ABSTRACT
The MONTHLY MAGAZINE (1796–1825) was published by the liberal publishing magnate Sir Richard Phillips and edited until 1806 by Dr. John Aiken. The reviews in the Monthly Magazine were, for the most part, short notices (sometimes grouped together in an annual supplementary volume), written by the editor or by an overworked hack writer, who in certain instances gives no evidence of having read the books he is noticing. Lyrical Ballads grew out of a plan by Wordsworth and Coleridge to write for the Monthly Magazine to help defray the cost of a walking tour. “The poem” that they began turned into Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner – ironically, the one poem in Lyrical Ballads that the Monthly Magazine’s reviewer picks out for criticism. From then on, it was all downhill for Wordsworth and Coleridge, who were treated as turncoats by the staunchly liberal Monthly Magazine. Shelley, however, proved too radical for the journal, and only Byron and Keats received generally favorable notices.
