About British Critic

British Critic

Overview

The British Critic was a conservative, High Church Anglican review journal published in London from 1793 to 1843. It was established at a moment of strong British reaction against the French Revolution, and for fifty years it offered its readers lengthy, serious reviews of new books from an orthodox Anglican and politically conservative standpoint. It began life as a monthly, changed to quarterly publication in 1825, and in its later years became closely identified first with the High Church circle known as the Hackney Phalanx and then with the Tractarian writers of the Oxford Movement. Under its full and changing titles, which at different points presented it as a new review and as a quarterly theological review, it was one of the characteristic serious journals of its age: anonymous, weighty, churchly and increasingly preoccupied with theology. It ceased publication in October 1843, and a replacement title, the English Review, followed it in 1844.

Founding amid reaction to the French Revolution

The journal was established in 1793 by the Society for the Reformation of Principles, a body founded the year before, in 1792, by William Jones of Nayland and William Stevens. The timing mattered. Britain in 1793 was reacting sharply against the revolutionary events in France, and a review that defended the established Church and conservative principles answered a clear demand of that moment. The British Critic rode that tide of reaction from the start, and its identity as a High Church organ was present from its foundation rather than acquired later. The men who shaped it first were churchmen of that older High Church tradition, and the review's early character — learned, defensive of the Church of England, and hostile to revolutionary and dissenting ideas — followed directly from the purposes of the society that created it.

The Rivington partnership and the first editors

The first editor was Robert Nares, with William Beloe as his assistant editor. Nares and Beloe were joint proprietors of the venture together with Francis and Charles Rivington, the London booksellers and publishers whose firm, Rivingtons, was long associated with Anglican publishing. According to the Dictionary of National Biography's account of the Rivington family, the British Critic came out monthly at two shillings and soon attained a circulation of 3,500 copies — a respectable figure for a serious review of the period. Nares and Beloe edited the review for about twenty years, giving its first two decades a consistent editorial character. The Rivington connection endured through the journal's whole life: the family firm remained its publishing home, and it was through Francis Rivington that the Tracts for the Times of the Oxford Movement were also later published, a sign of how closely the house was bound up with High Church causes.

From monthly to quarterly

The British Critic started as a monthly publication, but in 1825 its frequency was changed to quarterly. The change placed it more squarely in the company of the great quarterly reviews of the nineteenth century, journals that carried long, essay-length treatments of books rather than brief notices. The same period brought a marked narrowing of its interests. After 1825, the record summarised by modern historians is that the review became more narrowly theological in scope. A journal founded to defend conservative principles across the range of literature and public affairs thus settled, in its second phase, into being principally a theological and ecclesiastical review — a direction visible in the theological titles its later volumes carried, such as The British Critic and Quarterly Theological Review, the title borne by its final volume of April 1843.

The Hackney Phalanx purchase

Around 1811 the magazine was bought by Joshua Watson and Henry Handley Norris, who were associated with the High Church pressure group known as the Hackney Phalanx. The Phalanx took its name from Hackney, then east of the London conurbation, and its core consisted of Norris, the layman Joshua Watson and Watson's clerical brother John Watson. The group was active in education, where it worked to counter schools set up on Joseph Lancaster's scheme, and it also influenced the founding in 1818 of the Christian Remembrancer, another High Church journal. Its members looked back theologically to William Jones of Nayland, one of the founders of the society that had created the British Critic itself, so the purchase kept the review within the same tradition of churchmanship. Under its new owners the journal remained a High Church stronghold, though the owners later found the editorial line difficult to control under some of their editors — a problem that eventually drove them toward the Oxford men.

