About The British Quarterly Review

The British Quarterly Review

The British Quarterly Review was a quarterly periodical published in London from 1845 to 1886. Founded by the Congregational minister and historian Robert Vaughan, it became the leading review of British Nonconformity — the journal that demonstrated to a sometimes dismissive literary world that Dissenters could sustain criticism, theology, science and political argument at the highest level. It ran for forty-one years and eighty-three volumes, through three editors, and it is one of the few Victorian quarterlies to have received a dedicated modern monograph: E. M. Palmegiano's The British Quarterly Review, 1845–1886, published by Cambridge in its University Publishing Online programme in 2012. A complete run of all eighty-three volumes survives in HathiTrust.

Robert Vaughan: The Founder

Robert Vaughan (1795–1868) was an English Congregational minister, academic and writer of Welsh background. Born in the west of England on 14 October 1795 to Anglican parents, he came under the influence of the Independent minister William Thorp of Bristol, who trained him for the ministry. He was ordained in 1819 at Worcester, became a popular preacher, and in March 1825 accepted a call to Hornton Street, Kensington, in London.

In 1834 Vaughan was appointed to the chair of history in London University, a post that brought him into contact with Whig political leaders and increased his influence; he received the degree of D.D. from Glasgow University in 1836. In 1843 he succeeded Gilbert Wardlaw as president and professor of theology at the Lancashire Independent College, which moved to new buildings at Whalley Range, Manchester, on 26 April that year. His inaugural discourse there was on Protestant Nonconformity — the cause his review would serve. He occupied the chair of the Congregational Union in 1846.

Why Vaughan Founded the Review in 1845

Vaughan founded the British Quarterly out of dissatisfaction with the existing Nonconformist press. The Dictionary of National Biography records that he was dissatisfied with the tone of the Eclectic Review, which under Thomas Price was favouring the policy of Edward Miall. The Wikipedia summary of the same tradition specifies the Eclectic's editorial line under Miall himself. A fuller scholarly account explains that the new review was begun in 1845 by a group of Nonconformists dissatisfied with the Eclectic's association with the noisy dissent of Miall and the Anti-State Church Association, and with their insistence that voluntary education was the only valid system.

The distinction mattered. Vaughan's party within Dissent wanted a review that was political without being sectarian-noisy: one that could represent the thinking of the best minds of Dissent on political issues as well as on theological, scientific and literary matters. The first number appeared in January 1845.

Twenty Years of Vaughan's Editorship

Vaughan edited the review for its first twenty years. The Dictionary of National Biography judges that during that editorship he kept it at a high level of intelligence, and that while retaining its Nonconformist character and its theological conservatism, he admitted on other topics a wide range of writers of different schools. That combination — a firm denominational base with an open contributors' policy beyond theology — was the journal's formula from the start.

Vaughan's own contributions were substantial enough to be collected as Essays on History, Philosophy, and Theology in 1849, in two volumes. The review also functioned as a family-adjacent literary enterprise in its orbit: his son Robert Alfred Vaughan was set by his father to read Origen for an article for the British Quarterly, published in October 1845, which won praise from Sir James Stephen and Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, and the younger Vaughan went on to write for it on Schleiermacher and Savonarola. Vaughan senior resigned the presidency of Lancashire Independent College in August 1857 because of his health, but his editorship of the review continued into the mid-1860s.

The Voice of Respectable Dissent

The review quickly occupied ground that older denominational magazines could not hold. A scholarly history of the Congregational magazines notes that the Congregational Magazine was hard hit by the quality of the British Quarterly Review, and that the British Quarterly latterly took over the position of the Eclectic Review itself. In the heyday of political dissent, it came to represent Nonconformist opinion to the wider world, showing that the Dissenters were not the Philistines that Matthew Arnold and others too easily assumed them to be.

The compliment ran both ways: both Matthew Arnold and John Henry Newman complimented Vaughan on the review. A journal edited by a Congregationalist college president that could draw acknowledgement from the leading Anglican-turned-Catholic theologian of the age and from its sharpest critic of middle-class culture had achieved exactly the standing Vaughan intended — Dissent arguing in the common republic of letters rather than in a denominational enclosure.

