth in his Preface is manifestly
uncomfortable in addressing: the conditions of cultural production in which it is
 MARY ROBINSON, THE MONTHLY MAGAZINE, AND THE FREE PRESS 23

itself forged and received. The periodical press in particular emerges in

Robinson’s essay, as in her other prose works, as the most significant engine of
political and intellectual liberty in the contentious 1790s. The “real social
audience” that Wordsworth (paradoxically) fears is openly and successfully
sought out by Robinson in “Metropolis.” By publishing her manifesto in
the reformist and popular Monthly Magazine, as well as other essays in other
periodicals, Robinson helps build the Republic of Letters that she sets out to
document.

ROBINSON AND THE MONTHLY MAGAZINE

Robinson’s “Metropolis” essay crystallizes her increasing commitment to the
free press as the most potent engine of political reform, and its publication in
Richard Phillips’ Monthly invites us to consider more comprehensively her
political writings in the periodical press. The Monthly Magazine, with its
“situational” “liberal or radical principles,” was the natural venue for Robinson’s
increasing confidence as public intellectual and outspoken political thinker.7
Founded in 1796 by Richard Phillips and Joseph Johnson,8 the Monthly was
edited until 1806 by the prominent Dissenter Dr John Aikin, a central figure in
the Warrington Academy of radical Unitarians whose associates included Joseph
Priestley, William Taylor, Gilbert Wakefield and Anna Laetitia Barbauld.9 With
a circulation of 5,000 in 1797, the Monthly was easily one of the most popular
periodicals in the 1790s, outselling the Gentleman’s Magazine, British Critic and
Critical Review.10 The Monthly was known for its “cosmopolitan, ‘continental’
frame of mind,” covering foreign literature in detail as well as controversial
debates on the rights of women, non-human animals, and the insane.11 Mary
Hays wrote a number of feminist essays in the Monthly’s “Enquirer” series of
debates between readers, and Wordsworth and Coleridge famously intended to
write “The Ancient Mariner” for the Monthly in hopes of earning £5.12 The
“Monthly collected readers and writers as interchangeable participants,” writes
Jon Klancher, into “a new kind of ideologically cohesive discursive community:”
“not a ‘society of the text’ in the eighteenth-century sense, but a ‘polity’ of the
text” characterized by a “philosophical radicalism.”13 Unrepentantly Francophilic
and anti-war throughout the Romantic period, the Monthly Magazine was thus
wellsuited to Robinson’s increasingly radicalized politics and her cosmopolitan
feminism. In addition to “Metropolis,” Robinson also published in the Monthly
essays on French political figures (the Duc d’Orleans, Marie Antoinette)14 and
poems later incorporated in her unfinished political epic The Progress of Liberty.15
“Metropolis” is generically innovative, not surprisingly for a writer whose
final volume of poems, Lyrical Tales (1800), has been credited by Stuart Curran
as representing “the single most inventive use of metrics in English verse since
24 ROMANTIC PERIODICALS AND PRINT CULTURE

the Restoration.”16 Robinson builds on earlier eighteenth-century models of

urban writing, as well as more recent examples in the Monthly. In addition to
influential earlier accounts such as Defoe’s Tour Through the Whole Island of Great
Britain (1724–26), contemporary British travel books were clearly a source of
Robinson’s inspiration, such as her friend Samuel Pratt’s Gleanings of England,
which she admired and celebrated in verse.17 An earlier essay in the Monthly, a
“Sketch of the Present State of Society and Manners in Plymouth,” fits well with
the periodical’s consistent interest in what we would today describe as cultural
diversity, from foreign periodicals and literature to provincial manners.18 After
Robinson’s “Metropolis,” numerous other such urban accounts appeared in the
Monthly, none as long or as ambitious as hers. Robinson expanded the scope of
her metropolitan essay to that of a cultural manifesto, though others who followed
her example in the Monthly did not take this further step into cultural critique.
The “Account of the State of Society and Manners in Liverpool,” for example, is
written as a tourist guide to Liverpool, as were most of the other such accounts,
and lacks the critical edge of Robinson’s overview of metropolitan culture,
which is quite frank about London’s excesses and hazards.19
Robinson’s essay thus grew out of the contemporary taste for such panoramic
urban accounts, and grew into a new form of cultural critique, bringing
together her accumulated interests in art, politics, and print culture. Robinson
had published several earlier essay series that are in some respects proto-
versions of the “Metropolis” essay, though smaller in scope, such as her series of
Morning Post essays signed “Sylphid” and gathered posthumously in the Memoirs.
The Sylphid essays are not overtly political but more social in nature, giving an
overview of the aristocracy’s (particularly women’s) pretensions and hypocrisy.
They also nicely illustrate the unfolding trajectory of her Metropolis project, at
one point incorporating the titles of the two series that would follow: “Behold
me at the Close of the Eighteenth Century, in the metropolis of England.”20
Between the Sylphid essays early in 1800 and the Metropolis series later in the
year, Robinson also wrote an unsigned essay series titled the “Close of the
Eighteenth Century,” published from August to September 1800 in the Morning
Post and to my knowledge not previously attributed to her. Robinson builds on
her Sylphid critique of fashionable life, adding an appreciation of women writers
and artists which she had recently expounded in her feminist Letter to the Women
of England (1799).21
The final essay on the “Close of the Eighteenth Century” begins by
condemning the vanity of portrait painting among the aristocracy, and ends with
a celebration of authors and the Republic of Letters, a nice transition from the
concerns of the earlier Sylphid to the “Metropolis.” Robinson finds particularly
irksome the hypocrisy of the wealthy, who do not patronize the arts and yet
affect their attributes in their portraits:22
 MARY ROBINSON, THE MONTHLY MAGAZINE, AND THE FREE PRESS 25

Men, who have never read five volumes, beyond the literature of the
Race-Course, or a Court-Calendar, pourtrayed in pensive attitudes, with
books surrounded, as proudly as Macaenas: while women, who can
scarcely write an epistle, are displayed with pens in their hands, and with
a solemnity of countenance that marks the very extent of modern
philosophy: Dull, empty, vain, and imposing! There have been instances
of silly females sitting for their pictures crowned with laurels! Some have
attempted to personify Hebe, Minerva, Cleopatra, Sappho!23

