THE

MODERN ATHENIANS

THE EDINBURGH REVIEW

IN THE JEFFREY YEARS, 1802-1829

Tag Archives: the Quarterly Review

William Gifford (1756-1826)

GIFFORD was born in Ashburton, Devon, of working-class parents, and in his teens was apprenticed to a shoemaker, but a patron enabled him to attend Exeter College, Oxford.  His poems, The Baviad (1791) and The Maeviad (1795), were satires directed against the Della Cruscan poets and contemporary playwrights.  His Epistle to Peter Pindar (1800) attacked a fellow-satirist, John Wolcot.  In 1797-98, Gifford edited the Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner, and in 1802 he published a translation of Juvenal’s satires.  His edition of the plays of Philip Massinger appeared in 1805.  Reviewing the book three years later, the Edinburgh attacked its cantankerous notes [ER, 12:99-119].  Gifford responded sarcastically to the Edinburgh in a lengthy “Advertisement” to his second edition of Massinger’s works (1813).  Despite chronic ill health, he later published editions of the plays of Ben Jonson (1816) and John Ford (1827).  Gifford is best known for his editorship of the Quarterly; his correspondence with its founders discusses how to make it an effective counterblast to the Whig principles of the Edinburgh.  Unlike Jeffrey, he wrote few reviews himself, but hostile early readers perceived the Quarterly to be driven by his acerbic spirit.  As editor of the Quarterly, Gifford was caricatured as “Mr Vamp” by Thomas Love Peacock in Melincourt (1818), labeled the “Government Critic” by William Hazlitt in A Letter to William Gifford, Esq. (1819), and impugned for his irritability by Leigh Hunt in Ultra-Crepidarius (1823).

K.W.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Shelley was born in Sussex into the landed gentry and educated at Eton, but was expelled from Oxford after circulating his prose tract The Necessity of Atheism (1811).  His first major poem, Queen Mab, a utopian dream vision, was circulated in 1813 and pirated by radical publishers in 1821.  Shelley’s later major poems are restlessly expressive of both his skepticism and his transcendental idealism.  These include Alastor (1816), Prometheus Unbound (1820), Epipsychidion (1821), Adonais — an elegy commemorating John Keats (1821), and The Triumph of Life, left unfinished at his death.  Shelley also published two early Gothic novels — Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvyne (1811) — and in 1821 wrote a major prose manifesto, A Defence of Poetry.  He was reviled during his lifetime by the Quarterly and other periodicals for his alleged atheism, his liberal politics, his questioning of marriage, his abandonment of his first wife Harriet, and his association with the ‘Cockney’ Leigh Hunt and the ‘Satanic’ Lord Byron.  After the 1816 stay in Switzerland that inspired his second wife Mary to write Frankenstein (1818), Shelley and his family lived from 1818 in Italy, where he drowned off the coast in July 1822.  The Edinburgh did not mention Shelley while he was alive, but its ambivalent review by Hazlitt of his Posthumous Poems in 1824 called his poetry ‘a passionate dream’ and ‘a fever of the soul’ [ER, 40:494].

K.W.