ABSTRACT
Shelley, Alastor (1816); review by John Gibson Lockhart, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, VI (Nov. 1819), 148–154. Scott had quoted from the Alastor volume in his review of Frankenstein, but we do not know whether he passed the volume on to Lockhart (soon to be his son-in-law) or whether Lockhart had purchased the volume for himself. In any case, Lockhart not only writes a spirited appreciation of the first volume of poetry published under Shelley’s name, but also rebukes the Quarterly and other journals for their treatment of (or silence on) Shelley’s poetry (pp. 153–154). It seems likely that he knew the true identity of the Quarterly’s reviewer of The Revolt of Islam (John Taylor Coleridge, who had been a fellow at Exeter College, Oxford) for in his pamphlet John Bull’s Letter to Lord Byron (1821), Lockhart, speaking of the Quarterly reviewers, mentions “Mr. Coleridge (I mean not the madman, but the madman’s idiot nephew).” An ironic conclusion to this anonymous controversy between Lockhart and J. T. Coleridge was that, at Gifford’s retirement from editorship of the Quarterly in 1824, Murray first installed J. T. Coleridge as editor and then ousted him in favor of Lockhart (1825).