“As Authors (at least good ones), deserve the highest honours,” she continues,
“so those who are mere pretenders cannot be too severely censured.” The essay
concludes with a tribute to British authors: “the Republic of Letters will fix a
splendid data to the superior and augmenting powers of the human mind,
evinced at the close of THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.” This would become
the central concern of the Monthly’s “Metropolis” essay, which began publication
just as the “Close of the Eighteenth Century” ended.
What began as acute social critique of fashionable foibles and hypocrisy in the
Morning Post’s Sylphid and the “Close of the Eighteenth Century” becomes a
radical critique of press and political repression, and the pol itical (not merely
social) corruption of the wealthy, in the Monthly’s “Metropolis.” Robinson
skillfully designs each series to fit the publication’s distinct content and
audience. For the two series in the Morning Post, Robinson concentrates on
fashionable society because that newspaper, like most, regularly covered the
comings and goings of high society, from royal levees, to official functions,
balls, and dances, including detailed descriptions of the fashions worn. The
Sylphid and “Close of the Eighteenth Century” essays are juxtaposed deliberately
and ironically with such accounts of high society in the Morning Post. In the
Monthly Magazine, Robinson expands her argument to one suitable for that
quintessentially “serious” and philosophical periodical,24 sharpening the political
argument beyond a more acceptable anti-luxury critique, to a reformist and
antiaristocratic one. This range of materials and audiences shows Robinson at her
entrepreneurial best, juggling numerous publishing ventures under different
guises (and pseudonyms),25 but it also illustrates how much more we need to
learn about the extent and underestimated political range of her periodical
publishing.
Unjust restrictions on the press and on writers were a growing concern for
Robinson and appear as a theme throughout her novels. The Natural Daughter
(1799) in particular is deeply involved in print culture debates, featuring as its
heroine a writer who encounters a full range of difficulties while publishing.
Here Robinson is able to put to use her considerable experience of diverse print
media, venues, and genres, particularly regarding the periodical press. Her
26 ROMANTIC PERIODICALS AND PRINT CULTURE

narrative illustrates a cross-section of different kinds of periodicals read by her

female characters, distinguishing their content, audience, and the corruptions
they are prey to, including: a county paper, whose owner is menaced with
prosecution; a society paper, where marriages of the wealthy are pompously
announced; and the “diurnal prints” available in circulating libraries, where
women keep up with events in Bath high society, as well as the developments in
the war with France. In The False Friend (1799), Robinson dramatizes how the
treason laws and climate of paranoia were abused for selfish and criminal ends
while regulating the circulation of writings. The heroine Gertrude is detained
before a Lord Justice, charged by a scheming landlady with possessing a packet
of treasonous papers (in reality, papers legitimizing her lineage): “the packet is a
most suspicious packet: it looks and it smells like treason,” says the landlady,
“and it is the duty of every loyal subject to be careful, and to examine all
writings that pass through their hands; and to give information where they find
such symptoms of guilt.”26 Robinson’s Natural Daughter, The False Friend and
especially Walsingham have begun to attract critical attention, though generally
this focuses on the feminist sexual politics of the novels, not on their
engagement with reform and print politics.27
Excerpts from Robinson’s novel Walsingham; or, The Pupil of Nature (1797)
published in the Morning Post illustrate the political acumen with which Robinson
addressed freedom of the press in different publishing contexts. Walsingham’s
complex plot centers on a disinherited orphan Walsingham Ainsworth, whose
cousin Sidney inherits the family estates and title instead of him because s/he
cross-dresses as a man. Robinson demystifies sexual and class privilege, and
despite the “happy” marriage ending (of the excessively sensitive Walsingham
and the newly feminized Sidney, who nevertheless possesses a masculine
education and manly virtues), Walsingham is one of Robinson’s most politically
controversial novels. Walsingham was rightly identified by the Anti-Jacobin as a
dangerously philosophical novel, and its inclusion (along with the Monthly
Magazine) in Gillray’s “The New Morality” cartoon placed this novel of cross-
dressing and social critique squarely in the camp of fellow radicals like Godwin
and Wollstonecraft. Robinson clearly invited such political readings of her
novels, excerpting controversial passages from Walsingham in the pro-reform
Morning Post in order to raise political issues as well as sell more copies.
Robinson had long used the Morning Post as a platform for publicizing her works
and popularizing her social critique (for example, in the London columns and
her sharp-edged “Tabitha Bramble” poems). In Walsingham, however, she spoke
out even more boldly, as for example in this excerpt from the novel published
in the Morning Post as “On the Diurnal Prints:”
 MARY ROBINSON, THE MONTHLY MAGAZINE, AND THE FREE PRESS 27

“What right have the canaille to know the transactions of the upper
world?”
“That right which is the scourge of overbearing licentiousness, which
raises the bulwark of freedom above the chaos of folly and deception, and
illumines the low hovel of honest industry, equally with the loftiest abode
of pride and dissipation. Heaven forbid that the time should ever
approach when the source of public information, which has so long been
the pride of Englishmen, shall be closed and annihilated!”28

