Beginning Blackwood’s:

Thus crowed “Christopher North,” the fictional editor of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, at the beginning of “Maga’s” 100^th number (May 1825). William Blackwood, the magazine’s publisher, may have raised more glasses than one. This centenary road had not been smooth. The magazine had begun as the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine (April-September 1817), as “a REPOSITORY of whatever may be supposed to be interesting to general readers.”^{^[i]} Blackwood’s editors, James Cleghorn and Thomas Pringle, organized the contents in formal categories: Original Communications, Select Extracts, Antiquarian Repertory, Original Poetry, Review of New Publications, etc., with a concluding Literary And Scientific Intelligence and Monthly Register. But Cleghorn and Pringle were unable to procure sufficient Original Communications, and the magazine as organized was stodgy, without a recognizable personality to distinguish it from competing monthlies such as Archibald Constable’s Scots Magazine. Blackwood dismissed his feckless editors after the 6^th number and christened number 7 (October 1817) Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, with John Wilson and John Gibson Lockhart, briefless lawyers with impressive Glasgow-Oxford degrees, to act as sub-editors in fact if not in title. Wilson’s and Lockhart’s number 7 provided more personality than Blackwood had anticipated, attacking Coleridge, Leigh Hunt and “the Cockney School of Poetry,” and assorted public figures in Edinburgh. Such attacks continued in succeeding numbers, provoking law-suits and a notoriety that Blackwood came to fear might bring “his ruin as a Bookseller and Publisher.”^{^[ii]}

Baldwin, Cradock and Joy and then John Murray resigned as London publishers of Blackwood’s, and Oliver and Boyd in Edinburgh resigned as printers, in protest against the magazine’s ad-hominem assaults upon assorted Whigs, Westminster radicals and Cockneys.^{^[iii]} But notoriety increased Blackwood’s sales. Lockhart’s Peter’s Letters (1819), published by Blackwood as, in part, an apologia for his magazine, soothed some of the agitated tempers in Scotland, as the magazine attracted a growing group of regular, like-minded contributors–William Maginn, John Galt, George Croly and David Robinson among them–and Blackwood found more indulgent London partners in the firm of Cadell and Davies.^{^[iv]} Blackwood, Lockhart, and Wilson had abandoned the formal divisions of contents established by Cleghorn and Pringle. Serious essays and comic verse, contributions by fictional and real correspondents, were now mixed together. Non-fiction prose entries were shorter and less demanding of readers than the more ponderous essays in the quarterly reviews. The pseudonymous and fictional correspondents–Timothy Tickler, Morgan Odoherty, Mordecai Mullion–and the canny, chatty editor “Christopher North” gave Blackwood’s a corporate personality more lively and distinctive than those of competing monthlies.^{^[v]} Blackwood’s favorite subject was always itself, and by number 66 (July 1822) it could declare itself to be a phenomenon in British publishing, “a real magazine of mirth, misanthropy, wit, wisdom, folly, fiction, fun, festivity, theology, bruising, and thingumbob,” combining in its miscellaneous way “all the best materials of the Edinburgh, the Quarterly, and the Sporting magazine–the literature and good writing of the first–the information and orthodoxy of the second, and the flash and trap of the third.”^{^[vi]}

Despite that semi-inebriated tone Blackwood’s was a shrewdly calculated concern, mentored and published by a successful Scottish businessman. A categorical study of the contents of the first one hundred numbers (April 1817-May 1825) shows William Blackwood’s, Wilson’s, Lockhart’s, and William Maginn’s editorial changes–changes determined in part by the enlistment of new contributors with specific strengths and in part by calculation of the interests of subscribers outside Scotland. The most obvious change is a decrease in the number of articles of antiquarian interest. Antiquarian Repertory had been one of the formal categories of contents established by Cleghorn and Pringle in numbers 1 through 6 (April 1817-September 1817). Claiming liberal access “to unpublished manuscripts, both in the national and family repositories,” they hoped their magazine might “rescue from oblivion such materials as may throw some light on the disputed points in British history, and on such minute features in the state of society in former ages, as must necessarily be excluded from the pages of the historian.”^{^[vii]} Those materials included excerpts from mss. in the Advocates’s Library, Edinburgh; a Writ of Privy Seal; “curious documents” relating to the Stuart Kings; 13^th-century Scottish land grants; and documents connected with trials for witchcraft, with hints of “profane and revolting details...more than enough to shock even such readers as have the most voracious appetite for the horrible.”^{^[viii]}

Such antiquarianism appealed to William Blackwood, both personally and professionally. The bearded face on the cover of the Magazine was that of George Buchanan, the 16^th-century Scoto-Latin poet and scholar who was one of Blackwood’s cultural heroes.^{^[ix]} Early in his commercial career Blackwood had studied Scottish history, catalogued private libraries, and come to Walter Scott’s attention as a knowledgeable dealer in rare books. He procured antiquarian articles from Scott in the early numbers of the magazine, hoping thereby to snatch publication of Scott’s future novels from Constable, Blackwood’s major rival. But Scott withdrew his support from Blackwood’s because of the offense given to Edinburgh’s public figures by the “Chaldee Manuscript” in number 7 (October 1817), just as Wilson’s and Lockhart’s more fluid editorial arrangement and more personal, aggressive style began to attract new contributors with essays and comic verse on current subjects.^{^[x]} The number of articles on antiquarian subjects declined from fifty-five in the first year (April 1817-March 1818) to eighteen in the second year (April 1818-March 1819) to ten in the third year (April 1819-March 1820) to four in the fourth year (April 1820-March 1821), rose briefly to eight in the fifth year (April 1821-1822), then declined to two in the sixth year (April 1822-March 1823), to none in the seventh year (April 1823-March 1824), with two in numbers 87 through 100 (April 1824-May 1825).

A similar if not so precipitous decline can be traced in the number of non-fiction articles concerned with contemporary and near-contemporary Scottish life. Blackwood’s was published from 17 Princes Street, Edinburgh, at a time when Edinburgh was the second city for literature in Britain, and William Blackwood attempted to establish an audience for his magazine in Scotland by publishing fiction set in Scottish locales and essays on a wide range of Edinburgh and Scottish affairs.^{^[xi]} In the early issues there were essays on the living artists of Scotland, essays on the pulpit eloquence of Scotland, a report on decisions concerning divorce by the Consistorial Court of Scotland, two reports on proposed repairs of St. Giles Cathedral, an essay on a proposed Foundling Hospital in Edinburgh, an attack upon the management of the library of Glasgow University, and an abstract of a proposed bill for the protection of savings banks in Scotland. A “Scottish Chronicle” was included in numbers 8 through 15, full of Caledonian rainfall, rapes, robberies and burgh-reform.

