With the establishment of the Edinburgh Review all this was changed. The prime principle of the new Review was independence of booksellers. The plan was not a bookseller’s scheme, but was the outcome of the ambitious fervour of half a dozen young adventurers in law, literature, and politics. From the start the bookseller was a “mere instrument,” as Brougham specially notes. The management of the Review was at first in the hands of Sydney Smith. When he set out for London his last words to the publisher, Constable, were, “If you will give £200 per annum to your editor and ten guineas a sheet, you will soon have the best Review in Europe.” Accordingly, the editorship was at once offered to Jeffrey, at even a higher salary, £300, than Sydney Smith had named. Jeffrey hesitated because of “the risk of general degradation.” But he found the £300 “a monstrous bribe”; moreover, the other contributors were all planning to take their ten guineas a sheet; accordingly, after many qualms, he swallowed his scruples and became a paid editor. “The publication,” he wrote to his brother, in July, 1803, “is in the highest degree respectable as yet, as there are none but gentlemen connected with it. If it ever sink into the ordinary bookseller’s journal, I have done with it.”
So began Jeffrey’s “reign” of twenty-six years; and so ended the despotism of booksellers. Henceforth the editor, not the publisher, was master. It was Jeffrey who decided what books should be handled, or rather what subjects should be discussed; it was Jeffrey who determined the price to be paid for each article,—“I had,” he declares, “an unlimited discretion in this respect”; it was Jeffrey who pleaded with the dilatory, mollified the refractory, and reached out here and there after new contributors; in short, it was Jeffrey who shaped the policy of the Review and impressed on it its distinctive character.
But there were several other hardly less important points in which the business policy of the Edinburgh was a new departure. The pay for reviewing was greatly increased. The old price had been two guineas a sheet of sixteen printed pages; the Edinburgh Review, after the first three numbers, paid ten guineas a sheet, and very soon sixteen guineas. Moreover, this was the minimum rate; over two-thirds of the articles were, according to Jeffrey, “paid much higher, averaging from twenty to twenty-five guineas a sheet on the whole number.”
Again, every contributor was forced to take pay; no contributor, however nice his honour, was suffered to refuse. This regulation was of the utmost importance; the rule salved the consciences of many brilliant young professional men, who were glad of pay, but ashamed to write for it, and afraid of being dubbed penny-a-liners. By Jeffrey’s clever arrangement they could write for fame or for simple amusement, and then have money “thrust upon them.” With high prices and enforced compensation the new Review at once drew into its service men of a totally different stamp from the old hack-writers.
Finally, the Edinburgh was published quarterly, whereas the old Reviews were published monthly. This change was for two reasons important: in the first place, writers had more time in which to prepare their articles and led less of a hand-to-mouth life intellectually; and, in the second place, the Review made no attempt to notice all publications, and chose for discussion only books of real significance. Coleridge particularly commends this part of the policy of the Review: “It has a claim upon the gratitude of the literary republic, and, indeed, of the reading public at large, for having originated the scheme of reviewing those books only, which are susceptible and deserving of argumentative criticism.”[12]
[VI]
These, then, were the principal points in which the organization and policy of the Edinburgh Review contrasted with those of its predecessors; and the influence of these changes on the tone and spirit of the articles in the new Review can hardly be exaggerated. The Edinburgh Review was not a catch-all for waste information; it was an organ of thought, a busy intellectual centre, from which the newest ideas were sent out in a perpetual stream through the minds of sympathetic readers. The Review had opinions of its own on all public questions. In politics, it advocated the principles of the Constitutional Whigs, at first in a nonpartisan spirit, after 1808, fiercely and aggressively; it pleaded for reform of the representation, for Catholic emancipation, for a wise recognition of the just discontent of the lower classes, and for judicious measures to allay this discontent without violent Constitutional changes. In social matters, it urged reforms of all kinds, the repeal of the game-laws, the improvement of prisons, the protection of chimney-sweeps and other social unfortunates. In religion, it argued for toleration. In education, it attacked pedantry and tradition, ridiculed the narrowness of university ideals, and contended for the adoption of practical methods and utilitarian aims. In all these departments it criticised the existing order of things, always brilliantly and suggestively, and sometimes fiercely and radically, and stirred the public into a keener consciousness and more intelligent appreciation of the questions of the hour, social, political, and religious.
Now it is plain that, to accomplish all this, writers would find it necessary to go far outside of the old limits of book-reviewing, and to make their articles express their own independent ideas on various important topics, rather than simply their critical opinions of the merits of new publications. And this is precisely what happened. A book-review became in most cases merely a mask for the writer’s own ideas on some burning question of the hour. In other words, the establishment of the Edinburgh Review really led to the evolution of a new literary form; the old-fashioned review-article was converted into a brief argumentative essay discussing some living topic, political or social, in the light of the very latest ideas. This kind of essay had been unknown in the eighteenth century, and was developed at the opening of the nineteenth century in response to the needs of the moment.
Nor was this change in the nature of the review-article unremarked at the time; Hazlitt noted it, and with his usual sourness protested against it. “If [the critic] recurs,” he says, “to the stipulated subject in the end, it is not till after he has exhausted his budget of general knowledge; and he establishes his own claims first in an elaborate inaugural dissertation de omni scibili et quibusdam aliis, before he deigns to bring forward the pretensions of the original candidate for praise, who is only the second figure in the piece. We may sometimes see articles of this sort, in which no allusion whatever is made to the work under sentence of death, after the first announcement of the title-page.”[13] Coleridge, on the other hand, approved of the change, and commended the “plan of supplying the vacant place of the trash or mediocrity wisely left to sink into oblivion by their own weight, with original essays on the most interesting subjects of the time, religious or political; in which the titles of the books or pamphlets prefixed furnish only the name and occasion of the disquisition.”[14] The reviewers themselves recognized, of course, the change they were working, though they did not altogether realize its significance. In 1807, Horner writes Jeffrey, “Have you any good subjects in view for your nineteenth? There are two I wish you, yourself, would undertake, if you can pick up books that would admit of them.”[15] This quotation illustrates the fact that the important question in the minds of the reviewers was always, not “What new books have appeared?” but “What topics just now have the greatest actuality and are best worth discussing?”
This, then, was largely the cause of the success of the Review: it offered, in its articles, a literary form by means of which the most active and original minds could at once come into communication with “the intelligent public” on all vital topics; it made the best thought and the newest knowledge more readily available than ever before for readers who were every day becoming more alive to their value.