Here Walsingham defends the freedom of the press in a debate with an aristocrat,
describing newspapers as “the bulwark of freedom” because “they are not so
bought over to the service of unjust condemnation,” that is, to bribery and
influence. “The daily papers are too cheap,” and “their price should be raised
above the pockets of the vulgar,” replies the aristocrat (3:253). Of course that is
precisely what happened with Pitt’s Stamp Tax, as the Morning Post reminded its
readers each day for years by listing both its original price (three pence) and its
doubled price due to “Mr Pitt’s Tax.”29
A second excerpt from Walsingham in the Morning Post similarly highlights the
free-press issue, with Robinson declaring that “the most powerful of the human
race, in these momentous times, are men of letters, not men of titles: those who
can guide the pen, and influence the country by the genuine language of truth and
philanthropy”30 Robinson’s inflated rhetoric here and elsewhere should not be
mistaken for abstraction, because her targets are specific to the post-treason
trials 1790s, and she is not afraid to name names. Lest there should be any
confusion about the nature of her new novel, Robinson frequently alludes to its
critique of “men of titles” in notes inserted in the Morning Post in 1797 and 1798,
and singles out Lord Kenyon in particular: Walsingham “should have been
dedicated to Lord Kenyon,” she writes in the Post.31 Lord Kenyon was the Chief
Justice and Master of the Rolls,32 and had presided over several key English
treason trials of publishers and writers, namely those of John Frost, Daniel
Eaton, Thomas Williams (for printing Paine), and the Morning Chronicle. In the
1794 Morning Chronicle case, Kenyon summed up by saying that “I think this
paper was published with a wicked, malicious intent to vilify the Government,
and to make the people discontented,” adding that “the minds of the people of
this country were much agitated by these political topics, of which the mass of
the people never can form a true judgment.”33 The main thrust of Walsingham’s
disputes with the aristocracy, and specifically in the excerpts Robinson includes
in the Morning Post, systematically attacks the persecution of the free press that
Kenyon enacted on publishers, writers, and “diurnal prints” like the Morning
Chronicle.
28 ROMANTIC PERIODICALS AND PRINT CULTURE

Like Walsingham, Robinson’s “Metropolis” also refers to the treason trials and
other repressive measures that the government used to police the Republic of
Letters:

Works of extensive thought and philosophical research have been

watched with more malevolence than justice. Political restrictions have
been enforced, to warp the public taste; and the gigantic wings of Reason
have, at times, been paralyzed by their augmenting severity [Aug. 1800,
36].

“Even our prisons have been illumined by the brilliancy of talents,” continues
Robinson (36). The consequences of such repression of the free press can be
deadly, as the repentant aristocratic hero of her French Revolution novel,
Hubert de Sevrac (1796), finally realizes: “Had the tongues of my countrymen
been at liberty, their swords had been unstained with blood!”34 Walsingham
echoes this conviction: “Does not the liberty of the press present a thousand
avenues for just and natural retaliation?” (3:252). What remains unsaid in
Walsingham’s rhetorical question—the possibility of violent retaliation—is
precisely what Robinson had addressed in a 1794 letter defending the founders
of the British Convention against charges of treason.
In January 1794, Robinson, writing under her well-known pseudonym
“Tabitha Bramble,” wrote a remarkable letter to the Lord Advocate of Scotland,
Robert Dundas, defending the convicted founders of the British Convention in
Edinburgh and attacking governmental repression: “On the one hand, we have
the Reformers contending for certain principles, & certain renovations which
every body allows to be founded in Justice. On the other, Government
persecuting in a rigorous manner such honest endeavours.”35 Robinson then
evokes the example of the Glorious Revolution, and concludes with a warning
citing a more recent precedent of governmental terror and the retaliation that it
inspires:

The sanguinary harsh measures employed against the Reformers, are with
some degree of Propriety, attributed to you. Mr Muirs, & now Mr
Skirvings & Margarots cruel treatment have added to your Lordships
unpopularity: a few more will render you perfectly odious. It will then
be reckoned honourable to deprive Society of such a Pest. Some Male, or
rather more likely some Female hand, will direct the Dagger that will do
such an important Service; and Britain shall not want a Female Patriot
emulous of the fame of M.Cordet [sic].36
 MARY ROBINSON, THE MONTHLY MAGAZINE, AND THE FREE PRESS 29

William Skirving and Maurice Margarot, leaders of “The British Convention of

the Delegates of the People, associated to obtain Universal Suffrage and Annual
Parliaments,” had been convicted of treason earlier that month and sentenced to
transportation, virtually a death sentence.37 Thomas Muir, founder of the
Friends of the People in Edinburgh, had been convicted (along with the Revd
Thomas Palmer) of sedition in the autumn of 1793 and also sentenced to
transportation. Such sanguinary measures, warns Robinson, have inspired
terrible acts of revenge in English and French history—among them the
assassination of radical journalist JeanPaul Marat by Charlotte Corday. Corday
assassinated Marat in July 1793 in retaliation for the Jacobins’ earlier coup
against the Girondins, one of the precipitating events leading to the Terror. A
chain of escalating violence is precisely what restricting freedom of the press, of
speech, and of association sets in motion according to Robinson, who went as
far as calling for a British Corday, a “Female Patriot,” to defend such liberties.38
Robinson’s engagement with the treason trials, particularly in matters of the
free press, is significant, and due to restrictions of space I have only discussed it
here in the context of her writings in the Monthly Magazine and very briefly in
the Morning Post and the later novels. Freedom of the press increasingly occupied
Robinson’s mind throughout the 1790s, and we see in her subtle use of
different media—both monthly and daily papers, and novels—that she was keen
to exploit different formats to highlight the urgency of the situation. Having
examined Robinson’s “Metropolis” in this larger context of political reform and
repression, and in relation to other forms of publication such as “diurnal prints”
and novels, I turn now to a more detailed account of that essay’s claims, and their
significance for her audience, from (perhaps) William Wordsworth to a large
number of posthumous readers.

ROBINSON’S “METROPOLIS” AND WORDSWORTH’S

PREFACE
Robinson’s poetic practice has been put forward by Stuart Curran, Jerome
McGann, Judith Pascoe and others as a significant alternative to the
Wordsworthian poetic model under which Romantic studies have so long
labored. Thus McGann, referring to Robinson’s Preface to Sappho and Phaon
(1796), in which she elevates feminine sensibility to the highest poetic calling,
persuasively argues: “Well might Wordsworth, in the face of such a consciously
feminized prophecy, step slightly back and try to reestablish poetry as the
discourse of a ‘man speaking to men.’”39 In her 1800 “Metropolis” essay, I
suggest, Robinson goes farther than in her 1796 poetic manifesto, and offers a
critical overview of British public culture as a whole. Resolutely urban,
democratic, and cosmopolitan, Robinson’s essay amounts to a manifesto of
30 ROMANTIC PERIODICALS AND PRINT CULTURE

metropolitan culture, one in which women are central agents of change.