But Blackwood had publishing partners in London and ambitions for his magazine that extended south of the Tweed to a broader British public. As early as September, 1817, a correspondent warned Blackwood that the magazine’s forays into Scottish genealogy were “highly offensive to individuals, while wholly uninteresting to the generality of your readers.”^{^[xii]} By August, 1823, in an editorial notation to an essay on the politics of Scottish universities, Lockhart felt obliged to offer “some apology to our readers for taking up so much room with a subject which many of them will, of course, regard as very local and very trivial too.” In that same issue Episcopalian and Balliol-educated Lockhart remarked on the social attitudes of part of the Scottish reading public:

It is a very great pity that it should be so; but, in point of fact, the nobles and higher gentry of Scotland, are, with very few exceptions, in these days, ENGLISHMEN.... Every Scotch gentleman who can afford it, carries his family not to Edinburgh, but to London. With few exceptions, the young men of fashion and fortune are all chiefly educated in England. England is everything; Scotland is nothing but a place to get rent from, and to shoot grouse in for a few weeks after the rising of Parliament.^{^[xiii]}

Blackwood’s Scottish readers were not all young men of fashion and fortune, Albion-bound. Readers of the professional, manufacturing and commercial classes still resided in Scotland, and those readers, presumably, still were interested in purely Scottish affairs. But an editorial decision was made–by Blackwood, Lockhart, or the whole “divan” in concert.^{^[xiv]} The number of non-fiction articles on exclusively Scottish contemporary life declined from an average of forty per year in issues 1 through 36 (April 1817-March 1820) to a total of only fifteen in all of issues 75 through 100 (April 1823-May 1825).

The phrase prose fiction is a slippery category when applied to Blackwood’s because the magazine practiced fictions of many kinds–its pseudo-controversies, its pseudonymous contributors, the fictional narrative frames for entire numbers, and the fictional dramatic scenes of the “Noctes Ambrosianae.” In the 1830s Edgar Allan Poe identified a first-person fictional narrative of terror as the characteristic Blackwood’s article.^{^[xv]} There were many such gruesome fictions in the first one hundred numbers. D. K. Sanford’s “A Night in the Catacombs” (no. 19), William Maginn’s “The Man in the Bell” (no. 57) and “The Suicide” (no. 91), and James Hogg’s “A Scots Mummy” (no. 79) are proto-Poe, and John Galt’s “The Buried Alive” (no. 56) anticipates both Poe’s “The Premature Burial” and Stevenson’s “The Body Snatchers.” The extremes of Grand Guignol were explored in Walter Scott’s “Narrative of a Fatal Event” (no. 12), in John Wilson’s “Remarkable Preservation from Death at Sea” (no. 11), and in John Howison’s effective tales of North-American and Cuban cruelty, “Adventure in Havana” (no. 51), “The Florida Pirate” (no. 53), and “Adventure in the North-West Territory” (no. 55). So frequent were such sanguine stories that Blackwood’s could publish a parody of them in D. M. Moir’s “Singular Recovery from Death” (no. 58). Nothing singular about it, really, for Blackwood’s regular readers.^{^[xvi]}

Such discrete, self-contained stories of terror were only part of Blackwood’s prose fictions, notable in the early numbers of the magazine, appearing sporadically through the first one hundred numbers, and then gradually overshadowed (in word-count, if not in effect) by other kinds of fiction. From its beginning Blackwood’s offered its readers a variety of short stories, “fragments,” “sketches,” and “accounts”–e.g., James Hogg’s “Tales and Anecdotes of Pastoral Life” (nos. 1-3), William Howison’s long-running series of fictional episodes in the lives of famous people, “Time’s Magic Lanthern” (nos. 11, 13-16, 23, 26, 74-75, 80), science fiction and science parody, similar to bk. 3 of Gulliver’s Travels, through “A Visit to the Lunar Sphere” (no 44), and Thomas Hamilton’s “Account of the Life and Writings of Ensign and Adjutant Odoherty” (11-13, 21), a comic narrative that introduced a soon-to-be prominent pseudonymous contributor to the magazine. The amount of prose fiction remained roughly constant over the first one hundred numbers, peaking in numbers 37 through 62 (April 1820-March 1822), with serial fiction more prominent in the latter numbers. Serial fiction was attractive to William Blackwood because it could be republished by Blackwood in book form. John Wilson’s Scottish episodes, signed “Eremus,” were republished by Blackwood as Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life (1822). John Galt’s The Ayrshire Legatees (1821) first appeared as installments in the magazine, as did Galt’s nautical Decameron called The Steam Boat (1822).^{^[xvii]} Some aspiring serials, however,–“The Man-of-War’s Man,” “The Autobiography of Timothy Tell,” “Kiddywinkle History”–simply sputtered out.^{^[xviii]} In the area of prose fiction the first one hundred numbers were a process of experimentation, with many failed experiments. The magazine was decades away from its later eminence as the venue for George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness.

The term verse–connoting meter and rhyme, yet allowing a wide range of tone and content–is the safest term to use in connection with much of the imaginative literature, other than prose fiction, that appeared in the magazine. In the early numbers some of the English verse was reprinted from other sources, but that quickly became unnecessary as Blackwood’s enlisted a cadre of regular contributors. John Wilson and James Hogg, both published poets, provided much of the serious verse in the first year. In the second year the ranks swelled to include Felicia Hemans, “Barry Cornwall”/Bryan Waller Procter, and Charles Lloyd. In subsequent years verse was provided by writers now ignored by even the egalitarian editor of the New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse–Peter George Patmore, Thomas Doubleday, Thomas Gillespie, R. F. St. Barbe, Alaric Watts, G. R. Gleig, and Mrs. A. Gillespie Smith. The types of verse published included sonnets, both English and Italian; blank-verse narratives and dramatic scenes; imitation folk-ballads in the ballad measure; “lyrical ballads” in acknowledged imitation of Wordsworth; Crabbe-like village sketches in iambic pentameter couplets; descriptive-meditative blank verse, and “elegies” in every imaginable context–“on the Death of an Idiot Girl”, “in a Lonely Burial Ground on the Northern Coast of the Highlands,” “in a British Burial Ground in India,” “on Seeing the Grave of an Unfortunate Girl, whom the Author Had Known in the Days of Her Innocence.” Number 22 (January 1819) contained one of the longer titles in recent periodical literature: “Lines, Written in Consequence of Hearing of a Young man that Had Voluntarily Starved Himself to Death on Skiddaw; and Who Was Found, after His Decease, in a Grave of Turf Piled with His Own Hands,” Charles Lloyd’s blank-verse speculations on abnormal psychology, despair, and suicide.^{^[xix]}

