Filling the newspaper gap: Leigh Hunt, Blackwood’s, and the development of the miscellany

Blackwood’s Magazine effected, as the magazine itself put it, “a new era in periodical literature” upon its launch in October 1817. Central to discussions of Blackwood’s impact on the republic of letters has been the magazine’s political standpoint, particularly what is perceived to be a reactionary outburst against the reformist Leigh Hunt and the “Cockney School” of writers grouped around his Examiner newspaper. Hunt’s innovatory journalism at The Examiner and elsewhere offered a new kind of miscellaneity which proved successful in appealing to a newly enlarged reading audience. It was a model which influenced Blackwood’s directly. Blackwood’s did indeed focus obsessively on Hunt. But this article proposes that that focus should be recognized as a perverse form of tribute, a recognition of Hunt’s determining influence on the formal development of a new breed of magazines.