THE

MODERN ATHENIANS

THE EDINBURGH REVIEW

IN THE JEFFREY YEARS, 1802-1829

Tag Archives: Walter Scott

Jane Austen (1775-1817)

, novelist.

JANE AUSTEN, the daughter of an English clergyman, has become perhaps the best-known novelist of her generation, even though she was overshadowed at the time by contemporaries such as Sir Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth, and Madame de Staël. While she began writing in childhood and wrote preliminary drafts of two of her mature novels during the 1790s, it was not until 1811, with the publication of Sense and Sensibility, that Austen launched her publishing career. She followed that with Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1816). Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, her first and last completed novels, appeared posthumously in 1818. Austen did achieve modest literary success before her death:  the Prince Regent admired her work highly enough to invite her to dedicate Emma to him (which she did somewhat reluctantly), and Scott praised Austen’s fiction both publicly in The Quarterly Review and privately in his journal. Scott’s article for The Quarterly was, however, the only significant review that Austen received during her lifetime; she was not one of the very select few women novelists to be reviewed by The Edinburgh, though Jeffrey was reportedly ‘kept up three nights’ by Emma (1815). Her reputation began to climb in the 1820s and 1830s and ‘the novels of Miss Austin’ received favourable mention in an article Jeffrey wrote on Felicia Hemans in 1829 (ER 50:33). When in 1846 Jeffrey published his Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, he cited Austen as an ‘intrinsically original’ writer who had contributed to rescuing the novel from the ‘despicable’ and ‘degraded’ state to which he saw the genre as having sunk by the opening years of the nineteenth century (Jeffrey Contributions 3: 2).

PP

 

James Hogg (c.1770 -1835)

JAMES HOGG was born near Ettrick, where he spent his early years as a tenant farmer, shepherd, and amateur musician and poet. He published Scottish Pastorals in 1801 and was recruited by Walter Scott to collect ballads for The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Hogg moved to Edinburgh in 1810 to start The Spy magazine, which failed the following year. His epic poem The Queen’s Wake led him to William Blackwood, who would soon launch his Edinburgh Monthly Magazine (later Blackwood’s Magazine). Blackwood’s was the primary engine for Hogg’s literary fame. Hogg contributed over one hundred works in Blackwood’s and appeared as the character of “The Ettrick Shepherd” in the Noctes Ambrosianae; his character was the most popular of the literary figures represented in the series (Richardson 187). Hogg also published numerous poetry collections and novels, most famously The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner in 1824. His 1831 quarrel with Blackwood led him to other publishers; they reconciled shortly before Blackwood’s death in 1834. Hogg died on 21 November 1835.

 

Hogg’s “Epitaphs on Living Characters,” published in the Scots Magazine in June 1810, depicted Francis Jeffrey as “Bonaparte the second . . . The one kept the monarchs of Europe in awe; But this to the genius of Europe gave law.” Jeffrey later reciprocated by writing a complimentary review of Hogg’s The Queen’s Wake in December 1814.

B.W.