From its first issue, published on the 10th October 1802, Francis Jeffrey's Edinburgh Review established a strong reputation and exerted a powerful influence. Under Jeffrey's ubiquitous editorial hand, it evolved the informative and challenging review essay which it made its own.
In the first major literary study of the Edinburgh Review for over fifty years, Christie contextualizes the periodical within the culture wars of the Romantic era. Early numbers of the Edinburgh Review are characterized by a self-conscious sense of purpose. It was a continuous and coherent political and cultural enterprise, sustained by the oppositional energy of the talented and politically disfranchised Whig faction who launched it. However, it also saw much dissent; bitter personal disagreements between Henry Brougham and Sydney Smith, political and intellectual arguments between Francis Horner and Brougham, as well as violent differences of opinion between occasional reviewers such as Walter Scott, James Mill, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Malthus, Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, Thomas Carlyle and Thomas Babington Macaulay.
Christie approaches some of the most celebrated confrontations through the notional and national distinctions of the time – between Whig and Tory; Scotland and England; Byron and Wordsworth; Review critic and Lake poet.