Various causes have been suggested as contributing to the instant and phenomenal success of the Review,—the puzzling anonymity of its articles, its magisterial tone, the audacity of its attacks, what Horner calls its “scurrility,” the novelty of its Scotch origin. All these causes doubtless had their influence. More important still, however, were the wit, the knowledge, and the originality of the brilliant contributors that Jeffrey rallied round him. Writing to his brother in July, 1803, Jeffrey thus describes his fellow-workers: “I do not think you know any of my associates. There is the sage Horner, however, whom you have seen, and who has gone to the English bar with the resolution of being Lord Chancellor; Brougham, a great mathematician, who has just published a book upon the Colonial Policy of Europe, which all you Americans should read; Rev. Sydney Smith and P. Elmsley, two Oxonian priests, full of jokes and erudition; my excellent little Sanscrit Hamilton, who is also in the hands of Bonaparte at Fontainebleau; Thomas Thomson and John Murray, two ingenious advocates; and some dozen of occasional contributors, among whom the most illustrious, I think, are young Watt of Birmingham and Davy of the Royal Institution.”[7] Many of these names are now forgotten, but those of Sydney Smith, Brougham, Horner, and Davy speak for themselves and are guarantees of brilliancy of style, originality of treatment, and vigorous thought.

The editor and the contributors, then, must receive their full share of credit for the success of the new Review; but their ability alone can hardly account for a success that converted the “blue and yellow” into a national institution. To explain a success so permanent and far-reaching, we must look beyond editor and contributors and consider the relation of the Review to its social environment. The Edinburgh Review came into being in answer to a popular need; it developed a new literary form to meet this need; and its business arrangements were such as enabled the cleverest and most suggestive writers to adapt their work to the requirements of the reading public more readily and more effectively than ever before. The meaning of these assertions will grow clearer as we consider the difference between the Edinburgh Review and earlier English Reviews.

[V]

Prior to 1802 there were two standard Reviews in Great Britain,—the Monthly Review and the Critical Review. Minor Reviews there had been in plenty, of longer or shorter life; but these two periodicals had pushed beyond their competitors and were regarded as the best of their kind. The Monthly Review had been founded in 1749 by Ralph Griffiths, a bookseller; it was Whig in politics and Low Church in religion. Its rival, the Critical Review, of which Smollett was for many years editor, had been founded in 1756, and was Tory and High Church. These Reviews were alike in form and in ostensible aim; they were published monthly, were made up of unsigned articles of moderate length, and professed to give competent accounts of the qualities of all new books. But though thus apparently worthy predecessors of the great Reviews with which nineteenth-century readers are familiar, they were really quite unlike them in general policy, in scope and style, and in influence. They were merely booksellers’ organs, under the strict supervision of booksellers, and often edited by booksellers. They were used persistently and systematically, though, of course, discreetly, to further the bookseller’s business schemes, to quicken the sale in case of a slow market, and to damage the publications of rivals. They were written for the most part by drudges and penny-a-liners, who worked under the orders of the bookseller like slaves under the lash of the slave-driver. These characteristics of the older Reviews may be best illustrated by a brief account of the methods in accordance with which Griffiths, the editor of the Monthly, conducted his Review, and by some choice anecdotes of his treatment of subordinates.

Griffiths was originally a bookseller; and, though he was able later to retire from this business and to devote himself wholly to the management of his Review, he retained still the instincts of a petty tradesman, and kept his eye on the state of the market like a skilful seller of perishable wares. Of scholarship, of genuine taste, and literary ability he had next to nothing; but he had shrewd common sense, sound business instincts, tact in dealing with men, readiness to bully or to fawn as might be needful, and unlimited patience in scheming for the commercial success of his venture.

