The Edinburgh Review (1802–1929)

established is used for dates, names, editions and quotations that rest on the journal itself, contemporary letters, or several independent modern accounts, including Andrew Hook's study and Ina Ferris's history of the Review's debut. shared marks points where sources disagree on details, chiefly circulation figures and how many numbers Smith edited, and where the question is one of interpretation, such as whether the Review was fair to America. traditional marks stories repeated without good evidence.

The weak points are these. Circulation figures come from the Review's founders, its publisher and later memoirs; there are no audited numbers, and readership claims such as Jeffrey's 50,000 are guesses by an interested party. The American material comes mainly from Hook (1975), who drew on letters, travellers' accounts and American magazines. His judgement that the Review treated America fairly follows a 1935 thesis and is argued, not settled.

The first Edinburgh Review, 1755–56

established The name was not new. In 1755 members of the Select Society, the Edinburgh club of Enlightenment improvers, launched an Edinburgh Review to show "the progressive state of learning in this country". It managed two numbers, the second in March 1756, which carried Adam Smith's review of Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality. It folded under attack from the Popular party in the Church of Scotland.

shared Hook uses the contrast between the two reviews to make an argument. The 1755 journal, in his reading, was anxious to prove that Scots could match English standards; the 1802 journal assumed equality and spoke with confidence. That change of tone is his interpretation of Scottish culture's coming of age, but it is well supported by what the new Review said about Scotland (see "A Scottish voice" below).

Buccleuch Place, 1802

established The idea was Sydney Smith's. Smith was an English clergyman in Edinburgh as a tutor, and the only non-Scot of the four founders. The plan was worked out at Jeffrey's flat in Buccleuch Place with Francis Horner and Henry Brougham. All four were young: in October 1802 Jeffrey was twenty-eight, Smith thirty-one, and Horner and Brougham twenty-four. They belonged to Edinburgh's student debating clubs, the Speculative Society and the Academy of Physics.

shared Sources differ on the editing. Ina Ferris says Smith edited the first three numbers; other accounts say he edited only the first. All agree that Jeffrey then became the regular, paid editor from 1803. Hook's short statement that Jeffrey became permanent editor after the first number is consistent with the second view.

established The first number appeared on 10 October 1802 in blue and buff covers. Hook notes that these were the colours of the Foxite Whigs and of George Washington's uniform. It ran to 252 pages, cost five shillings and carried 29 articles; the old London reviews carried 43 and 60 notices in their issues that month. The first article was Jeffrey's review of Mounier, the second Smith's review of a sermon by Samuel Parr. The motto, from Publilius Syrus, warned that the judge is condemned when the guilty is acquitted.

established Constable's terms were new. He paid ten guineas a sheet, double the usual rate, and the founders insisted that every contributor take payment, so that reviewing became a profession rather than a gentleman's favour. Under Jeffrey the minimum rose to sixteen guineas. The first printing of 750 copies sold out, and Constable reprinted.

established Contemporaries described the effect in electric terms. Henry Cockburn called it "electrical". Brougham wrote that "The success was far beyond any of our expectations", and that Jeffrey was "utterly dumbfounded" (as quoted by Hook). Eliza Fletcher, the Edinburgh hostess, remembered the same "electrical effects" on the public mind.

What made it different

established The Review chose few books and wrote about them at length, often as a starting point for an essay of its own. It was unsigned, confident and frequently severe. It covered politics, political economy, science, travel, theology and literature. Horner wrote on economic questions in the tradition of Adam Smith; Brougham wrote on almost everything for about thirty-five years. Later contributors included Thomas Babington Macaulay, William Hazlitt, Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill.

established The literary historian Andrew Hook, in Scotland and America (1975), puts the point strongly: "No eighteenth century journal ever rivalled the prestige and authority so quickly accorded to the Edinburgh Review." An American magazine reached the same verdict in 1820. The Port Folio said the Review formed an epoch in literary history, since most of the older journals had been "remoulded according to the plan of the Edinburgh Review" (as quoted by Hook). The Port Folio dated the Review's start to 1803, a small error.

