ABSTRACT
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine was only too aware of the critical vigour of parody. One strategy in its inequitable but always entertaining repertoire was to link more orthodox critical writing (though orthodox is perhaps the wrong word for the mixture of flippancy, sarcasm and satire which characterises many of Maga’s essays) to a parody of the subject at hand. Thus, for instance, essays on Byron, Coleridge and Wordsworth are followed by parodies of those authors in a kind of satirical pincer movement. At the same time, the average Blackwoodian critical essay is often deeply tinged with satirical manoeuvring, most notably in the work of Lockhart and Wilson. And on other occasions, parodic poetry is mixed in unannounced within the main body of a review essay. These devices are all demonstrated in the December 1821 ‘Remarks on Shelley’s Adonais, An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, &C’. 1 The critical essay sees the Rev. George Croly venting his spleen on Adonais, whilst interpolated into the review are two parodies of the poem by Maginn.
