ABSTRACT
When in November 1817 Blackwood’s published its second acerbic attack on Wordsworth in six months (see pp. 11–16 above and Volume 5, pp. 1–10), it appeared the new magazine was intent on joining its rival, the Edinburgh Review, in an unofficial Scottish consortium against the Lake School. Early in the next year, however, Blackwood’s would dramatically reverse itself. Beginning with the February 1818 publication of Peter George Patmore’s (1786–1855; DNB) reverential ‘Sonnets to Mr Wordsworth’, Maga assumed the role of Wordsworth’s greatest champion in the periodical press. Over the next seven years, Blackwood’s would with increasing regularity congratulate itself on having been first to recognize Wordsworth’s genius, suggesting repeatedly that their appreciation of him and his works only further revealed the gap between their own critical disinterestedness and the petty partisanship of the old reviewing establishment. In October 1820, less than three years removed from his own assaults on Wordsworth, John Wilson boasted, ‘We have made [Wordsworth] popular here, in spite of the Edinburgh Review, and all the Whigs that whine in chorus’. 1
