Romanticism and Blackwood's Magazine:'An Unprecedented Phenomenon'

Romanticism and Blackwood's Magazine is inspired by the ongoing critical fascination with Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, and the burgeoning recognition of its centrality to the Romantic age. Though the magazine itself was published continuously for well over a century and a half, this volume concentrates specifically on those years when William Blackwood was at the helm, beginning with his founding of the magazine in 1817 and closing with his death in 1834. These were the years when, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it in 1832, Blackwood's reigned as 'an unprecedented Phenomenon in the world of letters.' The magazine placed itself at the centre of the emerging mass media, commented decisively on all the major political and cultural issues that shaped the Romantic movement, and published some of the leading writers of the day, including Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, John Galt, Felicia Hemans, James Hogg, Walter Scott, and Mary Shelley.

'This much-needed volume reminds us not only why Blackwood's was the most influential periodical publication of the time, but also how its writers, writings, and critical agendas continue to shape so many of the scholarly concerns of Romantic studies in the twenty-first century.' - Charles Mahoney, Associate Professor, University of Connecticut, USA

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Notes on Contributors
'A character so various, and yet so indisputably its own': A Passage to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine; R.Morrison & D.S.Roberts
PART I: BLACKWOOD'S AND THE PERIODICAL PRESS
Beginning Blackwood's: The Right Mix of Dulce and Ùtile; P.Flynn
John Gibson Lockhart and Blackwood's: Shaping the Romantic Periodical Press; T.Richardson
From Gluttony to Justified Sinning: Confessional Writing in Blackwood's and the London Magazine; D.Higgins
Camaraderie and Conflict: De Quincey and Wilson on Enemy Lines; R.Morrison
Selling Blackwood's Magazine, 1817-1834; D.Finkelstein
PART II: BLACKWOOD'S CULTURE AND CRITICISM
Blackwood's 'Personalities'; T.Mole
Communal Reception, Mary Shelley, and the 'Blackwood's School' of Criticism; N.Mason
Blackwoodian Allusion and the Culture of Miscellaneity; D.Stewart
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in the Scientific Culture of Early Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh; W.Christie
The Art and Science of Politics in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, c. 1817-1841; D.Kelly
Prosing Poetry: Blackwood's and Generic Transposition, 1820-1840; J.Camlot
PART III: BLACKWOOD'S FICTIONS
Blackwood's and the Boundaries of the Short Story; T.Killick
The Edinburgh of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and James Hogg's Fiction; G.Hughes
'The Taste for Violence in Blackwood's Magazine'; M.Schoenfield
PART IV: BLACKWOOD'S AT HOME
John Wilson and Regency Authorship; R.Cronin
John Wilson and Sport; J.Strachan
William Maginn and the Blackwood's 'Preface' of 1826; D.E.Latané, Jr.
All Work and All Play: Felicia Hemans's Edinburgh Noctes; N.Sweet
PART V: BLACKWOOD'S ABROAD
Imagining India in Early Blackwood's; D.S.Roberts
Tales of the Colonies: Blackwood's, Provincialism, and British Interests Abroad; A.Jarrells
Selected Bibliography
Index

ROBERT MORRISON is Queen's National Scholar at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. His book, The English Opium-Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey was a finalist for the James Tait Black Prize. He has edited writings by Jane Austen, Leigh Hunt, Thomas De Quincey, and John Polidori.
DANIEL SANJIV ROBERTS is Reader in English at Queen's University Belfast, UK. His publications include a monograph, Revisionary Gleam: De Quincey, Coleridge, and the High Romantic Argument (2000), and major critical editions of Thomas De Quincey's Autobiographic Sketches and Robert Southey's The Curse of Kehama; the latter was cited as a Distinguished Scholarly Edition by the MLA. He is currently working on an edition of Charles Johnstone's novel The History of Arsaces, Prince of Betlis for the Early Irish Fiction series.

