ABSTRACT
The BRITISH CRITIC (17931824, then continued as a quarterly) was a High Church, Tory monthly review founded to counteract the dissenting and reformist bias of the three leading monthly reviews of the time – the Monthly Review, the Critical Review, and the Analytical Review. William Beloe (1756-1817), its first editor, claims in his autobiography, The Sexagenarian (2 vols., London: Rivingtons, 1817), that the journal enjoyed the support of William Pitt and such leading churchmen as Charles Moore, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Beilby Porteus, Bishop of London (I, 298). The publisher was the family house of Rivington, booksellers in St. Paul’s Churchyard at least as early as 1710, who published “chiefly books relating to the Established Church” (Thomas Rees, Reminiscences of Literary London from 1779 to 1853, New York, 1896, p. 32). Besides Beloe, the chief projector and second editor was Robert Nares (1753-1829), a churchman (Archdeacon of Stafford, 1801) who, though dismissed as editor in 1811, later returned and was editor in 1821 (see Alaric A. Watts’ letter to William Black wood, December 17, 1821; Margaret Oliphant, William Blackwood and His Sons, 1897, I, 499).