Circulation

shared The figures vary by source. Ferris gives a print run of 7,000 within five years and 13,000 by 1814. Lewis Gates, writing in 1899, gives 9,000 within six years and "more than 12,000" by 1813. Wikipedia's article on Jeffrey gives about 12,000, and a 2020s Walter Scott Club lecture gives about 14,000. In 1809 Jeffrey claimed the Review was read by 50,000 "thinking people" within a month of printing. John Clive later estimated readership at three times sales. For comparison, Gates notes that The Times sold about 8,000 copies a day in 1816. Whatever the exact number, a serious quarterly selling in five figures was without precedent.

Whigs, Scott and the Quarterly

established Walter Scott wrote for the early Review, and Constable was his publisher. Jeffrey's review of Marmion in 1808 was mixed and complained, among other things, of "the neglect of Scotish feelings and Scotish character" in the poem (as quoted by Hook). The Review's increasingly partisan politics, especially an article late in 1808 that Scott took to be defeatist about the war in Spain, completed the break.

established Scott then helped the London publisher John Murray launch the Quarterly Review in 1809 as a Tory counterweight, with George Canning and Robert Southey among its backers and William Gifford, formerly editor of the Anti-Jacobin, as editor. For the next generation the Whig Edinburgh and the Tory Quarterly were the two great reviews of Britain, and American readers took both.

Byron and the "Scotch Reviewers"

established In January 1808 the Review dismissed Byron's first collection, Hours of Idleness, as the self-indulgent work of a titled youth. The notice is now generally attributed to Brougham, but Byron blamed Jeffrey. His reply, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, was published anonymously by James Cawthorn in London in March 1809. It attacked Jeffrey by name and gave English a lasting phrase for the Edinburgh critics. Hook shows that the phrase stuck in America too: when the Port Folio discussed Byron's satire in 1810, it called Jeffrey "the Caledonian champion" and the leading editor of "the far famed and far dreaded Edinburgh Review".

"This will never do": Jeffrey and the Lake poets

established The Review was hostile to the Lake poets from its first number, in which Jeffrey attacked Southey's Thalaba and the new "sect" of poets. Its most famous sentence opened Jeffrey's review of Wordsworth's The Excursion in November 1814: "This will never do." Gates, writing in 1899, observed that later critics tend to agree more with Jeffrey than with Wordsworth about the poem's artistic worth. The verdict nonetheless became shorthand for critical blindness, and it fixed Jeffrey's reputation as the severest judge of his age.

established Jeffrey was not only a hatchet man. He praised Scott's novels highly. He told Washington Irving in 1817 that he thought them the best things that had appeared in his time. He also championed Burns and Campbell, and the Review reviewed Campbell's Gertrude of Wyoming very favourably in 1809.

A Scottish voice

established Hook argues that the Review was full of resurgent Scottish nationality, and quotes it. In 1809, writing on Burns, the Review insisted that Scots was "not to be considered as a provincial dialect" but was "the language of a whole country,—long an independent kingdom" (as quoted by Hook), and that confusing it with the dialects of Yorkshire or Devon was ignorant prejudice. In 1828 it looked back on the eighteenth-century Edinburgh literati and found nothing "truly Scottish" in them. Reviewing Elizabeth Hamilton's novel The Cottagers of Glenburnie, with its Scots dialogue, it took "a sort of malicious pleasure" in telling southern readers they would not understand three pages. Hook contrasts these with the anxious Anglicising of the 1750s, when an Edinburgh society was formed to promote the reading and speaking of English.

After Jeffrey

established Jeffrey resigned with the 98th number in June 1829, on becoming Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, and was succeeded by Macvey Napier. Jeffrey went on to be Lord Advocate (1830–34) and a judge as Lord Jeffrey from 1834. Under later editors the Review became a respectable organ of Liberal opinion with less of its founders' edge. It ended in 1929, an event Time magazine marked by recalling Jeffrey's verdict on Wordsworth. The name was later revived by an unrelated Edinburgh literary magazine.

