Westminster Review

The Westminster Review was a quarterly British publication. Established in 1823 as the official organ of the Philosophical Radicals, it was published from 1824 to 1914. James Mill was one of the driving forces behind the liberal journal until 1828.

History

In 1823, the paper was founded by Jeremy Bentham. The first edition of the journal featured numerous articles by James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill which, combined, served as a provocative reprobation of a rival, more well-established journal, the Edinburgh Review.^[1]

In 1851 the journal was acquired by John Chapman based at 142 the Strand, London, a publisher who originally had medical training. The then unknown Mary Ann Evans, later better known by her pen name of George Eliot, had brought together his authors, including Francis Newman, W. R. Greg, Harriet Martineau and the young journalist Herbert Spencer who had been working and living cheaply in the offices of The Economist opposite Chapman's house. These authors met during that summer to give their support to this flagship of free thought and reform, joined by others including John Stuart Mill, the physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter, Robert Chambers and George J. Holyoake. They were later joined by Thomas Huxley, an ambitious young ship's surgeon determined to become a naturalist.

John Oxenford's anonymous 1853 article, "Iconoclasm in German Philosophy", was translated and published in the Vossische Zeitung. This led to a new interest in Schopenhauer's writings.

Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) became assistant editor and produced a four–page prospectus setting out their common beliefs in progress, ameliorating ills and rewards for talent, setting out a loosely defined evolutionism as "the fundamental principle" of what she and Chapman called the "Law of Progress". The group was divided over the work of Thomas Malthus, with Holyoake opposing it as the principle of the workhouse which blamed the poor for their poverty, while to Greg and Martineau this was a law of nature encouraging responsibility and self-improvement. Chapman asked Herbert Spencer to write about this divisive matter for the first issue, and Spencer's "A Theory of Population, deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility" actually appeared in the second issue, supporting the painful Malthusian principle as both true and self-correcting.

After 1853 John Tyndall joined Huxley in running the science section of the Westminster Review and formed a group of evolutionists who helped pave the way for Charles Darwin's 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species and gave evolutionary ideas backing in the ensuing debate. The term "Darwinism" was first put in print by Huxley in his review of The Origin, in the April 1860 issue of the Westminster Review, which hailed the book as "a veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism", promoting scientific naturalism over theology and praising the usefulness of Darwin's ideas while expressing professional reservations about Darwin's gradualism and doubting if it could be proved that natural selection could form new species.^[2][3]

In 1886 the Review published an essay by Eleanor Marx, "The Woman Question: From A Socialist Point of View".

The Nuttall Encyclopædia, published in 1907, notes that the Breeches Review was then a nickname for the journal on account of the fact that Francis Place, a breeches-maker, was a major shareholder in the enterprise.

London and Westminster Review

The London Review was an independent periodical, founded in 1835, that merged with the Westminster Review in 1836. From April 1836 to March 1840 the journal resulting from the merger was published under the title London and Westminster Review. After March 1840 publication continued under the title Westminster Review.^[4][5]

Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review

The Foreign Quarterly Review was an independent London-based quarterly that published from July 1827 to July 1846 (volume 37). In October 1846 the Foreign Quarterly Review merged with the Westminster Review. Until January 1847 the journal resulting from the merger was simultaneously published under two different titles: the Foreign Quarterly and Westminster Review and the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review; after January 1847, the journal was published under the title the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review.^[6] The last issue under the title Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review was published in October 1851 (volume 56, no. 2); after that issue the journal was published under the title Westminster Review and continued thus until it ceased publication in 1914.

Notable contributors

• James Mill
• John Stuart Mill
• George Grote
• Mary Shelley
• George Eliot
• Herbert Spencer
• Thomas Huxley
• John Tyndall
• John Bowring
• Harriet McIlquham

References

Further reading

• Nesbitt, George L. Benthamite Reviewing. The First Twelve Years of the Westminster Review, 1824-1836. New York: Columbia University Press, 1934.
• Browne, E. Janet (2002). Charles Darwin: vol. 2 The Power of Place. London: Jonathan Cape. ISBN 0-7126-6837-3. 

External links

• The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XI Ch. III §3 at Bartleby.com