Wartime Reading: Romantic Era Military Periodicals and the Edinburgh Review

Abstract

"Drawing on Jon Klancher's seminal study of the ways in which periodicals shaped British reading audiences in the Romantic era, this essay considers the role of wartime pressures and the military journals in the formation of the modern British reading nation at the turn of the nineteenth century. Admittedly, the editors of the Edinburgh Review were strongly tied to the Whig political opposition in Britain during the war years, meaning the journal was normally ambivalent and at times openly hostile towards the government's handling of the war. So too, the military journals were somewhat distinct from the Edinburgh Review because they were not intrinsically review periodicals. However, by detailing the approach of the military journals it can be argued that they were decisive in shifting a focus onto the shaping of public opinion as they elaborated their own corporate responses to how a wartime journal might operate."