The Edinburgh Review in America

established Hook devotes much of his chapter "Land of Learning" to the Review's career in the United States. His central claim is simple: "Admired or despised, everywhere they were read." American readers cared most about three subjects the Review returned to often: the state of American literature and culture, British travellers' reports of America, and Anglo-American politics. Hook calls the bitter Anglo-American argument over these subjects in 1800–30 the "literary quarrel".

established Jeffrey's 1803 letter. Jeffrey thought about an American readership within months of launch. On 2 July 1803 he wrote to his brother John Jeffrey, then in business in Boston: "I wish you would try if you can repandre us upon your continent, and use what interest you can with the literati, or rather with the booksellers of New York and Philadelphia" (as quoted by Hook from Cockburn's Life of Jeffrey). Hook notes that John seems to have obtained his copy independently, which suggests that copies were already crossing the Atlantic.

established Reprints. American magazines began reprinting the Review's criticism within two or three years. A comment on Ossian in Charles Brockden Brown's Literary Magazine in 1805 was taken almost word for word from the Review, and the Port Folio reprinted its notice of Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel the same year. From about 1810 the whole Review was reprinted in New York, probably first by Ezra Sargeant, then by Eastburn, Kirk & Co. British travellers of 1817–19, John Duncan and Henry Fearon, found both the Edinburgh and the Quarterly regularly reprinted in New York by Kirk & Mercein, who in 1816 also published a General Index to the Review from 1802. Complete sets were advertised for sale in Virginia newspapers. These were unauthorised reprints; no copyright protected British periodicals in America.

established Jefferson's subscription. On 17 May 1814 Thomas Jefferson told a Philadelphia bookseller who offered to supply the Review that he had "long been a subscriber" to the edition first published by Sargeant and then by Eastburn, Kirk & Co., and already held numbers 30 to 42. Number 30 was the issue for January 1810. Jefferson called the Review "certainly unrivalled in merit" and predicted it would become "a real Encyclopaedia" (as quoted by Hook).

established Four thousand American copies. In 1823 the Philadelphia lawyer and politician Charles Jared Ingersoll said in a public discourse that the Review's American circulation was about 4,000, equal to that of the North American Review, the best native journal. Hook infers that the Review was available to most of America's intellectual and literary world.

established Jeffrey's American marriage. In the summer of 1810 Eliza Fletcher took a country house near Lasswade. Through her circle, Jeffrey, a widower since his first wife Catherine Wilson died in 1805, met Charlotte Wilkes of New York, who was visiting her aunt Madame Simond. Charlotte was the daughter of Charles Wilkes of New York and great-niece of the English radical John Wilkes. She went home at the end of the summer. On 29 August 1813, with Britain and the United States at war, Jeffrey sailed for America. He married her there and returned with her in January 1814.

established A wartime welcome. The visit was a public event. Irving's friend Henry Brevoort, who had met Jeffrey in Edinburgh, first called him "this little inky Hector", ignorant of America and dependent on his brother's low opinion of Boston society. By June 1813 Brevoort had changed his mind. He gave Jeffrey letters to Irving and others and hoped his good opinion would "efface the calumnies & the absurdities" of ignorant travellers (as quoted by Hook). Irving's Analectic Magazine announced that Jeffrey was coming on business connected with the estate of a brother lately deceased at Boston, and urged that every facility be given him. Henry Tuckerman later described New York savants waiting on the Battery to greet the man who had been "their chief intellectual repast". Hook treats the scene as partly fanciful.

established Madison and Monroe. In Washington Jeffrey met President James Madison and James Monroe, then Secretary of State, and discussed the war and the British claim to search American ships. According to Henry Cockburn's Life of Jeffrey, he put the British government's case rather than the opposition case the Review had argued, because it would be "paltry not to stand by his country" before an enemy who had him in his power. Hook takes the episode as a measure of the Review's prestige: the editor of a literary magazine was received at the top of an enemy government.

established "War with America." The Review's articles of 1812 and 1814 under that title condemned the war. The first said it arose from popular contempt for Americans and called it a war between "the only two free nations that are now left in the world". The second asked why Americans were disliked in Britain and could find no reason but "a secret grudge at them for having asserted, and manfully vindicated, their independence" (both as quoted by Hook). In 1815 the Port Folio reprinted the 1814 article as one of the ablest replies to the Quarterly's attacks on the American character. In 1818 the North American Review defended the "Scotch Reviewers" against the poet Solyman Brown, citing that article as one no American could read "without a glow of national exultation".

established The North American Review. The clearest sign of influence was imitation. The North American Review, founded in Boston in 1815, was modelled on the Edinburgh from the start. Robert Walsh's American Review, eight numbers of which appeared in Philadelphia in 1811–12, was the first American quarterly on the Scottish pattern, and the Analectic Magazine (1813) was similar. In 1820, in a footnote to its review of Irving's Sketch Book, the Edinburgh welcomed the North American Review as the best production of the American press it had seen, and hoped to be honoured in "those heirs of our principles, and children of our example" (as quoted by Hook). Hook adds a caution from the critic William Charvat: American critics had themselves been trained in Scottish philosophy and aesthetics, so similar judgements may reflect a shared education as much as direct influence.

