The Reception of European Cultures in British Romantic Review Periodicals, 1809-1827

My PhD studied two British journals founded in the early nineteenth century. In British art history, this period is called the Romantic period: though it is more complex than that, emotions and nature were more important to Romantic artists than order and structure. Well-known British Romantic artists are the painter John Constable, whose landscapes (with their impressive clouds) are worth millions today; or the poet William Wordsworth, at whose "I wandered lonely as a cloud" many readers' hearts leap up still. Yet early-nineteenth-century life did not solely consist of solitary walks and high-flown poetry. What is more, Romanticism reacted against the growing urbanisation and industrialisation of British society - much like Paolo Cognetti’s The Eight Mountains is so popular these days, precisely because we are tired of our busy and digital lives, and yearn for the peace and simplicity of an Alpine hut. Accordingly, though we associate British Romanticism with nature scenes and sensitive poetry, countless other genres and types of media also flourished during the early nineteenth century, including magazines.

The two journals around which my research revolved are The Edinburgh Review and The Quarterly Review. The Edinburgh Review was established in 1802, when four ambitious young men decided to found a periodical that would review books. Their reviews were written from a liberal perspective, in line with the ideology of the liberal party. At the time, the liberals were only a minority in the British Parliament, where the conservatives reigned supreme. The Edinburgh Review became a success in no time. As that bothered the conservatives, they started The Quarterly Review in 1809, as a rival to The Edinburgh Review; it soon sold just as well. Just like The Edinburgh Review, The Quarterly Review was published four times a year; hence the name "Quarterly". Both periodicals reviewed books, but their reviews were very different from those you find in today’s newspapers and magazines. A review in The Edinburgh or Quarterly averaged 30 pages and dealt with more than just a book. For example, when they discussed the memoirs of the physician who served Napoleon on St Helena, the article would not just evaluate the memoirs, but equally examine Napoleon's rise and fall, as well as France’s likely future. At times the book under review was just an excuse to write about a theme the book was connected with. The Victorian author Walter Bagehot therefore called the articles in The Edinburgh Review "review-like essays" or, conversely, "essay-like reviews". In that respect, The Edinburgh Review and The Quarterly Review hover somewhere between the reviews of De Standaard der Letteren and the articles in Knack.

My dissertation examined how The Edinburgh and Quarterly Review wrote about other European cultures. For this, I studied their reviews of foreign-language books. On a practical level, my research consisted of two components: a quantitative and a qualitative component. The quantitative component focused on numbers and quantities: in a large Excel document, I noted down the details of every Edinburgh and Quarterly Review article published between 1809 and 1827 - both journals were accessible online. An enormous task, but fortunately I was able to get the help of three MA students, who entered a large number of articles into the database. The Excel document naturally contained the basic details about each journal article: title of the article, title of the reviewed works, publication date, etc. Additional categories were set up to study the presence of foreign languages. Examples of such categories are:

- in what language were the reviewed books written originally?

- were the foreign-language books reviewed in translation or in an original version?

- did the articles quote any excerpts in foreign languages?

After all periodicals were added to the Excel database, I was able to analyse them by combining categories and displaying them in tables and graphs. For instance, of all the books reviewed in The Edinburgh and The Quarterly between 1809 and 1827 (some 2,500 books), three-quarters were originally written in English; the remaining quarter were foreign-language books - reviewed in translation as well as reviewed in the original. A quarter is not a large quantity, but neither is it a very small quantity. It would be interesting to investigate this ratio in contemporary British review periodicals before and after Brexit, such as the Times Literary Supplement or the London Review of Books.

I also tried to find out whether the ratio remains constant year after year, or whether it fluctuates over time. Indeed, some historians and literary scholars claim that British culture became more isolated from mainland Europe after the French Revolution, though there is little evidence to support that claim. There are, however, quite a few historical documents demonstrating how the British interest in other cultures boomed after 1815, when the Battle of Waterloo ended the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. For example, customs records show that imports of foreign books increased dramatically after 1815. I was accordingly curious to see whether this trend would be reflected in The Edinburgh Review and The Quarterly Review, but the database showed that they did not. There are a few fluctuations, but overall the percentage of foreign-language books never strays far from the 25% mark. Still, it is remarkable that the percentage remains so constant throughout the turbulent war years and the transnational boom that follows. Although I did not discover any letters or other documents demonstrating that this 75-25 ratio was a deliberate publication strategy, a few letters from editors and reviewers show that both journals looked frantically for foreign-language publications during periods when trade with the Continent was hindered by the war. On the other hand, both journals were equally aware that it would not be very patriotic to let reviews of foreign-language literature prevail over reviews of English-language works.

The Excel database of course generated more results, among others:

Among the foreign-language books reviewed in the Edinburgh and Quarterly, French works prevail, followed by German, Italian, ancient Greek, and Latin works.