In number 52 (July 1821) Caroline Bowles Southey made her first appearance with “Lines Suggested by the Sight of Some Late Autumn Flowers,” and Bowles Southey would publish sentimental, religious and/or elegaic verse in the remainder of the monthly numbers studied here. In number 53 (August 1821) “David Lyndsay”/Mary Diana Dods published “The Plague of Darkness, a Dramatic Scene from the Exodus,” the first of her curious blank-verse dramas that would be reprinted and published by Blackwood as Dramas of the Ancient World (1822). The numerically-dominant versifier, however, was the physician David Macbeth Moir. With and without his pseudonym of “Delta” Moir published a total of more than one hundred and forty identifiable pieces in the first one hundred issues, sometimes, as in number 92, providing all the verse in a monthly number. His lyre had several strings, but the recurring note was one of nostalgic, sometimes mawkish melancholy, a mood found in much of the magazine verse of the time. The type of verse that was distinctive of Blackwood’s was comic verse–a relentless barrage of mock-heroics, comic ballads, self-congratulatory sonnets, comic translations of classical authors, parodies of contemporary authors in what Blackwood’s dubbed “this age of parody,” and verse-satires of Edinburgh manners, London Cockneys, Whigs and the Whig-infested Edinburgh Review.^{^[xx]} Comic verse first appeared in the “Prince’s Street Sketches” of number 10 (January 1818), a mock-heroic satire of Scottish beaux and dandies, and comic verse quickly swelled in bulk until it became the only kind of verse in many numbers. It could erupt anywhere–in the opening “Notices to Contributors,” in essays on politics and literature, and/or in the concluding “Noctes Ambrosianae” –giving readers the impression that the Blackwood’s divan at Princes Street was having an unusually good time. Lockhart, Hogg, and Wilson enjoyed making mischief, even for each other.^{^[xxi]} William Maginn, who arrived from Ireland to join the divan in 1819, provided much of the comic verse before departing for London, to become editor of the new Fraser’s Magazine in 1830.

But no amount of high spirits could counteract the slump in publishing, and especially the publishing of poetry, that occurred in the mid-1820s. “Poetry, it is in vain to deny it, is becoming a drug of the most opium-like propensities,” Blackwood’s acknowledged in number 89 (June 1824). “Few write poetry...and nobody at all reads it.”^{^[xxii]} The Magazine responded to this change in the market: the number of verse-pieces, serious and comic, declined from a high of one hundred in monthly numbers 37 through 48 (April 1820-March 1821) to forty two in numbers 87 through 100 (April 1824-May 1825). The same decline can be seen in the number of translations of classical, Eastern, and European verse. Two of Blackwood’s strengths were Lockhart’s and Wilson’s strong training in classical languages, a degree of training rare among contemporary Scotsmen, and Lockhart’s interest in foreign literatures. Under Wilson’s and Lockhart’s influence the pages of Blackwood’s included translations of and commentary on Greek and Latin literature: excerpts from John Hookham Frere’s translation of The Frogs, selections from Atheneaus’s commentary on Homeric writings, several essays titled “Remarks on Greek Tragedy,” imitations of Horace, “Observations on Catullus,” a translation of a Greek fragment of Simonides, a series of “Translations from the Less Familiar Latin Classics” by Thomas Doubleday, and the donnish erudition and wit of Francis Wrangham’s “Horae Cantabrigienses.” Translations from Eastern and European literatures included Swiss, Arabic, Icelandic, Chinese, Danish, Italian, Bohemo-Sclavonian and “Hindoostanee” verse.^{^[xxiii]}

Blackwood’s was especially interested in recent German literature and culture. “If proof were desired of the variety and energy of German literature,” Lockhart wrote, “we know not that a better could be found than in the example afforded by our own pages.”^{^[xxiv]} William Blackwood had provided funds for Lockhart’s visit to Germany and Goethe, an investment that Lockhart had repayed by translating Frederick Von Schlegel’s Lectures on the History of Literature for publication by Blackwood in 1818.^{^[xxv]} Lockhart then enlisted Robert Pearce Gillies and John Anster as translators for twenty “Horae Germanicae” in the magazine, translations of portions of the plays of Goethe, Müllner, Gillparzer, Körner, von Houvald, Schiller and others, for which Lockhart provided introductions and commentary. Lockhart was equally well-read in Spanish literature, and Blackwood’s duly published a series of “Horae Hispanicae,” mostly translations by Lockhart that were republished by Blackwood as Lockhart’s edition of Ancient Spanish Ballads, Historical and Romantic (1823). But Lockhart left Blackwood’s in 1825 to become editor of the Quarterly Review in London, a move that coincided with the slump in or surfeit of poetry in publishing. Reflecting those changes in personnel and market, the number of translations in Blackwood’s declined from a high of twenty-three in monthly numbers 37 through 48 (April 1820-March 1821) to three in all of numbers 87 through 100 (April 1824-May 1825).

Blackwood’s reviewing of new poetry and prose-fiction–especially its war against Leigh Hunt and his London associates, its surprising support of Shelley, and its contradictory treatment of Wordsworth and Coleridge–is an oft- and well-told tale.^{^[xxvi]} The magazine was a miscellany, however, not a mere review.^{^[xxvii]} Reviews of imaginative literature loomed no larger than articles on travel and on the fine arts in general–an average of twenty per year, with many monthly numbers having none. The whole review-business reeked of puffery, as Blackwood’s sometimes arily acknowledged. “To say the truth, Christopher,” confessed fictional contributor “Timothy Tickler”to fictional editor “Christopher North,” “the belles-lettres criticism of our day, is waning very rapidly to its total extinction; and unless you turn your attention to these matters...I honestly confess I see no chance of the affair outliving another twelvemonth...How long is it to be a matter of dead certainty that the Quarterly will puff off as first-rate characters all of Mr Murray’s authors,–the Edinburgh all of Mr Constable’s–the New Monthly all of Mr Colburn’s, –and so forth? Are people determined to be blind?”^{^[xxviii]} But when Christopher North turned his hand to reviewing, that hand often put money in William Blackwood’s pocket. Blackwood’s reviewed and puffed Blackwood’s new books, books often written by contributors to Blackwood’s. It was a comfortable arrangement. Henry Mackenzie reviewed Lockhart’s novel Adam Blair (1822); an anonymous reviewer, perhaps Wilson, reviewed Lockhart’s Matthew Wald (1824) and Reginald Dalton (1823); Lockhart reviewed Wilson’s Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life (1822) and Trials of Margaret Lyndsay (1823); Mackenzie reviewed John Galt’s Annals of the Parish (1821) and Wilson reviewed Galt’s The Entail (1823); Galt reviewed...etc. Perhaps the most rapturous review was given to Susan Ferrier’s Marriage (1818), published by Blackwood, which the publisher believed to be “as good to myself as a Banknote.”^{^[xxix]}

