The Historical Novel in the Reviews

Abstract

Thus far I have looked at the genre of the historical novel and the role of circulating libraries in its development. In this final chapter, I consider the role of critical reviews in sha** the historical novel. Like many Enlightenment institutions, reviews — periodical publications consisting primarily of book reviews — originated in France, the first of which, the Journal des Sçavons, began offering summaries of scholarly publications in 1665 (Roper 19). It took nearly a century for the British to develop their own reviews: in 1749 Ralph Griffiths founded the Monthly Review, which Forster calls ‘the first review journal in anything approaching the modern sense of the term’ (3). Central to Griffiths’s conception of the journal was the principle of employing expert reviewers: ‘Griffiths early conceived of the idea of a staff made up, not of a small group of hack writers paid a stated monthly salary, and reviewing books on any subject which came their way, but of a large group of experts, each devoting only a small part of his time to reviewing, each dealing with works in his own particular field, and receiving remuneration at a certain rate per printed sheet, varying with the eminence and reputation of the individual’ (Nangle viii). Following the success of the Monthly, reviews proliferated: between 1749 and 1760 nine new review journals were launched in Britain, including Tobias Smollett’s Tory Critical Review in 1756, while other journals added review sections (Forster 9). In the next several decades other major reviews began, including the London Review (1775); the English Review (1783), whose contributors included William Godwin and Thomas Holcroft; the Analytical Review (1788), which absorbed the English and included contributions from radicals such as Mary Hays and Mary Wollstonecraft; and the Tory British Critic (1793).