The dark days of 1793-94 cast a long shadow over British politics: Whigs were convinced that given the chance their opponents would muzzle the press and abolish the most basic civil rights, and Tories feared that the Whigs would disestablish the Church and foment a democratic revolution. These fears were well-grounded; no one knew then, nor can we know today, how deeply extreme views had penetrated the two parties. The result of this uncertainty was profound mistrust and continual anxiety. In the wake of the economic depression and civil insurrections that followed upon the defeat of Napoleon, political affairs returned to the explosive situation they had been in a quarter of a century earlier.

Such was the state of things when Leigh Hunt was mocked in Blackwood’s and John Keats was savaged by the Tory reviewers. The liberals gave as good as they got: Southey was ridiculed by Byron in A Vision of Judgment and along with William Gifford and J. W. Croker underwent a withering torrent of personal abuse in the newspapers.

Party divisions left few areas of life untouched and literature was certainly not among them. While the nuances of internecine conflict sometimes elude modern readers the alignment of the leading journals is easy to spot. As they had been since their foundation in the seventeenth century newspapers were filled with squibs, satire, and attempts at smartness at an opponent’s expense. The tribal warfare waxed and waned without changing its essential character. But there were new developments during the romantic era.

The most important were the development of ideology—the attempt to organize the political classes around principles as opposed to persons, families, creeds, and causes—and cultural discourses that attempted to organize a larger body politic around common traditions and modes of feeling. These new forms of political expression required more sophistication from more people than had hitherto been the case, so that new forms of literature needed to be invented to educate the reading public.

Leigh Hunt’s Examiner is a good case in point, dividing each issue into two parts, the first applying Whig political principles to the events of the week, and the second devoted to works of imagination: poems, theater, and the fine arts. Coleridge undertook similar work for the other side in his journalistic writings for the Courier. In their different ways William Hone and Robert Southey both attempted to teach the English how to be English by combining journalism with antiquarianism. Older and more vulgar forms of political combat continued unabated: character assassination was pursued with relish in literary forms both high and low.

These developments led to changes in literary reviewing. Party affiliations became more marked than they had been in the eighteenth century, but the most obvious differences were those of scale: book reviews expanded to ten, twenty, even fifty pages, and it seems likely that the numbers of review-readers expanded dramatically as well. The new philosophies required much explanation while various cultural traditions, real or invented, required equivalent amounts of description.

Among reviews there were little frigates and vast ships of the line. Dominating the latter class were the Edinburgh and Quarterly reviews, whose influence on elite thought would be difficult to overestimate. Leading political figures wrote for the two great reviews which could be counted upon to put a party stamp on any and all aspects of intellectual inquiry. The Whigs regularly accused the Quarterly of indulging in personality, which was certainly true: conservatives looked to persons where liberals looked to principles. To see both sides of an issue it was necessary to read both journals, expensive as they were, and many did. Compared to purchasing the books they so copiously excerpted reviews seemed like a bargain.

Most political literature is necessarily ephemeral: while the names change from week to week and year to year, the issues being contested recur with numbing regularity. Nonetheless, when personal histories are attached to the names, issues are connected with stirring national events, and the journalists are writers of genius like Hunt and Coleridge, political journalism acquires an interest transcending its hour of its creation. The intricacies of inter- and intra-party rhetorical exchanges can be fascinating, and given the ultimately peaceful outcome of what might otherwise have degenerated into civil violence, are perhaps worth attending to as an example of politics done right.

The growing list of documents below has yet to be digested and articulated into particular exchanges, but it does convey something of the vigor and variety of political exchanges in the romantic era.

David Hill Radcliffe