Responding to the very suspicion of puffery “Christopher North” whimsically appealed to the public’s sense of fair-play: “Two of Blackwood’s books are reviewed [in no. 65 of June 1822]...two of Hurst, Robinson, and Company’s...three of Murray’s...one of Longman & Co’s...one of Baldwin, Cradock and Joy’s...three of Colburn’s...one of Constable’s...and so on.... Because Mr Blackwood is becoming a great and good publisher, are we not to review his books?”^{^[xxx]} Blackwood’s treated any thing written by Scott with respect, although Scott was published by Constable, who also published the Edinburgh Review. It helped books published by the Olliers when it could. It usually dismissed, with scorn or faint praise, books published by Henry Colburn, whose New Monthly Magazine was a competitor. It gave mixed reviews to books published by John Murray, Longman, Rivington, Taylor and Hessey, Oliver and Boyd, G. and B. Whittaker, J. M. Richardson, Hurst, Robinson and Co., and Baldwin, Cradock and Joy. Among the poets and novelists whose works were reviewed, Byron and Scott–the contemporary colossi who bestrode Blackwood’s literary world–received the most attention. Wordsworth and Thomas Moore were close thirds, followed by Shelley, Leigh Hunt, Barry Cornwall, James Hogg, and the now almost-forgotten Henry Hart Milman, the clergyman, church historian, and poet whose Fall of Jerusalem (1820), Martyr of Antioch (1822) and Belshazzar (1822) once impressed pious contemporaries.^{^[xxxi]} Why Blackwood’s reviewers wrote what they wrote–the dynamics of the magazine’s reviewing–sometimes eludes a modern reader, even with the aid of the magazine’s unpublished archives. The notorious attacks upon “the Cockneys” was culture-war in a politically and socially unstable post-Waterloo, pre-Reform Bill age.^{^[xxxii]} The increasingly negative reviews of Byron’s works may have been revenge upon John Murray, Byron’s publisher and once the London publisher of Blackwood’s, for his break with “a Magazine which has involved everyone connected with it...in alternate anxiety disgrace & misery.”^{^[xxxiii]} But Blackwood’s critical verdicts seem at times to have been hastily and irresponsibly written.^{^[xxxiv]} This was, after all, a middle-brow miscellany–“a perpetual ‘Magazin de Nouveautés’–a perfect ‘Theatre de Variétes’”–not the heavy-weight Edinburgh, Westminster, and Quarterly reviews.^{^[xxxv]} As Maginn and Lockhart, writing as “Morgan Odoherty,” observed in the July 1822 and March 1823 “Noctes Ambrosianae,” “although he [Christopher North] now and then puts in puffs of mediocre fellows, every body sees they’re put in merely to fill the pages”–“but, after all, isn’t it odd that Reviews, &c., and all their wit, and all their malice, and all their hypocritical puffing, are not able to produce the smallest effect, good or bad, upon the permanent reputation of any writer.”^{^[xxxvi]} In the long run, reviews didn’t matter–as long as they were not reviews of books by Blackwood’s authors. The important thing was to get out next month’s number.

While he was London publisher of the magazine (September 1818-March 1819) John Murray was an opinionated partner, bombarding William Blackwood with demands, complaints, and strongly worded suggestions. One such suggestion was that Blackwood’s include more articles of popular science, which Murray believed to be “ten times more interesting to the public than any other class of literature.”^{^[xxxvii]} In its first and second years Blackwood’s included over eighty such articles, as well as single-sentence Literary And Scientific Intelligence and Meteorological Reports and Tables at the end of each monthly number. At the least, articles on technology and “the mechanical arts” might be immediately practical, “as one of the objects of this Magazine is to disseminate useful Knowledge,” so there were articles on an improved Edinburgh printing-press, on an American steam-frigate, on developments in the construction and operation of diving-bells, and on a new ear-trumpet designed by an Aberdeen physician. On a higher level, articles on the biological and physical sciences might allow readers to share in the thrill of intellectual discovery: “There are few things more gratifying to the human mind than to witness the successful efforts of a strong and vigorous understanding, exerted in elucidating the magnificent wonders of the earth.” At the highest level, articles on natural history might lift Blackwood’s readers into the realm of Paleyean, pre-Darwinian natural theology, demonstrating “that from every part of nature there speaks one voice, the voice of religion! that the whole universe is but a manifestation of the attributes of its creator!”^{^[xxxviii]}

Edinburgh was strong in what are now called the earth sciences, especially geology, and a recurring topic in Blackwood’s was the geological dispute between the followers of Scottish James Hutton, whose theory contradicted the first chapter of Genesis, and the followers of Abraham Werner, the German minerologist who attempted to reconcile geology with the Bible. Reports of scientific expeditions–to Loo-Choo, to Australia, to the Polar regions, to find a North-West Passage, into the South Seas, through the Bering Strait, to trace the course and find the termination of the River Niger–appeared frequently, sometimes puffing books published subsequently by Blackwood and Murray. Other frequent topics, sometimes treated satirically, were chemical combustion, physiognomy, animal magnetism, and the craniological theories of Spurzheim and Gall. Some of this material was sent from London by John Murray. Most was provided by scientists and scientifically-minded men within Blackwood’s circle in Edinburgh. Foremost among them were Robert Jameson and David Brewster. Jameson was Keeper of the Natural History Museum, occupant of the Chair of Natural History at the University, and President of the Wernerian Natural History Society. He used Blackwood’s pages to give “Some Account of the Wernerian Natural History Society,” to quote extracts from the Memoirs of the Wernerian Society, to publicize the Proceedings of the Wernerian Society, as well as providing articles on thunderstorms, polar ice, British zoology, and the minerology of India. David Brewster, Jameson’s rival at Edinburgh’s Natural History Museum, was the invertor of the kaleidoscope, a pioneer in optics, a university Principal, a founder of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and editor of one of Blackwood’s other publications, the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, or Dictionary of Arts, Science, and Miscellaneous Literature (1808-30). A master of the art of scientific miscellany, Brewster published in Blackwood’s articles on the optical properties of Mother-of-Pearl, on the weather of the British Isles, on a new method of measuring the length of the pendulum, the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, two descriptions of his own kaleidoscope, and an article on the “Method Adopted at Geneva for supplying the Poor with Nutritive Soups from Bones.”

“Your own publication, Mr Editor, has already done something to gratify the prevailing taste for these my favorite studies, and from its extensive circulation, it is calculated to do a great deal more.”^{^[xxxix]} So wrote “Microsophus, or the Virtuoso Pedant” in his account of the rise of natural history and earth sciences at Scottish universities. When these hopeful words appeared, however, in number 41 (August 1820), there was already an obvious decline in the number of scientific articles published in Blackwood’s. John Murray was no longer involved in the conduct of the magazine, the sciences were becoming more specialized, and David Brewster’s busy scientific career soon would include his new duties as sole editor of Blackwood’s quarterly Edinburgh Journal of Science. The Literary And Scientific Intelligence section, the penultimate section of each monthly number, was dropped after number 47 (February 1821), and many later monthly issues had only the Meteorological Table as a scientific element. Without Murray’s prompting and Brewster’s frequent contributions the number of articles on scientific subjects declined from fifty one in monthly issues 1 through 12 (April 1817-March 1818) to thirty one in 13 through 24 (April 1818-March 1819) to sixteen in 25 through 36 (April 1819-March 1820) to five in 37 through 48 (April 1820-March 1821), rose briefly to eight in 49 through 62 (April 1821-March 1822), then declined to five in 63 through 74 (April 1822-March 1823), remained at five in 75 through 86 (April 1823-March 1824), with only four in all of numbers 87 through 100 (April 1824-May 1825).