established Walsh's Appeal, 1819, and the reply of 1820. The bitterest American attack came from the same Robert Walsh. His Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain respecting the United States of America (1819) singled out the Edinburgh writers as "the Scottish critics" and charged them with hypocrisy: professing friendship for America while sneering at its culture. The Review replied in 1820 in a long, restrained article that Hook calls probably the best summing-up of its position on America. American opinion split. The Analectic reprinted the reply in full but said it could see no candour in it; the North American Review tended to support Walsh.

established "Who reads an American book?" The same year produced the line Americans remembered. Reviewing Adam Seybert's Statistical Annals of the United States in the Edinburgh Review for January 1820, Sydney Smith asked, "In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?" The passage went on to ask who went to an American play or looked at an American picture, and ended with a challenge about slavery. The Port Folio attacked the Review over it that year. Hook argues that the real grievance was less the severity of the Review's literary verdicts than how rarely it noticed American books at all.

established Mocking the travellers. On British travellers in America the Review usually took the American side. It called Thomas Ashe's Travels the most comprehensive piece of national abuse it had read, and Frances Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) "a spiteful ill-considered, and mischief-making book". Its 1824 article "America" defended Americans by mocking the English: "No English gentleman has spit upon the floor since the Heptarchy" (as quoted by Hook). It also teased Americans for their sensitivity, joking that they might burn down the London and Edinburgh publishers' shops "as we did the American Capitol". It finally found a travel book it admired in James Stuart's Three Years in North America (1833).

established Praise for American writers. When the Review did discuss American writing it was not hostile. It found "enormous" faults in Joel Barlow's Columbiad but called Barlow a giant compared with many English rhymesters. Irving and Charles Brockden Brown received more praise than blame. The American writer it praised most highly was the theologian Jonathan Edwards, "one of the acutest, most powerful, and, of all reasoners, the most conscientious and sincere" (as quoted by Hook).

established American visitors to Jeffrey. Jeffrey's house became a stop for Americans in Edinburgh. Washington Irving dined with him at Craigcrook on 27 August 1817, two days after reaching the city. Jeffrey said he had found more luxury and comfort in American living than he expected, disliked the violence of American party feeling at dinner, and objected to the early age at which American girls entered society. Irving wrote that Jeffrey "has made his house like a home to me". The Quaker chemist John Griscom was shown round the Court of Session by Jeffrey in March 1819. In 1834 N. P. Willis dined with him at Moray Place among a crowd of Whigs celebrating the Grey dinner.

shared Was the Review fair to America? Hook concludes, following Paul Wheeler Mowbray's 1935 study of everything the Review published on America from 1802 to 1861, that "America is appreciated, understood, and treated fairly by the Edinburgh Review" (Mowbray, as quoted by Hook). Hook explains this by the Scottish liberal tradition, which had respected America since the Revolution. William B. Cairns, in British Criticisms of American Writing, 1815–1855 (1922), took a harsher view: the reviewers drew Whig morals from American politics, but used American culture to amuse themselves. Both readings can be supported from the Review's pages. Its political articles were friendly; its literary asides could be crushing.

Blackwood's in America

established A Tory rival. William Blackwood launched the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine in 1817. It did badly until the seventh number, in October 1817, when it was renamed Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and taken over by John Wilson ("Christopher North") and John Gibson Lockhart. The "Chaldee Manuscript" in that number caused a scandal. Its purpose was to attack the Whigs of the Edinburgh, and it did so with unusual violence.

established American readers. Blackwood's was soon read in America too. A verse printed in the magazine in 1822 describes an American man of letters who "took / The Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews / and also Blackwood's Mag". The New York editor of Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae, published there in 1854, said he had found a set of Blackwood's containing the original "Chaldee Manuscript" only in New York, and claimed that the Noctes, which ran in the magazine from 1822 to 1835, had been appreciated most heartily in America.

