Tennyson, Dickens, Poe, Browning, and the Brontës: 'Blackwood’s Magazine' and "the foreheads of a new generation"

Morrison, R (2024) 'Tennyson, Dickens, Poe, Browning, and the Brontës: 'Blackwood’s Magazine' and "the foreheads of a new generation".' In: Gardner, J and Stewart, D, eds. Nineteenth-century literature in transition: the 1830s. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 241-262. ISBN 9781009268516

Abstract

Following its explosive debut in October 1817, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine reached the heights of its notoriety in the following four years, and while it moderated its ferocity as the 1820s progressed, it continued to exert a powerful influence on British political, literary, and popular culture. Its early assaults on poets such as Percy Shelley and Lord Byron typically combined truculence with insight, and in the early 1830s it took the same approach to the poetry of Alfred Tennyson. Most notably, Blackwood’s writers like John Wilson, William Maginn, and Samuel Warren produced innovative terror fiction that rejected the ominous suggestions and careful evocations of ‘atmosphere’ in the late eighteenth-century Gothic in favour of the precision and the more direct realism of chapbooks, broadsheets, ‘true crime’ narratives, and newspaper accounts of executions, murders, and suicides. These fictions inspired Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, and the three Brontë sisters, all of whom emulated and transformed the Blackwood’s tale of terror.

Item Type:	Book Chapter or Section
Keywords:	Blackwood’s Magazine, politics, literary criticism, Gothic, influence
Divisions:	Chancelry and Research Management
Date Deposited:	22 Feb 2024 11:12
Last Modified:	10 Jul 2024 22:00
URI / Page ID:	https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/id/eprint/16107

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