Philosophy–epistemological, ontological, moral and aesthetic–fared even worse. In the first one hundred issues of the magazine there were a total of thirty-three formal philosophical essays, inquiries, and “remarks,” thirteen of which were clustered in the second year (April 1818-March 1819). The more frequent identifiable contributors were Lockhart, John Wilson, William Howison, and Thomas Doubleday, who together produced fifteen of the total thirty three. Howison, whose Essay on the Sentiments of Attraction, Adaption, and Variety (1821) was published by Blackwood, wrote “Remarks on Keeping in Remembrance the Capacities of Human Nature” (no. 24), “An Essay on the Arrangement of the Categories” (no. 62), and a “Comparison of the Beauty of Sounds With That of Colours” (no. 20)–before deciding that the game was not worth the candle in Blackwood’s.^{^[xl]} Doubleday contributed essays on aesthetics–a two-part “On the Metaphysics of Music” (nos. 64, 88), an essay “On the Sources of the Picturesque and Beautiful” (no. 80), and an essay “On the Sweetness of Versification” (no. 42)–as well as an essay “On the Ignava Ration of the Stoics” (no. 44) and a two-part review (nos. 55, 57) of Edward Copleston’s Inquiry into the Doctrines of Necessity and Predestination (1821), published by Murray. Several Blackwood’s essays noted, and one lamented, “The Decline of a Taste for Metaphysics” (no. 24), but the principal reason why there were few philosophical articles in Blackwood’s was Wilson’s and Lockhart’s hostility toward the philosophical heritage of what is now called the Scottish Enlightenment.^{^[xli]} “Metaphysics, which used to lumber into the world in all its solidity (not to say stolidity) of a 4to phenomenon of four or five hundred pages assigned to each mooted point, have had their day of triumphant humbug.” In an editorial note to a report of a new metaphysical controversy at Oxford “Christopher North” complained that “we, here in the north, are stunned with them, and, for our parts, we had almost as lief dine with a young Whig lawyer, as with a metaphysician. The latter is always talking about ideas–the former without them.”^{^[xlii]}

Blackwood’s could not be serious for long, but for Lockhart this was no laughing matter. The trouble had begun with Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding (1748) and Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), in which Hume’s analysis of casual inference, his subjectivistic moral theory, and his discussion of the soul and personal identity threatened both Natural Theology and contemporary Christianity. “This man, by the penetrating and convulsive influence of his scepticism, determined the future condition of English [i e British] philosophy. Since his time nothing more has been attempted than to erect all sorts of bulwarks against the practical influence of his destructive scepticism: and to maintain, by various substitutes and aids, the pile of moral principles uncorrupted and entire.” Among the substitutes and aids offered by Scotsmen were the Sympathy of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), the Common Sense of Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788), and the variations on a “Common Sense” philosophy offered by James Beattie, James Oswald, and Dugald Stewart. For Lockhart none of this had proved sufficient to withstand the corrosion of Hume’s scepticism: “Common Sense is poor when compared with certain knowledge,–and moral feeling is a very inadequate foundation for a proper system of ethics . . . . We must have, in addition to these, an eternal law of rectitude, derived...from reason or from God.”^{^[xliii]}

In Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk (1819) Lockhart described Scottish mental culture from Hume to Dugald Stewart and the Edinburgh Reviewers as an aberration in the Scottish psyche, a desiccating rationalism that undermined the natural religious and moral impulses of the Scottish people:

The most remarkable literary characters which Scotland produced last century, shewed [sic] merely...the force of her intellect, as applied to matters of reasoning. The generation of Hume, Smith, &c. left matters of feeling very much unexplored . . . . Their disquisitions on morals were meant to be vehicles of ingenious theories–not of convictions of sentiment. They employed, therefore, even in them, only the national intellect, and not the national modes of feeling. The Scottish literati of the present day have inherited the ideas of these men, and acted upon them in a great measure

Prominent among the current Scottish literati were Francis Jeffrey, Henry Brougham and other Edinburgh Reviewers–“the legitimate progeny of the sceptical philosophers of the last age”–once students at Dugald Stewart’s lectures and guests at Stewart’s home-entertainments–that discreetly Whiggish Stewart whose ignorance of Greek and Greek philosophy condemned him to “the vain work of doing over again things that were as well understood two thousand years ago as they are now.”^{^[xliv]} An ignorance of Greek- and contemporary German thought was a fault of most Scottish educators and philosophers. No wonder young Whig lawyers were poor company at dinner.^{^[xlv]}

Those same Whigs, lawyers, and reviewers were often enthusiasts of Political Economy, as were the more radical contributors to the new Westminster Review, begun in 1824. Blackwood’s contributors were ambivalent about the wisdom of this relatively new field of study. The economics was often too political. James Stewart’s Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy (1767) and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) had been triumphs of recent Scottish thought, but what Carlyle would call the Dismal Science was now being used by Opposition in Parliament to dictate innovations in domestic and colonial policy. At the most, as in its second year, Blackwood’s published nine articles on political economy in the course of twelve monthly issues; at the least, as in its fifth and seventh years, it published none. Most promising and disappointing was a five-part series by William Stevenson titled “The Political Economist” (nos. 88-91, 97), impressive in its introductory methodology but turgid and timid in its “solution of the most interesting and important practical questions on this subject.”^{^[xlvi]} Other articles were theoretical or practical, solemn or satirical. Among the theoretical were two on the writings of David Ricardo (nos. 2, 19), one of them a review of Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), published by Blackwood and Murray. Among the applied and practical were essays recommending emigration–one by John Galt suggesting government-assisted emigration of Highlanders to Western Canada (no. 87), and two promoting emigration to parts of Africa (nos. 24, 31), perhaps preparing the public for James M’Queen’s Geographical and Commercial View of Northern Central Africa (1821), published by Blackwood and advertised in the magazine. Among the solemn were articles on the Poor Laws of England, on agricultural distresses, on tithes, on stocks or public funds, on the exportation of cotton yarn, and an “Abstract of the Proposed Bill for the Protection of Banks for Savings in Scotland” (no. 13). Among the satirical were two imitations of Swift’s Modest Proposal, ridiculing “the divine science of Political Economy” and suggesting several disastrous plans for improving the condition of Ireland.^{^[xlvii]}

In two articles in the centenary number David Robinson, now Blackwood’s principal political observor, attacked the doctrines of “those shallow visionaries, who call themselves political economists,” visionaries such as Henry Brougham among the Parliamentary Whigs and the Philosophical Radicals of the Westminster Review:

