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COPYRIGHT 2006 Boston University
Ms. 4004 OF THE BLACKWOOD PAPERS IN THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF Scotland includes a series of lengthy letters to William Blackwood from William Davies, partner in the London publishing firm of Cadell and Davies. In April 1819 Cadell and Davies had become the London publisher of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the notorious Maga, after that function had been abandoned by Baldwin, Cradock and Joy in July 1818, and then by a disgusted John Murray in March 1819. (1) Davies' letters are a chatty, detailed, sometimes day-to-day account of London literary life and the strategies of London book-promotion--everything that Blackwood in Edinburgh should know to further their shared business ventures. Prominent among those ventures was the forthcoming Peter's Letters to His Kinsfolk by "Dr. Peter Morris," in which Cadell and Davies had accepted a half-share. "Much may certainly be done, both at Edinburgh and London, to prepare the public interest for these Letters," Davies believed, and he was pleased to inform his Edinburgh partner that two London newspapers already had begun to publish extracts from the book. And the success of Peter's Letters might, in turn, counteract the rising criticism of Maga, another shared concern. "Peter's Letters have a double duty to perform"--one of which was to salve the wounds of Archibald Constable, Wordsworth, Coleridge and other Britons on both sides of the Tweed who had been bloodied by the Magazine. "We are, now and then, made to hear complaints of so many people being roughly, or even unjustly, handled in it ... and we do think it has somehow acquired a character for severity, which will require some time and pains to wipe away." Peter's Letters might be that solvent: "... you have sent out into the world the best pioneer in defence of your Magazine that could possibly have been managed," wrote Davies, switching metaphors; "I am full of hopes that, when the 'Letters' are published, not only Mr Coleridge, but many others that I am thinking of, influenced by the manner in which the alleged objectionable points of the [Mag.sup.e] are so handsomely admitted, will be much readier to join your standard than heretofore." It was essential for the good of Maga, then, that the Letters be promoted widely, in a campaign that would include a visit by Blackwood to London in the month after the Letters was published: "Preparatory to the actual publication, you will, of course, be prepared with a list of the persons, both in Scotland and here, to whom it will be expedient to send the book, as presents; and feeling as I do, how essentially Peter's Letters are calculated to benefit the interests of your Magazine, I have no hesitation in recommending that the list of presents in England be a very numerous one--Amongst others, I would certainly advise a liberal distribution, tempered by prudence, amongst the editors of newspapers--Mr Perry, Dr Stoddart...." (2)
Davies' tactful hints of Maga's troubles could not have surprised William Blackwood. Since his magazine's inception in April 1817 (titled The Edinburgh Monthly Magazine for its first six numbers) Blackwood had watched its sales and enemies increase and its allies diminish. Henry Mackenzie, Patrick Fraser Tytler, and Dr. Thomas McCrie, men of some influence in Edinburgh, had refused to continue as contributors. (3) Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, Maga's first London publisher, had borne the brunt of London's enmity against the magazine, and then decided that their connection with Blackwood was "no longer compatible with a just regard to our own interests." (4) John Murray had then become the London publisher, only to lament "the appearance of a Magazine which has involved everyone connected with it ... in alternate anxiety disgrace & misery." (5) After the publication of the "Chaldee Manuscript"--James Hogg's, John Wilson's and John Gibson Lockhart's apocalyptic parody--one John Graham Dalyell, member of the Faculty of Advocates, had initiated legal proceedings against Blackwood, and Lockhart feared that Maga might be banned from the Faculty of Advocates Library, a shameful loss of literary caste in Edinburgh. (6) Both magazine and publisher had been criticized at a meeting of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and Blackwood had been shunned by the allies of Archibald Constable at a meeting of the Society of Booksellers. (7) In 1818 Macvey Napier, editor of the Supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published by Constable, and eventual successor of Francis Jeffrey as editor of the Edinburgh Review, also published by Constable, had published a pamphlet, Hypocrisy Unveiled, And Calumny Detected: In A Review Of Blackwood's Magazine, describing Maga as "the vilest production that ever disfigured and soiled the annals of Scottish literature." (8) Even worse, Napier was plotting to expel--not only Maga from the Faculty of Advocates Library--but also Wilson and Lockhart, both quondam lawyers, from the Faculty itself. Oliver and Boyd, printers of the magazine, would shortly sever their connection because of "apprehensions of being involved in actions of damages in consequence of the publication of articles which by some have been considered to fall under the denomination of libels." (9) They would be replaced as printer by James Ballantyne, Scott's printer and literary advisor, who would then threaten to resign before printing "what he considers to be disgrace." (10) Perhaps Blackwood's housemaid remained faithful.
The problem was Blackwood's "personalities"--its anonymous and pseudonymous attacks upon the moral characters and physical ailments of public figures. The pulpit voice of Thomas Chalmers, a leader of the predisruption Church of Scotland, had been described as "jejune ... coarse, and even unnatural." The simian advocate John Graham Dalyell had been satirized in the Chaldee Manuscript as a creature with a face "like unto the face of an ape, [who] chattered continually, and his nether parts were uncomely." In that same Caledonian Dunciad the literary antiquarian Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe had a voice "like the voice of the unclean bird which ... defileth the holy places," while Thomas Pringle and James Cleghorn--the former editors of Blackwood's Edinburgh Monthly Magazine, who had defected to Constable's Scots Magazine and whose lameness forced both to walk with crutches--were pictured as hobbling through Edinburgh with joints of wood. (11) "Edinburgh is rather too narrow for satire so markedly personal," Walter Scott warned Blackwood, "and there are certainly several individuals who, from their character and situation, have reason to resent having been so roughly treated." (12) One such was Archibald Constable, one of Scott's publishers and Blackwood's arch-rival, whom Maga repeatedly referred to as "The Crafty," the unscrupulous eminence gris of Scottish publishing whose Edinburgh Reviewers were "the infidels in Edinburgh," "those heirs of the malignity of Gibbon and the scorn of Voltaire," and whose Supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica was edited by the incompetent Macvey Napier. (13) Maga claimed that Constable demanded multi-volume works from authors in order to charge...
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