Blackwood's was the most important and influential literary-political journal of its time, and a major institution not just in Scottish letters, but in the development of British and American Romanticism. Intemperate in political polemic and feared for its literary assassinations, the magazine became just as notorious for the shocking power of its fictional offerings. These set a new standard of concentrated dread and precisely calculated alarm, and were to establish themselves as a landmark in the development of the short magazine story. The influence of Blackwood's quickly reached many major authors, including Dickens, Emily Bronte, Robert Browning, and Edgar Allan Poe.
The tales of terror and hysteria published in the heydey (1817-32) of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine became a literary legend in the nineteenth century. Blackwood's was the most important and influential literary-political journal of its time, and a major institution not just in Scottish
letters but in the development of British and American Romanticism. This edition selects some of the best tales from the magazine's first fifteen years, and includes works by well-known writers such as Walter Scott, James Hogg, and John Galt alongside talented but now almost forgotten authors like
William Godwin, Samuel Warren, and William Mudford.