We believe to a certain extent in political economy for it comprehends a number of old stale truths, which were familiar to all men before the name was ever heard of; but we say that it combines with those truths many falsehoods...and that, as a whole, it will ruin the empire if reduced to practice by the government....These doctrines bring into question a very large portion of our political system; they seek the destruction of many sentiments and regulations, which in our judgment are essential for binding man to man, and class to class–for cementing together and governing the community. They are in their nature democratic and republican, hostile to aristocracy and monarchy, and they are generally taught by people who virtually confess themselves to be republican.^{^[xlviii]}

From its inception Blackwood’s had included a Commercial Report within the Monthly Register section at the back of the magazine. The Report provided empirical economic data. In number 27 (June 1819) it began to provide commentary that sometimes contradicted the positive picture of Britain’s economy painted in articles within the same number. For example, “The year 1819 may fairly be set down as the most disastrous in the commercial annals of Great Britain.”^{^[xlix]} The Commercial Report was dropped after number 60 (January 1822).

Blackwood’s has been labeled as a Tory publication. The magazine itself sometimes disavowed that label, claiming that its writers were the true descendants of the Whigs of 1688, the champions of constitutional monarchy and regulated liberty, while those called Whigs in the early nineteenth century were crypto-Jacobins, infected by the republican doctrines of the French Revolution: “Why should they profane this once venerable name? What have the Opposition of our times in common with the lofty and considerate authors of the English Revolution?”^{^[l]} Nonetheless the term Tory is accurate–if the term is understood to mean support of (1) “the august fabric of limited monarchy” as established by the Revolution of 1688 and now represented by the Hanoverians, (2) the British Parliament as then constituted, with an hereditary House of Lords to check the more democratic House of Commons, and (3) an established church, be it the Church of England, Church of Scotland or Protestant Church of Ireland: “Our veneration for the institutions of our fathers has not been shaken by any convulsions of democracy,–our antique associations preserve all their force,–the throne and the altar are still viewed by us with unbroken affection, and we look back with pride and reverence to a long line of pious and manly ancestors.”^{^[li]} Conflating imagery from the books of Exodus and Joshua with memories of the recent French experience Blackwood’s assured its readers that the wise British public would not soon reject “those principles of administration, which brought the sacred ark of their freedom, entire and triumphant, out of those billows of democratic or despotic rage, which overwhelmed the more gaudy, but less substantial vessels of their neighbours.”^{^[lii]} Crossing those metaphorical waters the British had been guided by a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire, Edmund Burke and Pitt the Younger.^{^[liii]}

Blackwood’s may also be described as a Romantic Tory publication–if the term Romantic is understood to mean respect for what is nationalistic, patriotic, traditional, emotional, intuitive, “the force of unenlightened, unreflecting sentiment,” as opposed to the sterile internationalism, utilitarianism, and rationalism of much Enlightenment thought at home and abroad.^{^[liv]} Lockhart was the most coherent thinker on this subject, using Blackwood’s pages to develop his cultural conservatism, a conservatism shaped by the thought of Burke, of Frederick Von Schlegel, and of his future father-in law, Walter Scott. Reviewing his own translation of Schlegel’s Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern, published by Blackwood in 1818. Lockhart warned of

the old bands every day relaxing around us, and, under the specious name of improvement, every thing which our fathers loved and venerated borne by slow but sure degrees, into the reach of that revolutionary current which leads to a fearful, and as yet an unexplored, abyss. None seems to have contemplated the tendency of this age with more concern than Frederick Schlegel. The work which we have just read is a noble effort to counteract and repel its effects, to arouse forgotten thoughts and despised feelings, and to make men be national and religious once more, in order that once more they may be great.^{^[lv]}

Schlegel believed that a great national character can be preserved or recovered only by cherishing the characteristic spirit of the nation’s past–that literature should be grounded in national history and an organic religious faith–and that literature’s purpose should be to strengthen our emotional associations with our religion, history, and national character. Thus Blackwood’s repeatedly praised Burns and Scott as the preeminent national poets of Scotland. Concerning Burns, “This man, born and bred a peasant, was taught, like all other Scotchmen, to read his Bible, and learned by heart, in his infancy, the heroic ballads of his nation. Amidst the solitary occupations of his rural labours, the soul of the ploughman fed itself with high thoughts of patriotism and religion, and...divined every thing that was necessary for being the poet of his country.”^{^[lvi]} Concerning Scott, “He speaks to us like some ancient bard awakened from his tomb....Since he sung his bold, and wild, and romantic lays, a more religious solemnity breathes from our mouldering Abbeys, and a sterner grandeur frowns over our time-shattered Castles....And if he be...the author of those noble Prose works that continue to flash upon the world, to him exclusively belongs the glory of wedding Fiction and History in a delighted union, and of embodying in imperishable records the manners, character, soul, and spirit of Caledonia.”^{^[lvii]} This Schlegian nationalism may have troubled some readers on both sides of the Tweed. If a national character and culture should be any people’s highest priority, should the 1707 Act of Union be revoked and Scotland again become an independent nation? Neither Lockhart nor Blackwood’s was willing to be logically consistent on that unsettling topic. In deference to reality and his own respect for English culture Lockhart offered Blackwood’s readers his version of a Greater Britain, a United Kingdom to which Scottish, English, Protestant Irish, and Welsh cultures could contribute.^{^[lviii]}

It is difficult to determine the number of political articles in Blackwood’s because politics intruded into many items that were not primarily political–into comic verse; into criticism of the poetry of Moore, Shelley, Byron and “the Cockney School of Poetry”; into Wilson’s short stories and sketches; into some of the rambling “Letters of Timothy Tickler”; into miscellaneous filler such as “Extracts from Mr Wastle’s Diary,” and some “Noctes Ambrosianae.” If the adjective political is restricted to articles entirely concerned with parliamentary activity, colonial policy, foreign policy, or the sundry sins of Whigs, the numbers indicate the increasing prominence of political articles in Blackwood’s first one hundred issues: there were ten such articles in numbers 1 through 12 and twenty six in numbers 89-100. On Parliamentary affairs Blackwood’s normally supported the Liverpool Administration, often warning Ministers against “conciliation” with Catholic agitators in Ireland and reformers of any stripe at home. On the subjects of Ireland and Catholic Emancipation Blackwood’s at first provided balanced discussion of “this most nice and delicate question.”^{^[lix]} “I am a strong Anti-Catholic,” wrote the Rev. George Croly, a contributor of articles on Parliament. “The protection of the English Church Establishment I consider as comparatively unimportant...but the great point is the maintenance of Protestantism–which strikes me as greatly essential to civil freedom & religious truth. It might not however be politic in your valuable work to declare in this instance too ardently for either side.”^{^[lx]}

