Undisciplining the Romantic Periodical: Unruly Readers in Print Communities, 1817-1825

In approaching the highly partisan arena of late Romantic-Period periodicals and their often combative modes of reviewing, it can often seem as if acts of reading and writing occur within tightly regulated critical, cultural, and political parameters which might suggest to the reader a considerable degree of editorial control. The temptation to characterise a number of notable Romantic periodicals along these lines might lead to the conclusion that in such apparently well-ordered print communities reviewer and reader are often closely aligned in their opinions and allegiances. Yet such a view is problematised by Mark Parker’s reminder that in literary periodicals and magazines ‘work in such a setting enters a variety of relations with other articles and ongoing institutional concerns that give subtle inflection to its meaning’ . With this in mind, I suggest that something of a contradiction begins to emerge in the character of a number of literary magazines around the turn of the 1820s: a self-referentiality which encourages acts of reading that operate in an autonomous, potentially unruly fashion, and which came to embody a new spirit of vibrant and often scandalous criticism which sometimes spilled out beyond the pages of the periodicals themselves. Taking selected examples from both the London Magazine and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine between 1817 and 1825, this paper will attempt to explore how a number of articles and reviews in this period sought to encourage modes of reading which called into question some of the assumptions regarding the print communities which they helped to define.