Editors of the middle years

The list of the review's editors in its middle decades reflects both its importance and its instability. In 1811 Thomas Fanshaw Middleton served as editor, and in the same year, at the beginning of the second series, William Van Mildert and Thomas Rennell also served as editors according to various sources, with Rennell continuing until William Rowe Lyall took over; Lyall edited the second series in 1816–17 — the series remembered in the Dictionary of National Biography's account of the Rivingtons. Archibald Montgomery Campbell was editor from about 1823 to 1833, while Edward Smedley was very much engaged in the periodical between 1827 and 1833, though according to the scholar Esther Rhoads Houghton he was never actually editor in title. James Shergold Boone then edited the review from 1834 to 1837. These were the years in which the journal's finances weakened, and by 1836 it was making losses serious enough that its publisher was considering closing it altogether.

The Tractarian takeover

The rescue came from Oxford. John Henry Newman offered the owners a stable of Oxford writers who would write reviews gratuitously — without payment — at precisely the moment when closure was under consideration. The arrangement transformed the journal. By the end of 1837 Newman was objecting to Boone's editorial decisions and line, including the use of Joseph Sortain as a reviewer and the sympathy shown to Renn Dickson Hampden, whose theological views the Oxford Movement opposed. Boone resigned by November 1837, and Samuel Roffey Maitland took over. Maitland, however, was immediately discomfited in early 1838 by a review by Edward Pusey relating to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, which placed him in a difficult personal position, and he resigned. From that point until 1843 the British Critic was effectively dominated by the Tractarian movement, whose supporters had secured coherence as a party in their united opposition to Hampden's appointment as Regius Professor of Divinity in 1836.

Newman and Mozley

Newman edited the British Critic from 1838 until July 1841, a period that overlapped with his lectures defending the via media of Anglicanism and with the publication in 1841 of Tract 90, the last and most controversial of the Tracts for the Times. The journal was made the organ of the party, spreading Oxford Movement views to a national clerical readership at the height of Newman's influence. Thomas Mozley succeeded him, editing from 1841 to 1843. Under Mozley's editorship the Critic was strongly partisan: it attacked Godfrey Faussett, the Oxford Margaret Professor of Divinity who had preached against the Tractarians, and it allowed Frederick Oakeley and W. G. Ward a free hand. That freedom made the journal increasingly combative in the movement's final Anglican phase, and its tone in these years was one of the things that set William Palmer, an early associate of the movement, at a distance from its editorial line, as his 1843 Narrative of Events Connected with the Publication of the Tracts for the Times made clear.

Closure and successor

The British Critic was closed down in October 1843. The Dictionary of National Biography's Rivington memoir records that the publication was discontinued at the urgent request of Bishop Blomfield, the Bishop of London — a measure of how controversial its Tractarian partisanship had become with the Church's authorities. Its half-century run therefore ended not with commercial exhaustion alone but amid the ecclesiastical conflicts of the early 1840s. In 1844 a replacement publication, the English Review, was set up by a group including John Kaye, with Rivingtons as publisher; it appeared until 1853. Readers who had taken the British Critic for its High Church reviewing were thus offered a successor from the same house, though the new title did not inherit the old one's central place in a national religious controversy.

Legacy

The British Critic's legacy lies in three distinct chapters of Anglican journalism. It was, first, a product of the 1790s reaction against the French Revolution, founded by a named society for the defence of established principles and edited for twenty years by its founding editors, Nares and Beloe. It was, second, an instrument of the Hackney Phalanx after Watson and Norris bought it around 1811, linking it to that circle's campaigns in education and church defence. And it was, third and most famously, the national organ of Tractarianism between 1838 and 1843, when Newman and then Mozley turned a loss-making quarterly into the movement's voice — a transformation serious enough that its closure required, on the Rivington account, the urgent intervention of a bishop. Modern scholarship, including S. A. Skinner's study of Newman, the Tractarians and the British Critic in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, has treated the journal as a key source for understanding how the Oxford Movement addressed the Church of England. Few reviews of its size have passed through so many hands — society founders, bookseller-proprietors, Hackney churchmen and Oxford controversialists — while keeping, throughout, a single recognisable identity as a High Church review.