The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, or, Monthly Political and Literary Censor, was a British conservative political journal active from 1798 to 1821. Founded by John Gifford after the cancellation of William Gifford's periodical Anti-Jacobin, the journal contained essays, reviews, and satirical engravings. Its content has been described as "often scurrilous" and "ultra-Tory" and was a prominent element of British hostility to Jacobinism and the broader ideals of the French Revolution.[1]
History
The first edition was published on 1 August 1798 and was advertised in The Times as "containing Original Criticism; a Review of the Reviewers; Miscellaneous Matter in Prose and Verse, Lists of Marriages, Births, Deaths and Promotions; and a Summary of Foreign and Domestic Politics."[2] Gifford served as its editor until 1806.[3] The periodical was covertly funded by the British government.[4]
Gifford called the periodical a champion of "religion, morality, and social order, as supported by the existing establishments, ecclesiastical and civil, of this country.[3]
The periodical promoted conspiracy theories of attempts to establish Jacobinism in Britain, accusing the Monthly Review, the Analytical Review and The Critical Review of spreading Jacobinism through "secret channels, disguised in various ways."[5] It supported the passage of the Unlawful Societies Act 1799 and the Combination Act 1799, arguing that the state needed the "wisdom to repress" in order to effectively defeat "domestic traitors."[5]
The periodical denounced reformers, especially the Evangelicals, and greatly angered them, as prominent politician and campaigner William Wilberforce made clear in 1800:
It is a most mischievous publication, which, by dint of assuming a tone of the highest loyalty and attachment to our establishment in church and state, secures a prejudice in its favour, and has declared war against what I think the most respectable and most useful of all orders of men—the serious clergy of the Church of England. . . . Its opposition to the evangelical clergy is carried on in so venomous a way, and with so much impudence, and so little regard to truth, that the mischief it does is very great indeed. It accuses them in the plainest terms, and sometimes by name, as being disaffected both to church and state.[7]
References
^John Strachan, “Gifford, William (1756–1826),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. May 2006. 7 May 2007).
^"New Review and Magazine". Classified Advertising. The Times. No. 4235. London. 20 July 1798. p. 2.
^Gordon, Charlotte (2015). Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley. Penguin Random House UK. pp. 494–495. ISBN9780099592396.
^Quoted in Ford K. Brown, Fathers of the Victorians: The Age of Wilberforce (1961) p. 187.
Bibliography
Stephen, Leslie. "Gifford, John (1758–1818)". Rev. Adam I. P. Smith. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. 7 May 2007.
Strachan, John. "Gifford, William (1756–1826)".Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. May 2006. 7 May 2007.
Further reading
Andrews, Stuart. The British Periodical Press and the French Revolution, 1789–99. New York: Palgrave, 2000. ISBN0-333-73851-9
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