Scottish men of letters and the new public sphere, 1802-1834

Abstract

From the founding of the Edinburgh Review'm October of 1802 to the mid-1830s, Scotland's capital city, Edinburgh, produced a remarkable number of periodicals and periodical-writers. For a period of about three decades, Scottish writers dominated what Jiirgen Habermas would later call the 'public sphere'. The cultural forces that generated Scodand's ascendancy through periodical-writing and -publishing are examined with respect to four writers: Francis Jeffrey, John Wilson, John Gibson Lockhart, and Thomas Carlyle. Jeffrey used the idea of an open intellectual arena in order, ironically, to arrogate peremptory authority to the Edinburgh Review. Wilson made use of the new interest among metropolitan Scots in eloquent and energetic 'talk' (as opposed to conversation) in order to present himself as more authentically 'Scottish', and in the process helped to turn the periodical medium into something more individualistic and competitive than polite and reciprocal. Lockhart, having tacidy adopted a suspicion of imaginative literature inherited from his middle-class Scottish provenance, exhumed the tradition of 'amateurism' as an alternative to the new poetics of Romanticism. Carlyle, finally, channelled the authority implicit in the old Presbyterian sermon into his own essays, thereby consummating the shift in Scottish periodical-writing of this era from a discourse characterized by politeness and collaboration to one characterized by individual authority and peremptory pronouncements. By examining these writers as Scottish writers participating in the public sphere of early-nineteenth-century Britain, it is possible to conclude, first, that Scottish dominance in periodical-writing during this era was the result of specific historical circumstances rather than merely interesting coincidence; and, second, that Scottish writers helped to alter the eighteenth-century public sphere (to the extent it had existed in the Habermasian sense) into a print culture far more attuned to individual authority.