Building on this scholarship that has returned Robinson to the center of critical
accounts of Romanticism and, more specifically, that sees her as representing a
powerful alternative to Wordsworth’s influential model of Romantic poetry, I
want to compare her “Metropolis” essay to Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical
Ballads. In exploring the connections between these texts, my intention is not to
reestablish Wordsworth and his Preface as the philosophical center of
“Romanticism” (as is often the case in traditional accounts) and Robinson as an
“alternative.” Rather, I am interested in seeing how Robinson’s manifesto, like
Wordsworth’s that followed, resonated with competing Romantic models of
art and its relations to the social.
As mentioned earlier, Robinson’s essay was published in the Monthly in four
parts—1 August, 1 September, 1 October, and 1 November 1800.
Wordsworth wrote his Preface in September and October and revised it as late
as December; the 1800 Lyrical Ballads did not actually appear until January
1801.40 During this same time, Robinson and Coleridge enjoyed an ongoing
poetic correspondence in the Morning Post (where Robinson served as poetry
editor). We know that Coleridge (and perhaps Wordsworth) also read
Robinson’s novels, and that after reading “Kubla Khan” in manuscript, Robinson
published the first known reference to that poem in her tribute “To the Poet
Coleridge.”41 Wordsworth’s relationship to Robinson was more conflicted, as
he had tried to change the title of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads once he
heard that Robinson’s Lyrical Tales would also be published by Longman’s in
London and printed by Cottle in Bristol.42 Nevertheless, Wordsworth’s “The
Solitude of Binnorie” (known later as “The Seven Sisters”), which acknowledges
the influence of Robinson’s “The Haunted Beach,” was published in the Morning
Post of 14 October.43 This was followed by another poem of Wordsworth’s,
“Alcaeus to Sappho,” submitted by Coleridge and published in the Morning Post
on 24 November 1800.44 These are just a few of the literary interchanges that
establish the great extent to which Wordsworth and Robinson (as well as
Southey and Coleridge) were mutually influenced at this time when, as Curran
has argued, Robinson was “by far the best known of these four poets.”45
I suggest that, in addition to these acknowledged poetic affinities and
influences, Robinson’s “Present State of the Manners and Society of the
Metropolis of England” may have been an inspiration for Wordsworth’s
Preface. Regardless of any possible influence, these manifestos merit reading
alongside each other as instances of two Romantic writers developing their
divergent models of art and its social functions and origins. Wordsworth
considered providing his own “account of the present state of the public taste in
this country,”46 and one can trace in his essay a series of counterarguments to
four central arguments in Robinson’s “Metropolis.” First, as we have seen,
 MARY ROBINSON, THE MONTHLY MAGAZINE, AND THE FREE PRESS 31

Robinson envisions turn-of-the-century London as the world’s leading Republic

of Letters, generating intellectual, aesthetic and political improvement across
class and gender lines:

The wide expansion of literature has been an augmenting fountain of

knowledge ever since priestcraft and bigotry became palsied by those
energies of mind which have, of late years, burst forth with an invincible…
dominion. Every man, nay, almost every woman, now reads, thinks,
projects, and accomplishes. The force of human reflection has taken off
the chain which once shackled the mined…. London is the busy mart of
literary traffick. Its public libraries, its multitudes of authors, its diurnal
publications, and its scenes of dramatic ordeal, all contribute to the
important task of enlarging and embellishing the world of letters [Aug.
1800, 35–6].

What for Robinson “embellish[es] the world of letters” and liberates people from
“priestcraft and bigotry”—public theater and popular print culture -for
Wordsworth are among the forces that “blunt the discriminating powers of the
mind,” reducing it “to a state of almost savage torpor.”47 For Robinson, the
instrument of all this social reform is the free press:

There never were so many monthly and diurnal publications as at the

present period; and to the perpetual novelty which issues from the press
may in great measure, be attributed the expansion of mind, which daily
evinces itself among all classes of the people….The daily prints fall into
the hands of all classes [305].

Compare this to Wordsworth’s well-known anxiety over the unpredictable

effects of print media on the public and their degenerating taste, exacerbated by
the “rapid communication of intelligence” in the mass media. In contrast,
Robinson’s commitment to the democratic effects of a free press is bracing, and
in line with radical reformers of the time who according to Kevin Gilmartin
“were convinced that the press necessarily promoted liberty and reform.”48
Robinson’s firmly forward-looking “Metropolis” essay combines older
eighteenth-century notions of commerce as contributing to refinement with
contemporary radical rhetoric praising the free press as a “bulwark which
REASON has raised…round the altar of immortal LIBERTY!” (305). Robinson
perhaps echoes the language (and certainly the sentiment) of the Society for
Constitutional Information, who in their publicized 1789 celebration of the
English Bill of Rights affirmed that “The Liberty of the Press” is “the bulwark of
liberty.”49
32 ROMANTIC PERIODICALS AND PRINT CULTURE

In addition to this vision of metropolitan print culture as fundamentally

democratizing, Robinson’s cultural ideal is cosmopolitan. She repeatedly
compares British cultural practices (often unfavorably) to European ones, and is
generous with praise for French and German influence on British literature,
theater, architecture, art, language, and fashion. For example, she notes that
“The great number of emigrants who have become our inmates since the French
revolution, have contributed to this wide circulation of knowledge,” adding that
“some of the best translations from the German have been the productions of
female pens” (221). Robinson then praises Anne Plumptre, whose popular
translations of Kotzebue were precisely what Wordsworth warned against a few
months later when he complained about an influx of “sickly and stupid German
tragedies.”50 Like Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, and other feminist
contemporaries, Robinson had long looked to continental Europe (where she
lived for some time) as a refuge from British provincialism and its suffocating
sexual mores and legal hypocrisy. In “Metropolis,” the bed-ridden and isolated
Robinson, suffering in the last stages of the illness that would end her life in a
few months, makes a powerful case for seeing London as a cosmopolitan and
European metropolis, full of all the predictable excesses of wealth and squalor,
but also a world capital, giving its citizens access to the widest possible cultural
influences.51
Central to this cosmopolitan vision, which Wordsworth would explicitly
reject in his nativist focus on English rural simplicity, is the role of women as
cultural producers:

The women of England have, by their literary labours, reached an

altitude of mental excellence, far above those of any other nation. The
works, which every year have been published by females, do credit to the
very highest walks of literature…. We have also sculptors, modellers,
paintresses, and female artists of every description [39].