With the emergence of David Robinson in number 84 (January 1824) as Blackwood’s prevailing voice on Irish affairs the magazine took a stronger anti-Catholic line. Robinson repeatedly described the Roman Catholic Church as the principal obstacle to progress in Ireland, keeping the Irish peasantry in a superstitious ignorance that disqualified them from full participation in British civic life. Conciliation of Irish terrorists would not help; a more aggressive Protestantism and Irish emigration might.^{^[lxi]} Nor would immediate emancipation of Negro slaves improve conditions in the British West Indies: abolitionist activity of the African Institution, led by William Wilberforce and Zachary Macaulay, was arrogant, rash and misinformed.^{^[lxii]} A similar impracticability pervaded the agitation of the extra-governmental Greek Committee, hellenophiles who wished Britain to interfere in the Greek’s revolt against Turkish rule. Blackwood’s position on Greece, Spain, and the revolting former Spanish colonies in South America was non-interventionist, in opposition to “the gentlemen of the press, the Greek, Spanish and other committees, the loan-mongers and stock jobbers” whose true agenda was to open new economic markets or to impose “the liberal system” of democratic constitutions throughout the globe.^{^[lxiii]} Let Britons stay home and tend to Britain’s affairs, one of which was the curious Erastian status of the Church of England. In three lengthy “Letters from the Vicarage” George Robert Gleig attempted to provide “an impartial examination of the present state of the Church of England; to inquire into the causes of its acknowledged unpopularity; and to point out, as far as I am able, the proper cure for so alarming an evil.”^{^[lxiv]} After abolishing the current system of tithes Gleig would have the Church of England assert its exclusive apostolic authority and independence from the British government in ecclesiastical concerns. That recommendation echoed the position of non-juring Anglican clergy in the late 17^th century and anticipated the Tractarian position of the decades ahead. Appearing in Blackwood’s in 1824 it may have raised Presbyterian eyebrows throughout Scotland.

As the number of political articles increased, and that of articles on some other subjects decreased, there was a steady flow of articles on, or reviews of books about, foreign travel, Greco-Roman artifacts, older English-and contemporary drama, education, architecture, sculpture, music, painting and other fine arts. Blackwood’s contributors traveled widely in Western Europe, sometimes with William Blackwood’s financial assistance, an investment that was repaid by essays written for the magazine. Lockhart, George Downes, James Wilson (John’s brother), and R. P. Gillies traveled in Germany; James Wilson in France; John Anster in Germany, southern France, and on islands off the Mediterranean coast; Archibald Alison secundus in Italy and Switzerland; P. G. Patmore in Switzerland, Savoy, and the Alps. On the spot or upon return Lockhart and/or James Wilson wrote “Sketches of Foreign Scenery and Manners” for Blackwood’s (nos. 3, 4, 5 and 6) and, perhaps, “Memorandums of a View Hunter” (nos. 1, 4 and 6). Lockhart mused “On the Great Madonna of Dresden” (no. 17) and provided an “Account of Curious Theatrical Representation at Strasbourg” (no. 8); Wilson contributed “Banks of the Rhine” (no. 24) and “Extracts of a Tour through France” (no. 23); Alison wrote a “Letter on the Scenery of the North of Italy” (no. 11) and “Of the Character and manners of the Tyrolese” (nos. 23 and 30); Patmore contributed “Sketches of Scenery in Savoy, Switzerland and the Alps” (nos. 23 and 25). With the £100 provided by Blackwood, Eyre Evans Crowe was able to dally in Paris, sending a “Letter from Paris” and “Parisian Sketches” to the magazine (nos. 61-62, 67 and 79), and then traveled through Italy while writing eight “Letters from Italy” (nos. 69-71, 74-75 and 77).^{^[lxv]} Other contributors ranged farther afield. There were letters from and accounts of the Philippine Islands (no. 17), Rio De Janiero (no. 50) and Sicily (no. 51). John Cay wrote on Poland (no. 65); William Dunlop wrote a series of essays on Calcutta (no. 63-64, 67 and 75); Leonard Stewart made “A Visit to the Shakers” in New York State (no. 75). Blackwood’s had a strong interest in the curious culture of Britain’s former North American colonies: two essays “On the Means of Education, and the State of Learning, in the United States of America” by Joseph Green Cogswell (nos. 23-24), three “Speculations of a Traveller Concerning the People of North America” by John Neal (nos. 89-91) and five essays on “American Writers,” also by Neal (nos. 92-94, 96-97). Of the travel-books reviewed, some concerned the United States (nos. 82 and 95) and others carried Blackwood’s readers to Denmark (no. 55), Persia, Armenia and Mesopotamia (no. 91), Canada (no. 58), and the coast of Africa (no. 62).

In response to what it believed to be “the increasing taste for the fine arts in this great literary capitol” Blackwood’s provided articles on Greek drama and sculptures; on architecture, foreign and domestic; and on painters, paintings, and British galleries and exhibitions.^{^[lxvi]} John Galt contributed and partly created “Transactions of the Dilettanti Society of Edinburgh...on the History and Progress of the Fine Arts” (nos. 31, 33, 36). Scotland’s enthusiasm for music was represented by an abundance of articles on music, ranging from “The Opera” (no. 24) to “Church Music” (no. 26) to “On the Metaphysics of Music, and Their Accordance with Modern Practice” (no. 64), an article that, despite its title, displayed Blackwood’s contempt for metaphysics. In literature, John Wilson wrote a series of “Analytical Essays on the English Dramatists” (nos. 4, 7, 9, 12, 17, 19, 34), discussing works by Marlowe, Webster, Shirley, Ford, Dekker and Rowley, and congratulating himself and his generation “On the Revival of Taste for Our Ancient Literature” (no. 21). James Crossley provided “Notices of Old English Comedies” (nos. 55, 61), studies of Jonson, Chapman, Marston, and Jasper Mayne. Thomas Hamilton, Lockhart, and Wilson wrote “Notices of Reprints of Curious Old Books” (nos. 8, 10, 19, 29, 31), which included Dekker’s The Gull’s Handbook, Roper’s Life of Thomas More, and a memoir of John Dunton, a 17^th-and 18^th-century London bookseller and bibliophile. Still lively reading for students of theatrical history are Peter George Patmore’s sixteen “Notices of the Acted Drama in London,” which began in number 10 (January 1818). Patmore’s warm, quirky appreciations of almost anything on the stage, from Kean’s Shakespeare to the Christmas pantomimes, were high spots in the early Blackwood’s. But Patmore was a man of divided loyalties, a close friend of Hazlitt, whose lectures at the Surrey Institution in London he respectfully reported in Blackwood’s (nos. 11-13), and a friend to many of the leading spirits of the new London Magazine, begun in 1820.^{^[lxvii]} Although it valued Patmore’s contributions Blackwood’s seldom missed a chance to deride “pimpled Hazlitt,” and its critical war with the London led to the death of John Scott, the London’s editor, in a duel at Chalk Farm with Lockhart’s second, Jonathan Christie, in 1821. Patmore’s series of “Notices” broke off in number 39 (June 1820). Reviews of the current theatrical season did not resume until the “London Oddities and Outlines” series (nos. 76, 81, 85) by George Croly, the clergyman-poet and political writer who was one of Blackwood’s handymen. Despite that hiatus Blackwood’s was obviously stage-struck, publishing “Upon the Relation of Music to the Drama” (no. 34), “On the Lives of Actors” (no. 47), “On the Neglect of Foote as a Dramatic Writer” (no. 49), “On the Alleged Decline of Dramatic Writing” (no. 51), “Cibber’s Apology” (no. 74), “Modern Dramas and Dramatic Writers” (no. 82), “Autobiography of Edmund Kean” (no. 92), and an essay on French drama (no. 86).