established Cogswell and Neal. Two Americans wrote for it. Joseph Green Cogswell, who was in Edinburgh with George Ticknor in 1819 and later became Harvard's librarian and an organiser of the Astor Library in New York, contributed two anonymous essays on the state of learning and education in the United States. John Neal of Baltimore, the novelist, wrote a long series on American writers and artists in 1824–25. Neal posed as an Englishman, but American magazines identified him quickly; the Port Folio called the articles "foolish and wicked lucubrations". Neal later said he had planned to turn Blackwood's guns on his country's British critics. Hook thinks this was hindsight. Neal also insisted, in Blackwood's, that American books should be as American "as the Scotch novels are Scotch" (as quoted by Hook).

established "We butter no man." Blackwood's line on America was blunt from the start. It said Whigs and Radicals used American institutions as a weapon against the British constitution, so it would keep questioning them. It despised the "cant of liberality" that made editors fawn on America, and preferred a "generous rivalry". It praised Irving and Brockden Brown, and claimed to have recognised them first. As Britain moved towards the Reform crisis of 1832 its tone turned shrill. America became an "immense Free-and-Easy Club" and Britain's greatest enemy, and in 1832 the magazine hoped "that all true Britons hate American manners" (as quoted by Hook). It enjoyed Mrs Trollope, dismissed Stuart's friendly book, and gave its highest praise to Thomas Hamilton's hostile Men and Manners in America (1833), using it to attack the Reform Bill.

established John Wilson and his American visitors. Ticknor met Wilson at Mrs Anne Grant's house in 1819 and found him "a pretending young man, but with a great deal of talent". In 1834 Willis breakfasted with him in Gloucester Place. While breakfast cooled, Wilson praised the American poets James Gates Percival and John Pierpont, talked about the origins of the Noctes, and said Hamilton had been annoyed by the North American Review's notice of his book. Willis's sketches of these visits, first printed in the New York Mirror as "Pencillings by the Way", were widely copied in American newspapers.

• The Review's blue and buff covers were the colours of the Foxite Whigs, and also of George Washington's uniform.
• Every contributor had to accept payment. The founders wanted reviewing to be paid work, not a favour.
• Jeffrey sailed to America in August 1813, while Britain and the United States were at war, and came home married to a New Yorker.
• Thomas Jefferson subscribed to the New York reprint and called the Review "unrivalled in merit".
• Sydney Smith, author of "who reads an American book?", was the only Englishman among the four founders.
• The North American Review, founded in Boston in 1815, was modelled on the Edinburgh, which publicly welcomed it as one of its "children".
• An earlier Edinburgh Review of 1755–56 managed only two numbers, but one carried Adam Smith's review of Rousseau.
• Jeffrey's 1806 duel with the Irish poet Thomas Moore was stopped by the police before a shot was fired; Jeffrey's pistol was found to have no bullet.

• Myth: Francis Jeffrey edited the first number. Sydney Smith edited the opening number or numbers. Ina Ferris says the first three, while other accounts say only the first. Jeffrey was the regular, paid editor from 1803.
• Myth: Jeffrey, Smith and Brougham were the only founders. Francis Horner was the fourth. Some accounts, Andrew Hook's among them, name only three.
• Disputed: How many copies the Review sold at its peak. Sources range from about 12,000 to 14,000 for 1813–14. There are no audited numbers, and Jeffrey's claim of 50,000 readers is a guess by an interested party.
• Myth: The 1802 Review is the same as the earlier Edinburgh Review. A short-lived journal of the same name ran for two numbers in 1755–56, and an unrelated literary magazine later revived the name.
• Myth: Jeffrey wrote the review of Hours of Idleness that provoked Byron. Byron thought so, but the notice is now usually attributed to Brougham.
• Myth: The Review was simply anti-American. Sydney Smith's 1820 jibe "who reads an American book?" is the best-known line, but its political articles opposed the War of 1812 and defended America against hostile travellers. Hook, following P. W. Mowbray, judges it fair to America overall, while William B. Cairns thought it condescending on culture.
• Myth: The Review began in 1803. The Port Folio dated it so in 1820, a small error. The first number appeared on 10 October 1802.
• Disputed: New York's savants waiting on the Battery to greet Jeffrey. Henry Tuckerman's picture is not a documented scene. Hook treats it as partly fanciful.
• Disputed: John Neal's later claim that his Blackwood's articles were a planned defence of America. Hook thinks it was hindsight.