Alex Benchimol, Rhona Brown, and David Shuttleton, eds. Before Blackwood’s: Scottish Journalism in the Age of Enlightenment. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2015. xii, 161p. ISBN: 9781848935501. £60 / US $99 (hardback).
This short but informative collection of articles on Scottish journalism between 1700 and the 1820s is worth reading, not only for those interested in Scotland but for all concerned with the wider history of print culture. The wide range of topics discussed by its contributors makes it impossible to provide a detailed summary, but for those riveted by the period there is much of interest. In the “Afterword,” Murray Pittock reminds readers that “the public sphere [in Scotland] was not necessarily conducive to the disinterested pursuit of truth ascribed to it by [John Stuart] Mill, or the openness to dialogue implicit in the Habermasian model” and “[i]t could rather be profoundly and savagely partisan” (129). Pittock interestingly adds that “the associational model of the public sphere as offering a free exchange of views in a sociable environment […] has always been unpersuasive” (130). What has to be examined is the discipline that the pursuit of profit added to the entire periodical literature, and this is a point that appears in some of the essays but could bear more prominence.
A brief summary of the collection could include the following details: Karin Bowie shows how the popular press aroused strong nationalist feelings in 1705 and made it possible for many Scots to believe that an English ship had plundered a Scottish ship, Seedy Return, and the attackers then murdered its crew. Stephen Brown makes the unusual point that advertising not only allowed the Edinburgh Evening Courant to become profitable, but also that the advertisements themselves attracted new readers, an indication of Edinburgh’s new consumer economy. Ralph McLean discusses the Edinburgh Review, a journal closely associated with many names familiar to followers of the Scottish Enlightenment. Rhona Brown reviews the treatment of John Wilkes in the Weekly Magazine or Edinburgh Amusement, paying particular attention to the role of politics and Scottish nationalism in its formation and support. James Anderson’s The Bee is perhaps the closest representative of the coffeehouse model of associational discourse, and its fate is described by Jon Mee. The participation of Robert Burns in the little known and short-lived Glasgow Magazine is the topic of Nigel Leask’s essay. The last three essays are more closely arranged around the writers or the topics addressed in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine: Gillian Hughes writes on the earlier works of James Hogg, the intermingling of politics and medicine in the magazine; the subsequent anger shown by Blackwood’s is treated by Megan Coyer, while David Stewart’s concluding essay argues that the fascination of Blackwood’s with the long-sunk Scots Magazine should modify the popular view of Blackwood’s magazine as the harbinger of a new age of periodical writing. This brief summary hardly does justice to the variety and detail of each essay, but I must limit more in-depth comments to the two contributions that overlap with my own research interests in political economy.
Interestingly, the Edinburgh Review is identified as the literary vehicle of the Moderates, the party most allied with the Scottish Enlightenment, those who wanted to modify the rigours of Scottish Calvinism and argue for the enjoyment of innocent pleasures. It is rightly noted that literary style was of great importance to those associated with this movement. This is clearly exemplified by Adam Smith, who began by giving lectures on English upon his return from Oxford; this experience helped him advance to Professor of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres, an appointment from which he eventually sought transfer to the position for which he is most remembered, Professor of Moral Philosophy. If Smith’s library is any indication – he is said to have remarked that “I am a beau in nothing but my books” – rhetoric remained his first love. Even though many of the clergy opposed to the Moderates were learned men, it was important to keep an eye on the Church by influencing the appointment of ministers. Since the nobility and the wealthy were more partial to the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment, the Moderates opposed any democratic appointments. This political selection process turned away several able ministers, of whom John Witherspoon was perhaps the most famous. Witherspoon went to America and ended up as the influential President of Princeton University.
James Anderson was an outsider – a farmer who was fascinated by knowledge. In the Public Characters (1800-1801), there is an account of Anderson which contains many personal details not readily available elsewhere, such as the beginning of his involvement with the fisheries and his contacts, or lack thereof, with officialdom. The account of the Bee provided in that work tells us that Anderson wrote much of the contents of the journal himself. The biographical account then relates that Anderson published a monthly publication, Agricultural Recreations, from London where he had moved around 1795. A failed periodical in the 1780s had preceded the Bee, and the Agricultural Recreations followed it; as Anderson was seldom well-off, it is not clear how he managed to support all of these publications. His editorial and journalistic endeavours indicate, however, the extent to which the reading public had grown. Anderson was also but one of a group including the MP George Dempster and the booksellers Knox who objected to the neglect of local economic issues. The literati dealt more with France than with the hinterland of their country. These odd facts should help circumscribe the Scottishness of the Scottish Enlightenment and suggest the extent to which Scots were both Anglophile and Francophile in their perspective.
This collection of essays will interest those curious about the rise of print culture in Scotland in the eighteenth century, while highlighting its dependence upon economic forces, the eagerness of the Scots to show their literary interests, and the variety of ways in which they sought to do so.
Salim Rashid
Universiti Utara Malaysia
