ABSTRACT

The CRITICAL REVIEW (1756–1817), a monthly whose first editor had been Tobias Smollett, was the same kind of journal as the Monthly Review, but it lacked the continuity of the Griffiths’ publication. Derek Roper’s study of the shifts in “The Politics of the Critical Review, 1756–1817,” Durham University Journal, 2nd Series, XXII (1961), 117–122, provides a convenient index to its many changes of ownership. (See also John O. Hayden, The Romantic Reviewers, University of Chicago Press, 1969, pp. 42–44.) A succession of publishers employed a succession of editors in the 1790’s and first two decades of the nineteenth century in a vain attempt to recapture a readership partly alienated through the erratic behavior of the Critical itself and partly lost to the quarterlies. It died, significantly, just as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine launched its new journalism of wit and personal abuse.