Following its explosive debut in October 1817, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine reached the heights of its notoriety in the following four years, and while it moderated its ferocity as the 1820s progressed, it continued to exert a powerful influence on British political, literary, and popular culture. Its early assaults on poets such as Percy Shelley and Lord Byron typically combined truculence with insight, and in the early 1830s it took the same approach to the poetry of Alfred Tennyson. Most notably, Blackwood’s writers like John Wilson, William Maginn, and Samuel Warren produced innovative terror fiction that rejected the ominous suggestions and careful evocations of ‘atmosphere’ in the late eighteenth-century Gothic in favour of the precision and the more direct realism of chapbooks, broadsheets, ‘true crime’ narratives, and newspaper accounts of executions, murders, and suicides. These fictions inspired Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, and the three Brontë sisters, all of whom emulated and transformed the Blackwood’s tale of terror.

The second chapter explores how literary writing in the Romantic period denies and decries caricature. I describe a ’caricature talk’, dominated by anti-caricature rhetoric, that seeks to establish the quality, verisimilitude and representational justice of textual characterisations; and I explore how caricature talk constitutes formal realism in the literary criticism of the Romantic period. The second part of the chapter positions imaginative literary caricature in relation to anxiety about prospographic and personal caricature describing real people, providing essential context for Chapter 3’s discussion of character originality and realism.

William Maginn made the transition from a learned Cork schoolmaster corresponding anonymously with British periodical editors to one of the central figures of the London press. He began by writing gratis for Blackwood’s Magazine, and then, fearful of the ‘cheerless prospect’ of Cork in the ‘Captain Rock’ years, moving to London as a working professional. While he avoided the trap of writing chiefly on the ‘Irish question’ as some expected, he was enveloped in the persona of ‘Morgan Odoherty’, a comic Irish figure invented in Blackwood’s by others. Maginn and Odoherty for some became one – a similar situation to that faced by James Hogg with the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’. In his last fifteen years, Maginn used multiple periodicals to both practise the art of humbug and attack, especially in politics, the humbugs of the age. His founding in 1830 of Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country was his central innovation in literary magazines and Tory politics during the Reform era.