When Lord Byron decided in May 1819 to publish his Gothic fragment, ‘Augustus Darvell’, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine seemed to him the obvious choice (Byron 1973–94, vol. 6: 126). Though founded only eighteen months earlier, the magazine had quickly established itself as one of the leading periodical publications of the day, and one that specialised in terror. Led by its editor, William Blackwood, and key contributors such as John Wilson and J. G. Lockhart, Blackwood's routinely used variously aestheticised forms of violence and fear as a method of engagement with a host of social, critical and cultural issues, and as a means of promulgating its virulent version of High Toryism, as seen most clearly in its bellicose attacks on Whig enemies such as the Edinburgh Review, and its literary assassinations of ‘Cockney School’ writers like John Keats and Leigh Hunt (Schoenfield 2013). The magazine's finest fictive offerings were part of this much broader campaign of terror, and unlike its politics, which looked decisively to the past, its tales of dread and the macabre pioneered a new form of Gothic fiction that rejected not only the long and anxious narratives of late eighteenth-century Gothic novels and romances by English authors such as Ann Radcliffe, Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis and William Godwin, but profoundly altered the distinctively Scottish tradition of the Gothic as it had emerged in the poetry of James Macpherson and Robert Burns. Blackwood's, as Byron realised, was especially interested in short, unnerving terror fiction like ‘Augustus Darvell’, and over the course of William Blackwood's seventeen- year editorship the magazine's most characteristic tales of terror set new standards of concentrated dread and precisely calculated alarm that had a powerful influence on writers such as Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, the Brontës and, of course, Edgar Allan Poe.

William Blackwood was the force behind the magazine that bore his name, and the one primarily responsible for making it the era's most influential and exciting periodical publication (Morrison 2006: 21–48). Born in Edinburgh in 1776, he was apprenticed as a bookseller in both Scotland and England before returning in 1804 to Edinburgh, where he established a shop specialising in the sale of rare books and began to experiment in publishing.