Throughout her works, Robinson characterized this “altitude of mental

excellence” as an “Aristocracy of Genius,”52 distinct from an aristocracy of
wealth or privilege, as she clarified in The Natural Daughter. “the aristocracy of
wealth had little to do with the aristocracy of genius” (1:249). Robinson also
disassociates the Aristocracy of Genius from would-be “Aristocratic Democrats”
who hypocritically reinforce hierarchies of (economic and sexual) power, upon
whom she heaps scorn in “Metropolis.” Women are central to this “Aristocracy
of Genius,” and as in her earlier feminist tract, A Letter to the Women of England on
the Injustice of Mental Subordination (1799), Robinson is always careful to name
Wollstonecraft, by then notorious, as a fellow traveler in this metropolis.53 As
Betsy Bolton and Judith Pascoe have argued, for the increasingly feminist
 MARY ROBINSON, THE MONTHLY MAGAZINE, AND THE FREE PRESS 33

Robinson, London—far from the frightening place of dislocation we find in The

Prelude—offers women the professional opportunities that are their only hope
for economic and sexual independence.54
These three emphases throughout Robinson’s overview of London—urban
print culture, cosmopolitanism, and women’s central role therein—contribute
to her overall vision of art as fundamentally public (not private, as in
Wordsworth), both in its creative origins and its ideal sphere of influence.
Robinson’s vibrant metropolis, despite being riddled with predictable excesses
(largely the aristocracy’s), is simultaneously an unrivaled, if idealized, vision of
the public sphere at the turn of the nineteenth century—that is, precisely when
according to Habermas the public sphere was in decline. Habermas’ theory of a
monolithic (and masculine) bourgeois public sphere has met with numerous
recent challenges; Robinson’s “Metropolis,” focusing as it does not only on the
bourgeois literary public sphere, but also across gender and class lines, is further
evidence of women’s participation in this diverse sphere.55 Trained in the
theater and known as “Perdita” because of her role in The Winter’s Tale which had
attracted a young Prince of Wales in 1779, Robinson always retained a
fascination with theatricality in her writings and self-presentation, which, as
Pascoe has persuasively argued, allows us to imagine an alternative, un
Wordsworthian Romanticism “founded on theatrical modes of self-presentation
and the corollary that women played active and influential roles in public life.”56
Robinson’s essay overwhelms us with a tour through London as public spectacle,
from its promenades “thronged with pedestrians of all classes” (138), through its
cattle markets, gambling houses, charity hospitals, museums, and theaters. The
emphasis is always on the public and (ostensibly) universally accessible nature of
these spaces and art forms, from the public art in cathedrals and parks, to the
cheap daily papers that “fall into the hands of all classes” and both genders. This
will be Wordsworth’s final and perhaps most significant departure in the
Preface, in his consistent rejection of public, urban culture, and retreat into an
idealized and introspective rural solitude. Robinson anticipated Wordsworth’s
withdrawal into “emotion recollected in tranquility” when she acknowledged
that:

The mind which is absorbed in the contemplation of public events, has no

leisure to cherish the meliorating powers of sober, rational delight—It is
in the solitude of peaceful thought alone that man becomes something far
above the common hord [sic] of humanity [Aug. 1800, 37].

Nevertheless, Robinson consistently associates genius with the idealized public

sphere: “A public exhibition is one of the most fostering spheres for the
expansion of genius” (37). And “in arguing for the expansive power of the
34 ROMANTIC PERIODICALS AND PRINT CULTURE

exhibit and the theatrical event,” Pascoe reminds us, “Robinson provides a
vindication of the exhibition of female talents.”57

CONCLUSION: THE AFTERLIFE OF ROBINSON’S

“METROPOLIS”
The “Metropolis” essay was one of the last writings published by Robinson in
her lifetime, and its curious afterlife in Phillips’ publishing house attests to its
significance as a key Romantic representation of London print culture. Phillips,
who had served three years in jail for printing seditious material and was known
for publishing such radicals as Paine, Thomas Holcroft, Mary Hays, and Joel
Barlow, also published the posthumous editions of Robinson’s Poetical Works
(1806) and Memoirs (1801), and her daughter’s tribute volume, The Wild Wreath
(1804).58 In 1802 he began a new and profitable venture, a cultural guidebook
to London called The Picture of London. Each year saw new editions, and the series
was taken over by Longman’s in 1815 and continued until the 1820s; later there
would emerge competing editions such as Leigh’s New Picture of London (1818)
and Mogg’s New Picture of London (1838), each following the model that Phillips
had set out.59
Phillips’ Picture of London contains the whole of Robinson’s “Metropolis” essay,
uncited and unacknowledged, and it seems possible that Robinson had
contemplated writing such a comprehensive overview of London herself.
Phillips’ Public Characters of 1800–1801 states that “Mrs Robinson…has nearly
completed her own memoirs, in the form of ‘Anecdotes of distinguished
Personages, and Observations on Society and Manners, during her Travels on
the Continent and England.’”60 Robinson died before completing this ambitious
project (her memoirs were probably finished by her daughter). Perhaps had
Robinson published them in her lifetime, she would have given the memoirs this
title and larger scope, one echoed in her essay on the “Present State of the
Manners, Society, &c&c of the Metropolis of England.” Robinson’s
“Metropolis” is included, complete, in the Picture of London for 1802 and for
1803, and by the 1806 edition, Phillips excerpts the essay chiefly as a section on
periodicals and newspapers. By the 1815 edition only one paragraph remains of
Robinson’s essay (again on the periodical press), and in the 1818 competing
Leigh’s New Picture of London this paragraph is still discernible, though
paraphrased, in a section on the “General State of Literature and the Arts in the
Metropolis.”
Phillips clearly saw the marketability of such a project, and in 1804 published
a more lavish and expensive version of his guide, Modern London; Being the History
of the Present State of the British Metropolis.61 This guide is even more dependent on
Robinson’s (again uncited) “Metropolis,” as its title suggests, with Robinson’s
Random documents with unrelated
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Road
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
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eBook.

