Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue: Recent Whig Interpretations of Romantic Literary History
- 1 ‘Strange Vigour’: A Review of Reviews
- 2 ‘The Modern Athenians’: The Edinburgh Enterprise
- 3 ‘The Self-Indulgence and Self-Admiration of Genius’: Jeffrey, Words-worth and the Common Apprehension
- 4 ‘That Superior Tribunal’: Jeffrey and Wordsworth on the People and the Public
- 5 ‘A Mortal Antipathy to Scotchmen’: The Biographia and the Edinburgh Review
- 6 ‘Running with the English Hares and Hunting with the Scotch Blood-hounds’: Jeffrey and Byron
- 7 ‘Wars of the Tongue’: Blackwood's against the Edinburgh Review in Post-War Edinburgh
- 8 ‘Beware, O Teufelsdröckh, of Spiritual Pride!’: Jeffrey and Carlyle's Sartor Resartus
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
7 - ‘Wars of the Tongue’: Blackwood's against the Edinburgh Review in Post-War Edinburgh
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue: Recent Whig Interpretations of Romantic Literary History
- 1 ‘Strange Vigour’: A Review of Reviews
- 2 ‘The Modern Athenians’: The Edinburgh Enterprise
- 3 ‘The Self-Indulgence and Self-Admiration of Genius’: Jeffrey, Words-worth and the Common Apprehension
- 4 ‘That Superior Tribunal’: Jeffrey and Wordsworth on the People and the Public
- 5 ‘A Mortal Antipathy to Scotchmen’: The Biographia and the Edinburgh Review
- 6 ‘Running with the English Hares and Hunting with the Scotch Blood-hounds’: Jeffrey and Byron
- 7 ‘Wars of the Tongue’: Blackwood's against the Edinburgh Review in Post-War Edinburgh
- 8 ‘Beware, O Teufelsdröckh, of Spiritual Pride!’: Jeffrey and Carlyle's Sartor Resartus
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
True, modest, unobtrusive religion – charitable, forgiving, indulgent Christianity, is the greatest ornament and the greatest blessing that can dwell in the mind of man. But if there is one character more base, more infamous, and more shocking than another, it is him who, for the sake of some paltry distinction in the world, is ever ready to accuse conspicuous persons of irreligion – to turn common informer for the church – and to convert the most beautiful feelings of the human heart to the destruction of the good and great, by fixing upon talents, the indelible stigma of irreligion.
Sydney SmithIn a telling episode late in John Gibson Lockhart's report on the state of cultural life in Scotland in 1819, Peter's Letters to His Kinsfolk, Lockhart's fictional cultural tourist and narrator, Dr Peter Morris, confronts a ‘philosophical weaver’ in Glasgow:
As to his face, its language was the perfection of self-important non-chalance. A bitter grin of settled scepticism seemed to be planted from his nostril on either side … and altogether the personage gave one the idea of a great deal of glum shrewdness in a small way – I should have mentioned that he had a green apron (the symbol of his trade) wrapped about his middle beneath his upper garment – and that he held a number of the Edinburgh Review, twisted hard in his hand.
It may be that, as the weaver himself laments, ‘the Review's sairly fallen off’, but the identification of the Edinburgh Review as the Bible of a recently repoliticized artisan class is unequivocal. Lockhart's weaver is an iconic figure, characteristic of Tory polemic and of conservative satirical cartoons throughout the Romantic period, but especially prevalent in the 1790s and again in the years following the Battle of Waterloo. By ‘philosophical’, Lockhart means, of course, ‘intellectually and socially presumptuous’: ‘What a sad picture is here of the state of these conceited creatures!’ comments Morris at the end of the encounter, ‘Truly, I would hope this fashion of superficial infidelity may not be far from going out altogether’.
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- The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic BritainMammoth and Megalonyx, pp. 147 - 166Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014