ABSTRACT
First published in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, III, May 1833, pp. 141–8. It was reprinted in Hunt, Political, pp. 258–70. William Tait (1793–1864; DNB) founded Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine in April 1832 on the crest of widespread radical enthusiasm for the Reform Bill, and quickly established it as the organ of advanced liberalism in Scotland, extending the philosophical radicalism of London’s Westminster Review, and directly countering the Toryism of its chief Scottish rival, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. ‘Tait a Bookseller here has attempted a Magazine, by way of rival to mine’, wrote William Blackwood (1776–1834; DNB) in April 1832, ‘and of course it is as much Radical as we are Tory’ (The Letters of Thomas De Quincey to His Publishers, and Other Letters, 1819–1832, ed. Barry Symonds, unpub. PhD., University of Edinburgh, 1994, p. 438). In the first issue of the magazine, Tait wrote that ‘we are upon the confines of a new era….Mighty questions have been stirred; deep interests have been created; old things are passing away; all things are becoming new’ (vol. i, p. 64). Such heady rhetoric characterized the magazine throughout its first year as it celebrated the Reform Bill, attacked Tory corruption and mismanagement, and championed the extension of civil liberties. By April 1833 Tait could justly claim that,
during the arduous contest between the people in conjunction with Earl Grey’s administration and the Whig party, on one side, with the enemies of all Reform on the other, we have not ceased to advocate the just cause, in season and out of season. We have fought the people’s battles with all our might; and with the single object of the people’s good (vol. iii, p. ix).
Contributors during these early years included leading radicals such as Richard Cobden (1806–65; DNB), John Bright (1811–89; DNB), Ebenezer Elliott (1781–1849; DNB), and John Stuart Mill.