Title: The Road

Author: Hilaire Belloc

Release date: May 10, 2021 [eBook #65304]

Language: English

Credits: Tim Lindell, Craig Kirkwood, and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book
was produced from images made available by the
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROAD ***

THE ROAD
 Profit, Conveniency, and Pleasure,
to the whole Nation.
Being a short Rational Discourse, lately
presented to His Majesty,
Concerning the

High-ways of ENGLAND:
Their Badness, the Causes thereof, the Reasons
of those Causes, the impossibility of ever having
them Well-mended according to
the Old way of mending.
But may most certainly be done, and for ever so
maintained (according to This New way)
substantially, and with very much Ease.
And so,
That in the very depth of Winter there shall not
be much Dirt, no Deep-Cart-rutts, or High-ridges; no
Holes, or Uneven Places; nor so much as a loose stone
(the very Worst of Evils both to Man and Horse) in
any of the Horse-Tracts.
Nor shall any Person have cause to be once put out of
his way in any hundred of miles Riding.

To mend High-ways, loe Here the way is shewn,

No better way than This, shall e’re be known:
A Firm and Certain way, of no great Cost,
In all wayes else their Labour’s wholly lost.
The Old way ne’re could do’t, ’twas meer Deceit,
As may be prov’d, it was a very Cheat.
 Printed for a Publick good in the Year 1675.

An Old Title Page showing the antiquity of the Road Problem

 THE ROAD

By
HILAIRE BELLOC

Printed & Published for

THE BRITISH REINFORCED
CONCRETE ENGINEERING C o . L t d .
By charles w. hobson, St. James’s Sq., manchester

1923
 THE CONTENTS

§ I THE ROAD IN GENERAL

Page

CHAPTER I The Origin of Roads

How Did the Road Come into Existence: The Experimental
or the Scientific Method: The Haphazard Road: The Case
for Design in Road Construction 3
CHAPTER II The Crossing of Marsh and Water
Physical Factors Modifying the Formula of the Road:
Marsh as the Chief Obstacle to Travel: The Political
Results of Marshes: The Crossing of Water Courses: The
Origin of the Bridge: The Effect of Bridges upon Roads:
The Creation of a Nodal Point: The Function of the Nodal
Point in History 13
CHAPTER III Passability
The Choice of Soils: Following the Gravel or the Chalk:
Conditions in the South and East: The Obstacle of
Gradient: The Early Vogue of Steep Gradients: “The Other
Side of the Hill”: The Modern Importance of Gradient:
Passes or Gaps in Hill Country 33
CHAPTER IV The Obstacle of Vegetation
The Special Expenditure due to Forest: Roads which Skirt
Woodlands: Roads which have been Deflected by Forest:
Proximity of Material as a Final Main Cause Modifying the
Trajectory of a Road: Cost of Transporting Material and its
Effects in Ancient and Modern Times 47
CHAPTER V Political Influences
The Factor of Cost Resulting in the “Strangling of 56
Communication”: Congestion which leads to decay: A
 Great Modern Problem: The Compulsory Acquisition of
Land: Old Roads Serving New Objects
CHAPTER VI The Reaction of the Road
The Physical Effects of Roads: The Way in Which the
Road Compels Communication to follow it: The Formation
of Urban Centres and the Urban Habit: The Spread of
Ideas by Means of Roads: History Deflected by the
Deflection of the Road: The Example of Shrewsbury and
Chester: Towns which are Maintained by Roads: The Road
in Military History: Results of the Decay of Roads: The
Road as a Boundary 63

§ II THE ENGLISH ROAD

CHAPTER VII The Road in History
Through the Dim Ages: The Characteristics of the English
Road: Absence of Plan: A Local instead of a National
System Leading to the Present Crisis 81
CHAPTER VIII The “Blindness” of English Roads
The Two Causes Governing the Development of English
Roads—Waterways and Domestic Peace: The Relation of
the English Road to Military Strategy 92
CHAPTER IX Five Stages
The “Potential” in Political Geography Examples: The
Primitive Trackways: The Roman Road System: The
Earlier Mediaeval Period: The Later Mediaeval Period: The
Turnpike Era 107
CHAPTER X The Trackways
The Three Divisions of the British Pre-Roman Road
System—the System of which Salisbury Plain was the
“Hub”: The System Connected with London: Cross-
Country Communications—The Three Factors which Have
Determined Travel in Britain 116
CHAPTER XI The Making of the Roman Road
 The Great Initiative: The Mark of the Roman Military
Engineer: The Theory and Practice of the Straight Line:
Modifications of the Straight Line: How it was Carried Out:
The Method of Odds and Evens 133
CHAPTER XII The Dark Ages
The Decline of the Roman Road: The Period at its
Occurrence: Gaps: Roman Roads which Fell into Disuse:
The Relationship of the Modern to the Roman System:
Watling Street: Stane Street: The Short Cut Between
Penkridge and Chester: Peddars Way: The Coming of the
New Civilization in the Twelfth Century 147
CHAPTER XIII Wheeled Traffic and the Modern Road
The Transition from the Horse to the Vehicle: The
Distinctive Mark of the Later Seventeenth Century: The
Turnpike System: The Underlying Idea of the Turnpike: Its
Decline and the First Emergence of the General National
System in 1810: Thomas Telford and His Work: The
Movement Connected with the Name of Macadam: The
Coming of the Locomotive and its Results on Canals and
Roads 179
CHAPTER XIV The Future
A New Vehicle Compelling us to Make New Roads: Arterial
Roads for the New Traffic: The Five Necessities of these
Roads: Ways and Means: A National Fund: Taxation
according to Fuel Used: The Question of the Land
Contiguous to the New Roads 194
 THE ILLUSTRATIONS

