In the waning hours of his short-lived editorship of the Quarterly Review, John Taylor Coleridge wrote to John Murray, the journal's publisher: ‘I have now put the finishing hand to my last number, and return you with this the little key of your paper box for Mr Lockhart's use’ (QR Letter 264). The Quarterly Review letterbox, preserved in the John Murray Archive, is a portal to the past. Open it and we find wonderful things. In addition to a lock of William Gifford's hair, the box now holds a remarkable document, an ancient memorandum book, torn in half, at some point slated for destruction. Murray began to use the notebook only a few weeks after his early October 1808 visit to Walter Scott at Ashiestiel, the famous meeting during which the two men discussed setting up a journal to rival the Edinburgh Review. Murray's memoranda include subjects and books for review and, most interesting of all, lists of prospective reviewers. These lists help demonstrate that for moderate conservatives the commencement of the Quarterly was the opening of a hope chest, a chest they had begun to fill in 1802 with the publication of the first number of the Edinburgh. By meditating on the lists, we can consider how well Murray and his gentlemen managed the textual wedding of a number of conservative constituencies, and, by surveying the early history of the journal, how well that marriage turned out.

The lists represent various conservative networks: academic, philosophical, political, legal, ecclesiastical, scientific and military. Among the 123 names listed, we find some familiar ones: the Lake Poets, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey; clergymen-academics such as Thomas Robert Malthus, Edward Copleston and Peter Elmsley; scientists and mathematicians, including Thomas Young, Sir Humphry Davy and James Ivory; the evangelical philanthropists William Wilberforce, James Stephen and Henry Thornton; and famous statesmen, George Canning, Lord Aberdeen and Lord Hawkesbury (later Lord Liverpool).