The
Quarterly Review was founded in 1809, to act as a counterbalance to the Whiggish Edinburgh Review. The founders
included George Canning (later a Tory Prime Minuster), the poet Robert Southey and the poet and novelist Sir Walter Scott,
and it was published by the celebrated London publisher John Murray. It became one of the 19th century's most influential
journals.
Its first
editor was William Gifford, a former seaman and cobbler’s apprentice from Derbyshire. A benefactor paid for Gifford
to go to college (he graduated BA from Oxford in 1782). He began to make a name as a satirist, writing a devastating poem
called The Baviad aimed at the Della Cruscan poets, whom he regarded as dangerously sentimental and radical. His
reputation secured him the editorship of Canning’s Anti-Jacobin in 1797. Gifford rapidly became the best-known
Tory polemicist of his day, and a noted translator of Juvenal. Later editors included John Gibson Lockhart, Walter
Scott's son-in-law, whose Life of Scott is widely regarded as one of the classic biographies in English.
The Review launched the career of
Jane Austen, and contributor John WIlson Croker penned such a blistering review of John Keats’ Endymion
that it was actually blamed for his death – “snuffed out by an article”, as Keats’s friend Lord Byron
expressed it. As well as Scott, Southey, Canning, Gifford and Croker, QR contributors included the Duke of Wellington,
Lord Salisbury, William Gladstone, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin and the Italian writer Ugo Foscolo – and many more.
The old Quarterly
Review ceased publication in 1967, but was revived in 2007, under the aegis of the former Conservative MP and distinguished
author, Sir Richard Body, who is Chairman of the Editorial Board. The editor
is Derek Turner and the deputy editor is Dr Leslie Jones. The art director is Gary Woods.
Each issue contains a mixture of in-depth
political essays on all the most important and controversial subjects and informed cultural critiques, with regular features
on music, film, classic books - plus poetry, columns and articles from the original QR archives.
The aims of the revived QR are the
same as that of its illustrious forebear – to draw upon a wide range of opinions to provide counter-intuitive writing
for people who like to think, and to enhance literary, philosophical and political debate.
