John Murray’s Quarterly Review: Letters 1807-1843

This scrupulously edited volume is the first edition of letters specifically related to the important British journal the Quarterly Review. Included are letters by notable literary and political figures such as Sir Walter Scott, George Canning, William Gifford, John Gibson Lockhart, and John Wilson Croker. The product of rigorous scholarship and careful attention to researchers’ requirements, the edition will interest students across all academic levels. The selection is comprehensive enough to provide valuable insights into Romantic and early Victorian literary and political history, but selective enough to be pertinent to a specialised readership interested in periodical journalism and publishing history. Informed by up-to-date scholarship and fresh research, the volume’s substantive introduction discusses the sources and dimensions of the Quarterly Review’s commercial success and cultural authority. It also provides a compelling account of tensions between the publisher’s commercial and his editors’ political and literary motivations. Students of reading and reception history will be interested in the discussion of press responses and the sociological make-up of the journal’s readership. The authoritative notes to the volume provide supporting information on the cultural and historical context.