At poetry's highest commercial watermark in Britain, roughly between 1812 and 1817, the Edinburgh Review demonstrated how the reception of literary texts could offer opportunities for wider commentary on the differing natures of European and non-European conceptions of progress. The contents of its first two issues reveal how the periodical placed poetry in the same discursive frame as essays on historiography, postulations on the attitudes of Greek and Turkish society towards an emergent European orientalism, travel writing on the Far East and discussions of the Highland clearances. In issue number one it features ‘Asiatic Researches, vol. 6’, along with ‘Irvine's Enquiry into the Causes and Effects of Emigration from the Highlands and Western Islands of Scotland’ and a review of ‘Southey's Thalaba: A Metrical Romance’. In number two, we find ‘Sonnini's Travels in Greece and Turkey’, ‘Denon's Travels in Egypt’ and a review of ‘Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border’. Numbers three and four develop in this form, which is something akin to a cultural and historical compendium, guided by the Edinburgh Review's avowed manifesto: ‘to confine their notice […] to works that either have achieved, or deserve, a certain portion of celebrity’. Francis Jeffrey's review of Byron's The Corsair and The Bride of Abydos from April 1814 illustrates how the Edinburgh Review depicted verse as part of this wider cultural complex. The review borrows from models of conjectural history to describe a ‘natural’ poetic progression through stages of oral savagery to written sophistication that demonstrates how the idea of refinement would survive and thrive in Whig versions of progress in the new century: ‘As civilisation advances, men begin to be ashamed of the undisguised vehemence of their primitive emotions; and learn to subdue, or at least to conceal, the fierceness of their natural passions. The first triumph of regulated society, is to be able to protect its members from actual violence; and the first trait of refinement in manners, is to exclude the coarseness and offence of unrestrained and selfish emotions.’

Jeffrey's review follows eighteenth-century stadial history's unresolved tension between the idea that European culture progresses inexorably towards civilization, and that this civilization is corroborated by a rejection of the stultifying manners of civil society.