Quarterly Review

Quarterly Review
First issue March 1809 (1809-March)
Final issue 1967
Company John Murray II
Country United Kingdom
Language English

The Quarterly Review was a literary and political periodical founded in March 1809[1] by the well known London publishing house John Murray. It ceased publication in 1967.

Early years

Initially, the Quarterly was set up primarily to counter the influence on public opinion of the Edinburgh Review. Its first editor, William Gifford, was appointed by George Canning, at the time Foreign Secretary, later Prime Minister.

Early contributors included the Secretaries of the Admiralty John Wilson Croker and Sir John Barrow, the Poet Laureate Robert Southey, the poet-novelist Sir Walter Scott, the Italian exile Ugo Foscolo, the Gothic novelist Charles Robert Maturin, and the essayist Charles Lamb.

Under Gifford, the journal took the Canningite liberal-conservative position on matters of domestic and foreign policy, if only inconsistently.[2] It opposed major political reforms, but it supported the gradual abolition of slavery, moderate law reform, humanitarian treatment of criminals and the insane, and the liberalizing of trade. In a series of brilliant articles in its pages, Southey advocated a progressive philosophy of social reform. Because two of his key writers, Scott and Southey, were opposed to Catholic emancipation, Gifford did not permit the journal to take a clear position on that issue.

Reflecting divisions in the Tory party itself, under its third editor, John Gibson Lockhart, the Quarterly became less consistent in its political philosophy. While Croker continued to represent the Canningites and Peelites, the party's liberal wing, it also found a place for the more extremely conservative views of Lords Eldon and Wellington.

During its early years, reviews of new works were sometimes remarkably long. That of Henry Koster's Travels in Brazil (1816) ran to forty-three pages.[3]

Controversial reviews

Typical of early nineteenth-century journals, reviewing in the Quarterly was highly politicized and on occasion excessively dismissive. Writers and publishers known for their Unitarian or radical views were among the early journal's main targets. Prominent victims of scathing reviews included the Irish novelist Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson), the English poet and essayist Walter Savage Landor, the English novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and her husband the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

In an 1817 article, John Wilson Croker attacked John Keats in a review of Endymion for his association with Leigh Hunt and the so-called Cockney School of poetry. Shelley blamed Croker's article for bringing about the death of the seriously ill poet, 'snuffed out', in Byron's ironic phrase, 'by an article'.

Later history

The Quarterly Review stopped publication in 1967. A publication taking this name was founded in 2007. Edited by Derek Turner, the new Quarterly Review is a successor to Right Now!, and was revived under the aegis of the former Conservative MP and author, Sir Richard Body, who is Chairman of the Editorial Board. Other members of the Editorial Board include philosophers Antony Flew and Thomas Molnar, ecologist Edward Goldsmith, economist Ezra Mishan and Diana Schumacher. Columnists include socialite Taki Theodoracopulos, ecologist Rev John Papworth and Roy Kerridge. The deputy editor is Dr Leslie Jones, and the managing editor is Luise Hemmer Pihl. Each issue of the new Quarterly Review includes an article from the original publication.

The aims of the revived QR are the same as that of its illustrious forebear – to draw upon a wide range of opinions to provide counter-intuitive writing for people who like to think, and to enhance literary, philosophical and political debate.

Nineteenth-century editors

References

  1. ↑ Courier (London newspaper), March 1, 1809, "Published this day". The first issue, however, bore a title page date of February, 1809.
  2. ↑ Boyd Hilton, ‘“Sardonic grins” and “paranoid politics”: Religion, Economics, and Public Policy in the Quarterly Review’, in J. Cutmore (ed.), Conservatism and the Quarterly Review: A Critical Analysis (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007), pp. 41-60.
  3. ↑ 'Art. IV. Travels in Brazil By Henry Koster', review in Quarterly Review dated January 1817, in bound volume XVI (London: John Murray, 1817), pp. 344–387
  4. ↑ Walter E. Houghton (ed.), The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 1824–1900, 5 vols. (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1966–87), Vol. 1.

Further reading

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Wood, James, ed. (1907). "Quarterly Review". The Nuttall Encyclopædia. London and New York: Frederick Warne. 

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