John Gibson Lockhart and Blackwood’s: Shaping the Romantic Periodical Press

Abstract

John Gibson Lockhart’s connection with Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine is frequently associated with a number of controversial articles in the first year of the reconstituted Maga, both in terms of his role as author and in terms of the speculation at the time on the extent of his role as the magazine’s ‘veiled editor’.¹ Lockhart is most commonly maligned and vilified by critics for what are considered his ad hominem attacks in the series of articles ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry’, a damning assessment of Leigh Hunt and other writers linked to Hunt’s name.² Especially galling to many readers is the fourth article in the series, on the poetry of John Keats, which asserts that Keats was a talented young man whose training for a career in medicine had been disrupted by the ‘poetical mania’ of the age, resulting in the ‘calm, settled, imperturbable drivelling idiocy of “Endymion”’, and which concludes, ‘for Heaven’s sake, young Sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry’.³ Ironically, some modern critics, passionate about their own subjects, occasionally have been guilty of the same personal attacks that they have criticized in Lockhart’s writing and, consequently, have seriously misrepresented Lockhart’s character. For example, Duncan Wu, in his otherwise excellent biography of William Hazlitt, writes that ‘Lockhart was a proud, spiteful, vengeful man, indifferent to the feelings of others… He was a cold fish and malign with it… Both Wilson and Lockhart possessed the kind of cleverness that coexists with sadism and arrogance, qualities they possessed in spades’.⁴