The Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802, was one of the most influential British magazines of the 19th century. It ceased publication in 1929. The magazine took its Latin motto judex damnatur ubi nocens absolvitur (the judge is condemned when the guilty is acquitted) from Publilius Syrus.

In 1984 the Scottish cultural magazine New Edinburgh Review, originally founded in 1969, explicitly adopted the title Edinburgh Review from issue 67/8, taking the motto To gather all the rays of culture into one. It is still published and a member of the Eurozine network.

An earlier short-lived magazine with similar purposes, Edinburgh Magazine and Review, was published monthly between 1773 - 1776.

Edinburgh Review in the Nineteenth Century

Started on October 10 1802 by Francis Jeffrey, Sydney Smith and Henry Brougham, it was published by Archibald Constable in quarterly issues until 1929. The magazine began as a literary and political review. Under its first editor, Francis Jeffrey, it was a strong supporter of the Whig party and laissez-faire politics, and regularly called for political reform. Its main rival was the Quarterly Review which supported the Tories. The magazine was also noted for its attacks on the Lake Poets, particularly William Wordsworth.

Notable contributors

• Thomas Arnold
• Richard Harris Barham
• Thomas Brown
• Thomas Carlyle
• Ugo Foscolo
• Henry Hallam
• William Hamilton
• Abraham Hayward
• William Hazlitt
• Felicia Hemans
• James Henry Leigh Hunt
• George Cornewall Lewis
• Thomas Macaulay
• Sir James Mackintosh
• John Stuart Mill
• Robert Montgomery
• John Playfair
• Henry Reeve
• Henry Enfield Roscoe
• Bertrand Russell
• Charles William Russell
• Sir Walter Scott
• Arthur Penrhyn Stanley

External links

• Facsimile of first edition
• Current edition homepage

Further reading

• Shattock, Joanne. Politics and Reviewers: the Edinburgh and the Quarterly in the Early Victorian Age. London, Leicester, and New York: Leicester University Press, 1989.