The Quarterly Review was launched, on the first day of March 1809, under the imprint of the young London publisher John Murray by a consortium of powerful conservative politicians and literary men, George Canning and Walter Scott foremost among them. Their avowed purpose in setting up a new periodical was to combat the ‘radically bad principles’ of Archibald Constable's flagship journal, the Edinburgh Review. Repelled though they were by the Edinburgh's politics, they were at the same time attracted by its wit, its verve, and, not least, by its success with the public. In response, they created a contending journal similar to its northern rival in outward appearances but opposed to the Edinburgh in its critical, religious, and above all its political principles. With conservatives’ objections to the ‘Northern blast’ involved in the origins of the Quarterly Review, it is therefore to the Edinburgh that we briefly turn.

The Quarterly's doppelganger and nemesis was started in October 1802 by three young Edinburgh University graduates, Sydney Smith, Francis Jeffrey, and Francis Horner. As it was first constituted, the Edinburgh Review was not a Whig party journal. Instead, it reflected philosophic Whiggism: it was egalitarian, materialist, and anti-dogmatic. By 1808 it had as many as 8,000 subscribers, in that day a substantial number for a weighty political-literary journal. The Edinburgh's influence extended beyond these few thousand readers, however; to judge from contemporary correspondence, the nation's elites habitually took account of its opinions.

A reason for the Edinburgh's extensive reputation and reach was its innovative approach to book criticism. Reviewing before the Edinburgh was conducted in journals that contained numerous brief articles top-heavy with quotations. In contrast, the Edinburgh's writers used books as launching pads for lengthy opinionated dissertations. The editor Francis Jeffrey's reviews in particular were regarded as ‘witty, saucy, and eloquent’ and under his direction the periodical was generally acknowledged to be ‘superior in genius and vivacity’. Even conservatives admired the Edinburgh reviewers’ ‘unquestionable talent’ and considered the journal ‘essential to the library of a literary man’.