His dealings with Goldsmith between 1755 and 1765, and with William Taylor of Norwich between 1790 and 1800, illustrate his narrow policy in the conduct of the Monthly and his tyranny towards contributors. Goldsmith, he by turns bullied and bribed according as poor Goldsmith was more or less in need of money. On one occasion he became Goldsmith’s security with his tailor for a new suit of clothes on condition that Goldsmith at once write four articles for the Review; these articles were turned out to order, and appeared in December, 1758. On Goldsmith’s failing to pay his tailor’s bill in the specified time, Griffiths demanded the return of the suit and also of the books; and when he found that Goldsmith had pawned the books, he wrote him abusively, terming him sharper and villain, and threatening him with jail. In 1759, on the appearance of Goldsmith’s first book, Griffiths ordered one of his hacks, the notorious Kenrick, to ridicule the work, and to make a personal attack on the author. These orders were faithfully carried out in the next number of the Monthly Review.[8]

With William Taylor of Norwich Griffiths took a very different tone. Taylor was one of the few men of breeding and of parts who, before 1802, condescended to write for Reviews, and he was moreover for many years the great English authority on German literature. For these reasons, Griffiths always used him with the utmost tenderness, and, even when giving him orders or refusing his articles, took a flattering tone of deference and admiration. On one occasion Taylor demanded an increase of pay; Griffiths’s answer gives a very instructive glimpse of the relations between the bookseller-editor and his hack-writers. The “gratuity” for review work, Griffiths assures Taylor, had been settled fifty years before at two guineas a sheet of sixteen printed pages, “a sum not then deemed altogether puny,” and in the case of most writers had since remained unchanged, although there had been certain “allowed exceptions in favour of the most difficult branches of the business.” These exceptions, however, had tended to cause much jealousy and heart-burning among the contributors; for “it could not be expected that those labourers in the vineyard, who customarily executed the less difficult branches of the culture, would ever be cordially convinced that their merits and importance were inferior to any.” After these laborious explanations Griffiths agrees to raise Taylor’s compensation to three guineas per sheet of sixteen printed pages, though he expressly points out that by so doing he risks “exciting jealousy in the corps, similar, perhaps, to what happened among the vine-dressers, Matt., chap. xx.” “If objections arise,” he shrewdly continues, “we must resort for consolation to a list of candidates for the next vacancy, for in the literary harvest there is never any want of reapers.”[9] Griffiths’s slave-driving propensities show clearly through the thin disguise of politic words. Plainly he feels himself absolute master of the minds and wills of an indefinite number of penny-a-liners; and it is on these penny-a-liners that he resolves to depend for the great mass of his articles.

The evil influence of the publisher’s despotism ran through the Review and vitiated all its judgments. The editor-publisher prescribed to his hacks what treatment a book should receive. Sometimes this was with a view to the market. “I send also the Horæ Bibilicæ at a venture,” writes Griffiths to Taylor, “... it signifies not much whether we notice it or not, as it is not on sale.”[10] The italics are Griffiths’s own. Sometimes, the publisher-editor merely wanted to favour a friend or injure an enemy. Griffiths’s dictation in the case of Goldsmith’s first book has already been noted. On another occasion Griffiths sent a copy of Murphy’s Tacitus to Taylor with the following significant suggestion: “One thing I have to mention, entre nous, that Mr. M. is one of us, and that it is a rule in our society for the members to behave with due decorum toward each other, whenever they appear at their own bar as authors, out of their own critical province. If a kingdom (like poor France at present) be divided against itself, ‘how shall that kingdom stand’?”[11] If Griffiths ventured on this dictation with a man of Taylor’s standing and independence, his tyranny over his regular dependents must have been complete and relentless.

As a result, review-writing became purely hackwork. The reviewer had no voice of his own in his criticism; what little individuality he might, in his feebleness, have put into his work, had he been left to himself, disappeared under the eye of his taskmaster. He became a mere machine, praising and blaming perfunctorily and conventionally, at the bidding of the editor-publisher. Mawkish adulation or random abuse became the staple of critical articles; and in neither kind of work did the critic rise above the dead level of hopeless mediocrity.

A final result of this whole system of review-managing and hack-writing was unwillingness on the part of men of position to have anything to do with review-writing. If a man criticised books in a Review, he felt that he was putting himself on a level with Kenrick, Griffiths’s notorious hireling, who had been imprisoned for libel, with Kit Smart, who had bound himself to a bookseller for ninety-nine years, and with other like wretches. William Taylor of Norwich was one of the few gentlemen who, before 1802, ventured to write for Reviews.