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Abstract:

By investigating Blackwood’s Magazine’s response to Germaine de Staël’s political writing, in particular her Considérations sur les principaux événemens de la Révolution Françoise (published posthumously in 1818), this paper examines the critical reception of French political thought in post-Waterloo Britain. Whereas scholars such as Biancamaria Fontana, Mark Schoenfield, Ian Duncan, and Jon Klancher have explored the impact of the French Revolution on British periodical culture, the early-nineteenth-century reception of Madame de Staël’s criticism has been studied by Silvia Bordoni, Joanne Wilkes, Stuart Curran, Karyna Szmurlo, and by Fontana in her recent monograph Germaine de Staël: A Political Portrait. Even though Staël’s oeuvre has thus been amply studied, the host of periodical literature about her life and work that appeared during the years following her death in 1817 - a period that has generally received little attention in Romantic Studies – has remained largely unexplored. Accordingly, this paper analyses Blackwood’s Magazine’s review of Staël’s Considérations in its September 1818 issue, and compares it with reviews of the same work in contemporaneous periodicals, thereby concentrating particularly on the Edinburgh Review. As has repeatedly been argued, periodicals such as the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Magazine interpreted the ideas articulated in French political texts for a broad British middle-class audience. As reviews typically included lengthy extracts of the work under discussion, translation played a crucial role in this process of mediation. By providing a detailed analysis of these processes of translation and mediation, this paper pursues a closer understanding of the response to Staël’s political thought in late-Romantic periodical culture.