To fill the one hundred and twenty-five two-column, closely-printed pages of each monthly number there was always self-referencing filler such as “Timothy Tickler’s” series of “Letters to Eminent Literary Characters,” a series of off-the-cuff cultural commentary, often praising and defending Blackwood’s. There were also humorous and serious essays that do not fit in any category yet mentioned here, essays innocent of contemporary politics or of involvement in Blackwood’s several culture-wars. These were generic periodical pieces that might have appeared in the competing London, Scots, and New Monthly magazines–or in the Spectator, Rambler, Mirror and Lounger of the preceding century.^{^[lxviii]} There was an average of twenty such essays in each year studied here. Among the humorous pieces first prize might be given to “The Confessions of an English Glutton” (no. 72) by Thomas Colley Grattan, a parody of De Quincey’s Confessions, Lamb’s “Dissertation Upon Roast Pig,” and other confessional literature of “the age of confession–the era of individuality,–the triumphant reign of the first-person singular.”^{^[lxix]} From the pen of egregiously athletic John Wilson came essays on fly-fishing, hiking, wrestling, and boxing. “The Fly-Fisher’s Guide” (no. 26) evoked the charms of the outdoor life, of certain Edinburgh shops, and of different rods and lures.^{^[lxx]} The “Boxiana” series (nos. 28-31, 33, 36 and 43) used a review of Pierce Egan’s Boxiana; or Sketches of Antient and Modern Pugilism (1812-13, 1815-29) as a pretext for Wilson’s musings on the manly art. Much of the humor of these essays was local. The “Old Indian and Alpina” controversy (nos. 10-11, 13 and 15) concerned the manners of young women in Edinburgh. Despite its title “There is Death in the Pot” (no. 35) was a nostalgic survey of specific butchers, bakers, and vintners in Edinburgh and Glasgow. “The Voyages and Travels of Columbus Secundus” (nos. 51-52, 54-57) contained the humorous observations of a fictional visitor to the Leith races and to Edinburgh’s fish-market, wynds, and closes. There was a facetious “Letter from Glasgow” (no. 13), a complaint about “Edinburgh Nuisances” (no. 47), and a satire of a “Prospectus of a New Academical Institution at Edinburgh” (no. 20).

The well of local merriment slowly went dry. Writings as “Timothy Ticker” and recently arrived from Ireland, William Maginn suggested that, “perhaps, Edinburgh is not a good place for a smart paper–too narrow and limited–people all egg-shells–damned stupid people too–all taken up with their own little jokes, that are unintelligible when you pass Cromond Bridge.”^{^[lxxi]} By the seventh year of the magazine the number of such humorous essays had declined in relation to the number of serious generic periodical essays, not overtly political and not specifically Scottish. Prominent among the serious essayists were Caroline Bowles Southey, Henry Thomson, and R. F. St. Barbe. Bowles-Southey’s “Chapters on Churchyards” (nos. 87, 91-93, 96, 98-99) are graveyard prose, descriptive-meditative pieces full of antiquarian enthusiasms and ubi sunt contemplations. Henry Thomson’s “The Night Walker” (no. 82) and “Thoughts on Thoroughfares” (no. 97) are vivid pre-Mayhew, pre-Dickens descriptions of the variety of neighborhoods and humans to be seen in walks through London. The first and best of St. Barbe’s “Sea-Side Sketches” (nos. 63, 67, 84) is heavily atmospheric, a literary equivalent of Whistler’s later Thames-side sketches. There were four essays “On the Probable Influence of Moral and Religious Instruction on the Character and Situation of Seamen” (nos. 52-53, 57-58), and Thomson’s discussion of “Punishments in the Army” (no. 87). “Spring” (no. 64) by Charles Cherbery is a mellow essay on the season, on the Englishman’s love of the country, and on raising a family amidst rural charms. First prize in this category perhaps should be given to “Ruins” (no. 42). Anti-positivistic, anti-utilitarian, “Ruins” is a thoughtful, culturally conservative expression of the importance of the past to individual and national consciousness.

At the conclusion of the main body of the magazine for March 1822, before the Monthly Register section, readers found the first of what would be a signature series–the “Noctes Ambrosianae,” the series with which Blackwood’s name is most often linked in modern literary histories.^{^[lxxii]} There had been several proto-Noctes, several attempts to combine in a novel and more coherent format Blackwood’s regular cast of fictional contributors with its running controversies and “bams” and the new material of each monthly number. “Minutes and Proceedings at Ambrose’s” and “The True and Authentic Account of the Twelfth of August, 1819" (no. 29) were first attempts at a narrative and semi-dramatic format, the “True Account” being a fictional account of a week-long shooting expedition of the editor and chief supporters of the magazine and uninvited English guests. The miscellaneous origins of the hunting party (lowland Scots, highland Scots, Protestant Irish, Welsh and English) are a metaphor for Blackwood’s itself and represent Lockhart’s ideal of Britishness, a heterogenous but ultimately coherent British culture.^{^[lxxiii]} “The Tent” and “Last Day of the Tent” (no. 30) continue the hunting-party motif, as “Christopher North” narrates how members of the party gather in “The Tent” to read, accept, reject and comment on submissions for the next number of the magazine (this number 30), with the successful submissions inserted as intervals in the comic narrative. “Luctus on the Death of Sir Daniel Donnelly” (no. 38) is a farrago of personal and topical allusions, providing a pretext and framework for humorous pieces by various hands, with “North” and other members of “the divan” appearing as characters. “An Hour’s Tete-a-Tete with the Public” (no. 43), and its sequel in no. 47, allowed “Christopher North” to review the progress of Blackwood’s in an essay of twenty-one pages and shamelessly hyperbolic language–its sales, its London agents, its rate of payment, its satires, poetry, prose-fictions, faithful contributors, and promotion of German literature. John Galt’s “Account of a Coronation Dinner at Edinburgh” (no. 54), purportedly written to a Glaswegian, narrated the revels of the Blackwood’s group at Ambrose’s, their favorite tavern, and their discussion of the events and personalities of George IV’s coronation day.