Henry Robert Reynolds, Co-Editor 1866–1874

Vaughan's successor phase began in 1866, when Henry Robert Reynolds (1825–1900) and Henry Allon took over the editorship jointly. Reynolds was a Congregational minister and college head: educated at Coward College in London, he graduated from London University in 1848, was ordained in 1846, served congregations at Halstead and then at East Parade Chapel, Leeds, from 1849, and in June 1860 became president of Cheshunt College, where he was professor of dogmatic theology, ecclesiastical history and New Testament exegesis.

Reynolds was himself a contributor of long standing before he was an editor: he had published a criticism of Auguste Comte in the British Quarterly Review as early as April 1854, and with his brother John Russell Reynolds he wrote an anonymous novel on the intellectual and religious questions of the time, published in 1860. From 1866 to 1874 he was co-editor of the review with Henry Allon, and afterwards edited the Evangelical Magazine from 1877 to 1882. His career embodies the review's ideal contributor: minister, theologian, college president and man of letters in one.

Henry Allon and the Final Twenty Years, 1866–1886

Henry Allon (1818–1892) was a Congregational minister born at Welton, near Hull, on 13 October 1818. He entered Cheshunt College in 1839, became assistant pastor of Union Chapel, Islington, in 1843, and succeeded as pastor at the end of that year, serving that church until his death on 16 April 1892. He was called twice to the chair of the Congregational Union and was a regular contributor to the British Quarterly Review before becoming its editor.

Allon edited the review from 1866 to 1886 — initially with Reynolds, and then alone for its last twelve years — so that his name covers the journal's entire final phase. Reference works on the reception of Darwin's On the Origin of Species in the periodical press identify him in exactly those terms: a regular contributor who edited the journal for twenty years from 1866. Under Allon the review continued to engage the scientific and theological controversies of the later Victorian period from within a Congregational framework.

Character of the Journal: Heavy, Long and Serious

Later scholarly judgement has been candid about the review's manner. To twentieth-century readers, one historian wrote, the journal seems intolerably heavy and dull, its articles too long and too weighty for modern taste — but it did work of incalculable value in manifesting Nonconformist opinion to the world. That verdict captures the Victorian quarterly form at its most characteristic: long, anonymous, argumentative essays that expected sustained attention and repaid it with considered positions rather than news.

Palmegiano's bibliographic work places the review among the forty-five journals surveyed for her annotated bibliography of crime in Victorian Britain, covering 1845 to 1886, and likewise in her study of perceptions of the press in nineteenth-century periodicals — evidence that the British Quarterly ranged well beyond theology into social questions including crime, journalism and public policy, exactly as its founders intended.

End of Publication in 1886

The British Quarterly Review ceased publication in 1886, with Allon still its editor, closing a run of forty-one years and eighty-three volumes. It had outlived its founder by eighteen years. Its end came as the great quarterly reviews generally were losing ground to newer monthly magazines and signed journalism, and as the Nonconformist constituency it served was itself changing; the sources record the closure without attributing it to a single crisis, and the journal's complete run passed intact into library collections.

The Scholarly Record: Osbourn, Palmegiano and HathiTrust

The review has an unusually strong scholarly apparatus for a denominational quarterly. R. V. Osbourn published a dedicated article, “The British Quarterly Review”, in The Review of English Studies in April 1950 (volume 1, number 2, pages 147–152). Palmegiano's 2012 Cambridge monograph, The British Quarterly Review, 1845–1886 (ISBN 9781843317562), provides the full modern study its history requires. The Online Books Page at the University of Pennsylvania records the essential archive fact: HathiTrust holds all eighty-three volumes, 1845–1886, and all content of the serial is in the public domain in the United States.

That completeness matters for researchers. Because the run is whole, the review can be used systematically — for the reception of Darwin, for Nonconformist responses to legislation, for Victorian judgements on crime and the press — rather than sampled from fragments, which is the condition of many of its contemporaries.

Assessment

The British Quarterly Review was founded to solve a specific problem: the ablest tradition within English Dissent lacked a review that other traditions would take seriously. Vaughan's solution — theological conservatism and Nonconformist identity combined with openness to writers of different schools on every other subject — sustained the journal through two editorial successions and four decades. Reynolds brought academic theology and an early engagement with Comte; Allon brought twenty years of continuity to 1886. Few Victorian periodicals so completely fulfilled their founding brief, and fewer still can now be read complete, in eighty-three volumes, exactly as their first readers in 1845 could have hoped posterity would find them.