Introduction

The robust free market of print in eighteenth-century Britain witnessed the birth of a new kind of journalism solely committed to informing readers of new publications. It was pioneered by the Monthly Review (1749) and fortified by its competitor, the Critical Review (1756). The book trade, centred in London and catering to a wide range of readers in Britain, erected a platform for launching a commercially viable enterprise to sustain this derivative genre of periodical publication. The objective conditions may have been ripe, but the enduring success of the Monthly and the Critical owed a great deal to the integrity, impartiality and versatility of those who were involved in the journals.

The authority of the two monthly periodicals as guides to readers and guardians of criteria stood unchallenged in the mid-eighteenth century. The anonymous author (Frances Burney) of Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World (1778) dedicated her novel to the ‘Authors of the Monthly and Critical Reviews’. Appealing to the ‘impartiality’ as well as the ‘benevolence’ of the ‘Magistrates of the press, and Censors for the Public’, she entreated them to greet her work with those ‘generous sentiments by which liberal criticism … ought to be distinguished’ (Burney [1778] 2002: 5–7). Her readers would not have frowned on this apparently facetious ‘mock’ dedication (Justice 2002: 160). The two reviews were not only purchased by thousands of individual subscribers but were steadfastly collected by public institutions. Liverpool Library (established in 1758), Manchester Circulating Library (1765) and Leeds Library (1768) subscribed to both, as did the libraries of the university colleges in England and Scotland (Allan 2008b: 29; Roper 1978: 25). The ascendancy of the Monthly and the Critical incited the envy of numerous literary adventurers, so that by the end of the century there had appeared – and very often disappeared after a short life – some 265 literary periodicals presenting reviews, often along with original essays (Golden 1983a: xv). The chances of a new publication capturing the attention of the market depended increasingly on its being noticed by the two reviews rather than on the publisher's advertising, which in newspapers had begun to decrease significantly by 1765 (Tierney 2009: 497).