"From Indomania to Indophobia":Thomas De Quincey's Providential Orientalism

Thomas De Quincey’s terrifying oriental nightmares, reported to sensational acclaim in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), have become a touchstone of romantic imperialism in recent studies of the literature of the period (Leask 1991; Barrell 1992 et al). De Quincey’s collocation of “all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions” in the hypnagogic hallucinations that characterized what he called “the pains of opium” seems to anticipate neatly Said’s theory of orientalism, whereby the orient was supplied by the west with “a mentality, a genealogy, an atmosphere,” the attitudinal basis as he argues for the continuing march of imperialism from the late eighteenth century. Yet, as Thomas Trautmann (1997) has pointed out, orientalist scholarship based in India and led by the influential Asiatic Society of Bengal in the late eighteenth century was extremely enthusiastic about Indian classical antiquity. The early orientalist scholarship posited ethnic, linguistic, cultural and religious links between Europe and India, while recognizing the greater antiquity of Indian civilization. This favourable attitude (which Trautmann calls “Indomania”) was overtaken in the nineteenth century by disavowal of that scholarship and repugnance (which he calls “Indophobia”), influenced by utilitarian and evangelical attitudes to colonialism. De Quincey’s lifespan covers this crucial period of change. My paper examines his evangelical upbringing and interest in biblical and orientalist scholarship to suggest his anxious investment in these modes of thinking. I will suggest that the bizarre orientalist fusions of his dreams can be better understood in the context of changing attitudes to the imperialism during the period. An examination of his work provides a far more dynamic understanding of the processes of orientalism than the binary model suggested by Said. The transformation implied from imperial scholarship to governance, I will suggest, is not irrelevant to a world which continues to pull apart on various grounds of race and ethnicity, and reflects on our own role in the academy today.

John Thompson: Seeing through China

In 1848, Karl Marx predicted that a flow of cheap commodities would be the heavy artillery which would batter down all Chinese walls and open up the country to the west (Marx, 1978, p. 477). The Scottish photographer John Thomson (1837-1921) was both chronicler of and participant in the early moments of this process. Thomson was a commercial photographer who first arrived in the Far East in 1862. He earned the moniker of 'China' in a decade-long stay during which he photographed what he considered to be the key aspects of its culture and landscape. In this body of work, Illustrations of China and its People (first published in 1874) is perhaps the most comprehensive. It explores, through two hundred photographs and accompanying texts, a series of phenomena from the macro-scale of landscape, infrastructure and industry to the smaller scales of streetscapes, domestic spaces, individual portraits, and other details of everyday life. Despite his own description of the volumes as encyclopedic, Illustrations is geographically quite limited. Thomson's explorations into the hinterland proceed up the country’s principal rivers from those coastal ports which had already been wrested into western hands during the Opium Wars (of the 1840s) and subsequently opened up to trade. This is perhaps one of the reasons why Illustrations has been described as an explicitly colonial text, a guide-book for the prospective settler whose content offered the strategic knowledge of land, culture and natural resources necessary if the territorial advantages of the coastal periphery were to extended to the interior (Jeffrey, 1981, p. 64). It can also be argued, however, that Thomson’s volume offered justification for a potential colonial presence. Faced with a civilization whose history was as sophisticated as the west, it depicts a culture that is static and moribund, its addiction to traditional values an impediment to progress. While this is perhaps most explicit in the texts of Illustrations of China, it can also be seen in the images whose uniform chemical rendering also serves to make an essentially diverse culture seem homogenous. Yet it is these images that distinguish Illustrations from previous attempts to collate China’s culture and landscape. Here, the mechanical precision of his camera captures a reality that often subverts the colonial narrative, confounding stereotypes as Thomson’s mass-produced images allow another China to emerge.

La Comunità ebraica di Shanghai

The Jewish community in Shanghai was among the first to settle in the Treaty Ports which were opened after the Opium war. Jewish population grew until the rendition of the foreign settlements to the Chinese authorities, and its history broadly consists of three periods.The first Jews came to Shanghai in the XIX century were sephardits from Iraq and India. Among those emigrated to Shanghai following the expansion of the British commerce in China were such famous families as Sassoons, Hardoons and Kadoories.The second wave arrived with the White Russians exodus after the October Revolution; they were askanzits Jews who fled from pogroms and the Russian civil war. The third wave were Jews fleeing from central Europe in the 1930s. This group was the largest of the three.The first settlers saw Shanghai as a port of opportunities, while the others came there seeking refuge.The interwar Shanghai could offer protection and a temporary place of residence for Jewish people. In the 1920s and 1930s Jews coming to Shanghai were helped by local Jewish associations, which supported them in the search for accommodations and jobs. This net of associations was effective until WWII. The war, however, made them face increasing number of contraints. In this constrained situation we should remember that the Japanese authorities, occupying the International Settlement, imposed a ban for new Jewish arrivals to settle in the Hongkou district; while the French authorities under the Vichy government imposed a complete ban on Jewish residents in their concession. Finally, the Jewish immigration to Shanghai had stopped completely in 1942, because there were no more ways to get there.Japanese authorities, however, were not interested in applying the racial laws as their priority lay in the conquest of China. And although the Jews were in an enemy's territory, they were not persecuted. In fact, when the war was over they left Shanghai directly to the United States and Israel.