ABSTRACT
sometime in 1858 Richard Bentley decided to complement his monthly magazine, Bentley’s Miscellany, with a quarterly review that would rival even the famous Edinburgh and Quarterly. Indeed, with a burst of initial enthusiasm he wrote to W. H. Prescott on September 3, 1858, “I am about to commence … a New Quarterly Review, which will be supported by most of the ablest writers of England, France, Germany, [and] Italy.” 1 This was a dream, but Bentley succeeded in procuring as remarkable a group of editors and contributors as any Victorian periodical could have boasted, before or since—unless it was the Saturday Review. The general editor was Douglas Cook, director of the Saturday Review; the literary editor William Scott, editor of the Christian Remembrancer and leader-writer for the Saturday; and the political editor the brilliant young Lord Robert Cecil, later to be third Marquis of Salisbury and Prime Minister of England, who was on the staff of the same weekly. 2 Of the twenty contributors—among them Sarah Austin, Cecil, Dean Church, W. B. Donne, E. A. Freeman, Anne and J. B. Mozley, H. L. Mansel, and Goldwin Smith—nineteen are in the Dictionary of National Biography, and eight were already contributing to the Saturday. Bentley’s high hopes, therefore, rested on a foundation of Saturday editors and reviewers who had made that weekly the outstanding periodical of its kind, to be supplemented by other writers of similar powers. Might they not create a new quarterly of high distinction?
