ABSTRACT
The LITERARY GAZETTE (1817–1862) was a Tory weekly published on Saturdays. It was founded in January 1817 by Henry Coburn (1782–1855), the slightly disreputable publisher who also published the New Monthly Magazine. In July 1817 William Jerdan (1782–1869) became part owner and editor, and he guided the Literary Gazette for the next thirty years. A comparison of passages in Jerdan’s Autobiography (London, 1852; II, 177–178 and 188) and Bryan Waller Procter’s Autobiographical Fragment and Biographical Notes (London, 1877; pp. 133–134) strongly suggests that the Reverend George Croly (1780–1860), an aspiring poet and miscellaneous writer, was the (hitherto unidentified) chief literary reviewer in the early days of the Literary Gazette who contributed “some exceedingly clever criticisms on Scott, Byron, Campbell, Southey, Coleridge, and other living poets.” Two general characteristics of reviews in the Literary Gazette and all other weeklies that strove to be comprehensive in their coverage are the haste with which the comments were written and the tendency of the reviewers to fill up space with long quotations from the volume under review.