The majority of foreign-language books are reviewed in the original version, rather than in translation.

Throughout the period 1809-27 the number of ancient Greek and Latin books selected for review decreases. Instead, more attention is given to modern languages, such as German, Italian, and Spanish.

In general, the Edinburgh and Quarterly discuss more non-fiction works than imaginative literature, but among the foreign-language books the share of imaginative literature is larger.

A striking number of reviewed (English-language as well as foreign-language) books revolve around transnational subjects: foreign politics, colonial matters, travel narratives, (auto)biographies of foreign celebrities, etc.

But do the liberal EdinburghReview and the conservative Quarterly Review approach Continental culture in different ways? When looking at the quantitative results only, the answer is no. Numerically there is hardly any difference between the two journals. But the actual text of the review articles is another matter: there other cultures are indeed approached from different ideological angles, as will be explain below. This issue is precisely the reason why it was important not to stare at my Excel document for too long, but to read the reviews too. In scholarly jargon, quantitative analyses of large groups of texts are called "distant reading". You do not read the actual texts, but analyse them on the basis of the data you have collected: in my case these are the title of the review, language of the reviewed books, etc. On the other side of the "distant reading" method stands "close reading”, or reading and analysing the text in detail. Since my thesis combined "distant reading" and "close reading", the image of a telescope illustrates my method well. With the help of a telescope you can view objects in the distance, but you can also zoom in on them. You can alternate between studying objects from afar and from up close, just my research did.

A four-year PhD seems long, but it was too short to read all reviews encompassed by my Excel document. I therefore made a selection of articles around a number of themes, which served as case studies. Unfortunately, in the limited time span of four years, I could not explore the reception of all languages or regions on the Continent either. Instead, I chose two languages that featured prominently in the database; French and German. It would therefore be nice if future researchers can use the Excel database to study the reception of other languages and cultures. I explored the reception of French culture through three case studies. The first focused on reviews of letters and memoirs of eighteenth-century French celebrities. Except for the Prince de Ligne, who was born and bred in Brussels, most of these socialites have been forgotten, but they did frequent the salons where Rousseau, Voltaire and other major figures of the French Enlightenment also dwelled. In the second case study I looked at articles that discussed the life and work of Germaine de Staël, a French-Swiss salonnière whose novels are often seen as proto-feminist works and whose book On Germany boosted the French and British appreciation for German Romanticism. The third and final case examined reviews of French fiction: novels, poems and plays. For the reception of German culture, there were two case studies: one on Goethe, author of DieLeiden des jungen Werthers and Faust, and one on Germanic folklore. In the latter case study, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm played a major role, as they led the European trend for collecting medieval fairy tales, legends and folk songs.

These five case studies led me to conclude that both The Edinburgh Review and The Quarterly Review used tons of clichés when writing about French and German culture. The French may have been excellent cooks, but they were conceited, effeminate, adulterous and corrupt. Consequently, French literature was considered equally decadent, and the long tradition of powdered and perfumed monarchs prevented France from establishing a democracy so soon after the Revolution; certainly not a democracy as balanced as the British was. The German-speaking regions, in turn, are described with a different set of stereotypes: Germans are primitive savages who enjoy exorbitant amounts of food and drink. German literature has progressed little beyond the Middle Ages, as it abounds in superstition and material themes (such as food and clothing). Needless to say, from this perspective Britons are the best people in the world, especially when compared with the French dandies and German savages. British reviewers increasingly position themselves as authorities in literature and politics. In reality, they do not yet possess such status, but it is true that they are gradually taking France’s role as the leader of European culture. Moreover, these clichés are typical for the early nineteenth century, when each culture sought to highlight its own unique character.

It is in this part of my argument that the link to the cover image of the thesis lies, which is taken from the first English translation of the Grimms' fairy tales. Just as the young tailor in the illustration makes the wild bear dance, British reviewers make French and German texts dance to their own tune by portraying them in a particular way. This at last brings us to the difference between The Edinburgh Review and The Quarterly Review. In their reviews of French texts, the journals agreed on literary issues, but not on ideology. Reviews of French books regularly culminated in ideological discussions about the best form of government, in which The Quarterly Review stubbornly protected the power of the elite, while The Edinburgh Review was more favourable towards the people – note, however, that their definition of "the people" did not include the working classes, but the upper classes and higher middle classes.

In their reviews of German texts, the relationship between the two magazines looks somewhat different. Though they agree that German culture lags behind, but The Quarterly Review recognises its value earlier than The Edinburgh does. Still, these divergent attitudes are not directly connected with the magazines’ ideological background, but rather with the personal preferences of particular editors and reviewers. While the new (and young) editor of The Quarterly admires German literature, the older editor of The Edinburgh is not convinced of its worth. The literary and ideological differences between two journals that looked so similar when viewed from a distant perspective, underline the importance of studying periodicals from various methodological angles.