The essays in this collection contribute to a renewed scholarly commitment to explore the cultural impact of early nineteenth-century periodicals. During the Regency, contemporaries credited the Quarterly Review with great power to influence literary opinion and the sale of books. Consequently, its many famous reviews – of Keats, the Shelleys, Byron, Wordsworth, Crabbe, Hemans, Hazlitt, Hunt, Austen and Scott – are quoted by reader-reception specialists, by literary historians, by biographers of Romantic-era figures and by students of book history. Also, because its political, foreign policy and economics reviews represented the cream of conservative writing in the period, and because some of its core contributors were connected with the highest levels of government, historians frequently cite the journal. It is perhaps surprising, then, that hitherto no critical study of the early Quarterly Review has appeared.

The preservation of thousands of relevant documents (in the John Murray Archive, the Sir Walter Scott Collection, and elsewhere) makes the Quarterly ideal for testing theories of the formation and conduct of early nineteenth-century periodicals. To facilitate such an experiment in the present instance, the editor supplied the contributing essayists with transcriptions of primary sources that relate to the journal during the editorships of William Gifford (1809–24) and John Taylor Coleridge (1825). With each essayist addressing either a major topic (politics, classics, the business of reviewing) or a major contributor (Scott, Southey, Barrow), the collection strikes a balance between treating the journal as a monolithic cultural formation in which individual voices were editorially suppressed and as a collaborative enterprise that was shaped by the publisher's, editor's and contributors' sometimes competing motivations and interests. Whatever their positions on questions of theory, all of the essayists regard the Quarterly not as a cultural sampler, nor as historical background, but as a textual artefact worthy of detailed study.

This introduction begins with an overview of the nature and sources of archival Quarterly Review materials, it then reflects on the essayists' use of those and other materials, and it closes with a look at what the archives tell us about the publisher John Murray and his editor William Gifford, the two men primarily responsible for making the Quarterly Review a successful commercial venture and an effective instrument of conservative propaganda.