Page

FRONTISPIECE: An old Title Page showing the antiquity of

the Road Problem 4
ICKNIELD STREET 27
TYPICAL ENGLISH LANE 87
THE EARLIEST ROAD 111
WELSH SECTION, HOLYHEAD ROAD 123
DERELICT ROAD, SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS 151
ERMINE STREET NEAR ROYSTON 171
TOLL HOUSE ON THE BATH ROAD 181
The text is also elucidated by fifteen maps and diagrams
 AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION
We are arrived at a chief turning-point in the history of the English
highway. New instruments of locomotion, a greater volume of traffic,
a greater weight in loads, and vastly increased rapidity in road travel
have between them brought us to an issue: either some very
considerable and immediate change in the character of the Road, or
a serious and increasing handicap in our rivalry with other nations
through the strain and expense of an out-worn system.
The moment therefore calls for some examination of the Road, its
theory and history. That need has prompted me to write this essay;
but I must say at the outset that I approach my task with no expert
qualification. My only equipment for the general sketch I intend is
historical reading and the experience acquired in the writing of
certain monographs upon the topography of the Road in the past. I
can do no more than suggest lines of thought which, if they lead to
practice, need a detailed science I do not possess.
The Road is one of the great fundamental institutions of mankind.
We forget this because we take it for granted. It seems to be so
necessary and natural a part of all human life that we forget that it
ever had an origin or development, or that it is as much the creation
of man as the city and the laws. Not only is the Road one of the
great human institutions because it is fundamental to social
existence, but also because its varied effect appears in every
department of the State. It is the Road which determines the sites of
many cities and the growth and nourishment of all. It is the Road
which controls the development of strategics and fixes the sites of
battles. It is the Road that gives its frame-work to all economic
development. It is the Road which is the channel of all trade and,
what is more important, of all ideas. In its most humble function it is
a necessary guide without which progress from place to place would
be a ceaseless experiment; it is a sustenance without which
organized society would be impossible; thus, and with those other
characters I have mentioned, the Road moves and controls all
history.
A road system, once established, develops at its points of
concentration the nerve centres of the society it serves; and we
remark that the material rise and decline of a state are better
measured by the condition of its communications—that is, of its
roads—than by any other criterion.
The construction, the trace, and the whole character of the Road
change with new social needs and habits, with the facilities of
natural science, their rise and decline. But this perpetual change,
which affects the Road as it does architecture and every other work
of man, is specially marked by certain critical phases, one of which,
as I said at the opening of this, we have now entered. There are
moments in the history of the Road in any society where the whole
use of it, the construction of it, and its character have to be
transformed. One such moment, for instance, was when the wheeled
vehicle first appeared: another when there first appeared large
organized armies. It occurred whenever some new method of
progression succeeded the old. It occurred at similar critical turning-
points in the history of the Road not only when any of these things
arose, but also when they declined or disappeared. The appearance
of great cities, their sudden expansion or their decay, or the new
needs of a new type of commerce—and its disappearance—bring a
whole road system to one of these revolutionary points. We have
had (as I shall develop in more detail) five great moments of this
kind in the history of the English road system: the moment when the
British trackway was superseded by the Roman military road; the
moment when the latter declined in the Dark Ages; the moment
when the mediaeval system of local roads grew up on the basis of
the old Roman trunk roads and around them; the moment when this
in its turn declined in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries;
and the re-casting of the road system by the turnpikes of the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To-day the sixth great
change is upon us.
It is incumbent upon us then to-day to get ourselves clear upon the
theory and the history of the Road, and I propose in this essay to
take them in two sections: first, the Road in general; next, that
special institution the English Road.
 A PREFACE

The British Reinforced Concrete Engineering Co. Ltd. recently

became acquainted with the fact that Mr. Hilaire Belloc was engaged
in the production of an essay on the history of British Roads. In
numerous writings Mr. Belloc has treated various aspects of Road
history, and his learning on the subject and his method of
communicating it are in high repute among wide circles of readers.
He is, in fact, an outstanding literary authority on the topic. It
therefore seemed to the Company that if they could acquire the
copyright of the work, in which Mr. Belloc was treating the whole
subject not indirectly, but directly and systematically, and if they
could issue this work to people who are professionally engaged in
the construction of roads, a very considerable service would be done
to the cause of road development in the country. The future always
becomes a little clearer if we thoroughly understand the past, and
the Company feel that everybody who is giving much of his mind
and life to road problems will be glad to have in his possession a
book which brings out the historical and social, not to say the
romantic, interest which lies beneath the surface of the English
highway. Mr. Belloc was accordingly approached on the subject and
agreed to sell the publishing rights of his work to the British
Reinforced Concrete Engineering Co. Ltd., who now have great
pleasure in issuing it to the surveying and civil engineering
profession, believing that it will at once assist and beguile the work
of those to whose hands the future of the English Roads, and with it
much of the economic and social prosperity of the country, is largely
entrusted.
 THE ROAD

§I
THE ROAD IN GENERAL
 CHAPTER I
THE ORIGIN OF ROADS
How Did the Road Come Into Existence: The
Experimental or the Scientific Method: The Haphazard
Road: The Case for Design in Road Construction.

