ABSTRACT
First published in The True Sun, 25 November, 1833, p. 3; see headnote above, pp. 229–30. Tom Cringle’s Log was a sea-faring adventure novel written by Michael Scott (1789–1835; DNB), and serialized in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine between September 1829 and August 1833. Hunt was one of many who read and admired this enormously popular novel. Thomas De Quincey was ‘greatly’ impressed by Scott, who ‘in some of his sketches…has the mingled powers of Salvador Rosa and of Hogarth: so at least it strikes me’ (Horace Eaton, Thomas De Quincey (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1936), p. 354). Samuel Taylor Coleridge declared the sketches ‘most excellent’, and J. G. Lockhart thought Cringle ‘perhaps the most brilliant series of Magazine papers of the time’ (Coleridge, Table Talk, vol. ii, p. 278; ‘M. G. Lewis’s West India Journals’ in Quarterly Review, 50 (January, 1834), p. 377). The novel was one of Charles Dickens’s ‘perennial favourites’, and is a probable influence on the Brontë sisters (Philip Collins, ‘Dickens’s Reading’ in Dickensian, 60 (September 1964), p. 146; Tom Winnifrith, The Brontës and their Background (London: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 91–2). For more information, see Tales of Terror from Blackwood’s Magazine, eds. Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995), pp. 97–100, 282, 290.
