ABSTRACT
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine was the most important literary journal to be founded in the post-Napoleonic period. 1 Established by the Edinburgh publisher William Blackwood in 1817, Blackwood was publishing some 6,000 copies per issue by the following year. 2 Ultra-Tory in politics, Blackwood’s is characterised by a wild invention and an acerbic but often compelling humour. Particularly important is its stylish parody, 3 notably by William Maginn, and the satirical cornucopia of contemporary literature and politics that is the Nodes Ambrosianæ, a series of imaginary conversations by John Wilson and others, which ran from 1822 to 1835. The ferocious satirical partisanship evident in the Nodes is echoed in Blackwood’s outrageous brand of literary criticism. After a dull start which led to the dismissal of the original editors, the magazine was relaunched in October 1817 on a sea of stylish vitriol against the so-called ‘Cockney school’ of Hunt, Hazlitt and Keats. 4 Though the likes of De Quincey, Hogg and Scott contributed to Blackwood’s, or ‘Maga’ as it often labelled itself, the critical tone of the journal is best captured in the corrosive flair of its key reviewers, John Gibson Lockhart and John Wilson (‘Christopher North’). Like its metropolitan Tory rival the Quarterly, which popularised the notion of a ‘Satanic school’, ‘Maga’ was fond of grouping authors into schools, offering a series of articles on ‘The Lake School of Poetry’ 5 and coining a powerfully negative critical term in the series ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry’ 6 As the magazine noted in June 1821, ‘It is the fashion of the present day to arrange poets into schools; and we have the Lake School, the Cockney School, the School of Pope, the Ballad School, and a dozen others, well tenanted with pupils.’ 7 ‘The Sable School of Poetry’ is an able parody of a Blackwood’s ‘school of’ article. The employer of poetical panegyrists of blacking is elevated into the founder of a new school of poetry and the article characterises his school (but not before B. M. has dealt with Warren’s suspicious antecedents, absolving the London manufacturer from the charge of being a ‘Cockney’ and making the unlikely assertion that he is in fact a Scot, of ‘the land of William Wallace and Christopher North’). In particular, the school of Warren is compared to that of Wordsworth. Like his Lake School contemporary, Warren is possessed of the ‘true secret of imagination’. His faults are also Wordsworth’s; he is a person, in The Prelude’s phrase, ‘Whose tale is only of himself’. 8 In another parodic counterpart to the notion of Wordsworth’s ‘egotistical sublime’, ‘B. M.’ comments that ‘The only fault we have to find with Mr. Warren consists in his excessive egotism’. He shares this defect ‘with the choicest spirits of the age’, thus manifesting a peculiarly Romantic sensibility. Criticism of Warren’s puffs here acts as a parodic counterpart of criticism of the Romantic preoccupation with, to quote from The Excursion, ‘the mind/ Turned inward’. 9