i
In order to understand any matter, especially if we have to
understand it for a practical end, we must begin by the theory of the
thing: we must begin by thinking out why and how it has come into
existence, what its function is, and how best it can fulfil that
function. Next we must note its effect, once it is formed, and the
results of the fulfilment of its function.
What then, to begin with, is the origin of the Road? Why did this
human institution come into existence, and how does it tend to
develop? How may it best be designed to fulfil its function?
When we have decided that we can go on to the next point, which
is: how does the Road, once formed, react upon its environment;
what physical and (much more important) political results flow from
its existence?
The answer to the first question, “How did that human institution,
the Road, come into existence, and why?” is simple, and will be
given in much the same terms by anyone to whom it is addressed.
The Road is an instrument to facilitate the movement of man
between two points upon the earth’s surface.
If the surface of the earth were uniform in quality and in gradient—
that is, if it were of the same stuff everywhere, of the same degree
of moisture everywhere, and everywhere level—the Road between
any two points would clearly be a straight line (to be accurate, the
arc of a great circle) joining those two points. For when we say that
the Road exists “in order to facilitate” travel over the surface of the
earth from one point to another the word “facilitate” includes, of
course, rapidity in progression, and the straight line is the shortest
line between any two points.
But the surface of the earth is highly diversified in quality as in
gradient. Therefore the trajectory or course of the Road is not in
practice, and should not be in theory, a straight line from point to
point. That straight line has to be modified if we are to give to the
Road an ultimate form such that it shall best serve its end; and
when we come to look into the problem we shall see that it is one of
very great complexity indeed. That is where the study of the theory
even in its most elementary form becomes of such value to the
execution in practice. We discover by studying the theory of the
Road how many and how varied are the elements of the formula we
have to establish. We become prepared in that study for the
discovery, in each new particular problem, of any number of novel
modifications not present in problems previously attacked.
So true is this that the whole history of progress in road-making is a
history of discovering methods for dealing with obstacles either
novel in character or only appreciated after lengthy use. Let us begin
at the beginning, with the very elements of the affair.
The first element in the theory of the Road may be put thus: To find
a formula of minimum expense in energy for communication
between two given geographical points under given conditions of
travel and carriage.
The diversity of geographical circumstance moulds the formula into
its final shape through balanced modifications of the direct line.
The most obvious modifications to a direct trajectory arise from the
two primary circumstances of surface and gradient. It is easier to go
over one kind of soil than another; easier to go over one kind of
surface in summer and another in winter; easier to go over one kind
of surface in wet, and another in dry weather; easier to go over one
kind of surface with a heavy load and another with a light load; over
one with sumpter animals, over another on wheels, and so on.
Again, it is for all kinds of travel easier to go upon the flat than
uphill, and this element of gradient is much more complicated than
at first it would appear. Thus travel of one kind—travel on foot, for
instance—can take a sharp gradient for the sake of a short trajectory
more easily than can traffic with burdens; and traffic with burdens
carried by animals can take a sharper gradient with advantage than
can wheeled traffic; and wheeled traffic differs according to the
character of the vehicle in this respect.
Again, a road of diverse use must strike a compromise in its formula
between the various needs subserved. If the great bulk of its use is
to provide for rapid military advance by marches, you must sacrifice
to shortness some of the easier gradients which would be demanded
for traffic mainly civilian, yet if of three main users even the least
important is incapable of more than a given gradient, your formula
can never exceed that gradient, and so forth. So we have even in
this simplest and most primary of all analyses of the Road
considerable elements of complexity appearing.
As the study progresses an indefinite series of further complexities
arises, and one soon reaches that crux in the theory of the Road
which has led to so much discussion and which some still call
unsolved: whether the formula of the Road is best left to the
unconscious or half-conscious action of experiment, which in time
should lead to an exact minimum of expense in energy, or whether it
is best to arrive at it by a fully conscious, exact, and (as we say to-
day) “scientific” examination of all the conditions and a deliberate
and immediate conclusion upon them.
Should the road grow or should it be planned? The discussion is not
idle. The clash of opinion upon it is at the root of the contrast
between national systems, and a right answer will make all the
difference between success and failure in our approach to a new
road system such as is now upon us.
 ii
I maintain that of the two theories the second is just: that a gradual
experimental growth in its roads, a method coincident with local
caprice, burdens with imperfect communication the society adopting
it; that conscious design is essential to efficiency. And this I propose
to illustrate by a single example. Take two points A and B, such that
a line joining them must lead across a marsh, a river, and a range of
hills. Let some primitive wanderer make his way from A to B,
knowing, when he is at A, the direction of B by, let us say, a distant
peak overtopping the range between. That primitive wanderer would
first of all skirt about the marsh and, finding its narrowest place at C,
would set to work and make his causeway there. Having crossed it,
he would come to the river. He must either swim or ford it.
Supposing him to prefer, through the necessity of a pack or what
not, to ford it, he casts about for a ford. He finds one at D, and
perhaps he also, if he takes time to look about him, finds another
deeper one at E and another at F, but as his causeway is near D he
takes that ford.
 Sketch I.
Then he has to make for the hills. We will suppose that the peak
directing him from beyond B is still visible. He takes his new
direction from it and looks towards the base of the hills at G. There,
in the direct line to the peak, the contours are so steep that the
trouble of getting up would more than counterbalance the shortness
of the cut. He casts about for a better chance, and at last finds a
gradient just worth his while at H. He climbs up that; but though the
gradient is easy on the A side at H on the far side it is very difficult,
so he turns along the ridge to K, where he finds an easier down
gradient: a spur leads him on by its gentle slope, and from the
bottom of the spur he makes straight for B, which is now right in
front of him and plain sailing.
Now, look at that track as established by our primitive wanderer and
see how lengthy and inconvenient it is, how ill fulfilling the object of
the traveller compared with what would have been established by
even a moderately intelligent and cursory survey of the ground as a
whole and the making of a plan. To begin with, it would have paid
our traveller to take a little more trouble in crossing the rather wider
gap in the marsh at L and the rather deeper ford at F, because he
would have gained very much in time and space with comparatively
slight extra effort had he surveyed the whole ground and thought
things out. He was only led on to the ford at D because it was
suggested by the crossing of the marsh at C. The first opportunity
made the second. But to continue the plan: F is nearly opposite the
easier up gradients of the hills, but, having surveyed that bad steep
on the far side, he slightly modifies his road, crossing the ridge at M
behind a summit which hid this way from the first traveller. Then he
goes down the practicable, though steep, slope at N, and so reaches
B. The first road produced haphazard by successive chances gives
the lengthy and roundabout trajectory A—C, D, H, K—B. The second,
with very little extra labour, gives him the far shorter and better
trajectory A—L, F, M, N—B.
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