Analytical Review

While the journal had low circulation numbers for its day, it still influenced popular opinion and was feared by the conservative government of William Pitt the Younger.

The Analytical Review suspended publication in December 1798 after the deaths of Christie (1796) and Wollstonecraft (1797), the conviction of Johnson for seditious libel (1798) and the retirement of other contributing editors.

Its articles were intended to be rigorously analytical and attempted to "settl[e] the [Biblical] text by a comparison of various readings; by accurate translation, division, and punctuation; by a concise, well-digested commentary; by notes philosophical and explanatory; and finally by adding doctrinal and moral conclusions".

[6] Johnson and Christie were mutual friends of Priestley and others, and their combined interest in beginning such a journal resulted in the foundation of the Analytical Review.

[7] Literary scholar Paul Keen has described the Republic of Letters as a vision of society in which "all rational individuals could have their say, and in which an increasingly enlightened reading public would be able to judge the merit of different arguments for themselves".

[8] The practical goal of the Analytical Review was to facilitate this society by summarizing serious new and foreign publications in great depth so that intelligent readers might form their own opinions.

[15] The journal was, according to scholar Nathaniel Teich, "the most important radical review adopting the encyclopedic format for the attempted universal coverage of published works".

[18] Unusual for its time, the Analytical Review brought current foreign-language publications, particularly those with a scientific, philosophical, or aesthetic bent, to its readers' attention.

[21] Johnson and Christie set up separate departments for practical sciences, such as mathematics, natural history, agriculture, and medicine; literature, such as poetry, drama, and romance; and finally, politics and religion, which encompassed government, theology, philosophy, morality, law, and trade.

Scholars have speculated that her reviews are signed by the letters "M", "W", or "T", corresponding roughly to her initials, in large part because they have identified her writing style in these pieces.

[30] Wollstonecraft wrote excoriating reviews, criticizing the passive novelistic heroines of the time and praising, for example, the "wise and resilient" Mrs Stafford of Charlotte Smith's autobiographical novel Emmeline (1788).

In highlighting this character, she "singles out ... the knowledgeable mother figure who has felt and thought deeply", one who resembles the women she described in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) as having "power ... over themselves".

[32] Evincing a particular regard for the works of Thomas Holcroft, such as Anna St. Ives (1792), Wollstonecraft celebrated their championing of innate nobility and virtue over aristocratic titles.

[33] Romanticist Anne Chandler argues that Wollstonecraft's reviews demonstrate "an earlier Augustan politics of knowledge, variously outlined by Dryden, Pope, and, to a lesser extent, Swift" which "may be seen in her insistence on a continuum between aesthetic integrity and civic virtue; her belief in a metaphysical dialogue between human wit and divine Nature; and her perception of belletristic criticism as the proper tribunal for a new onslaught of scholarly and scientific research".

According to Eudo Mason, "Fuseli's peculiar style, his favourite phrases and quotations, themes and ideas make it possible to determine his authorship beyond reasonable doubt in most cases".

In July 1789, when the Bastille fell, the Analytical reviewed The Rural Economy of Gloucestershire, Life of Thomas Chatterton, Transactions in Bengal, Military Operations on the Coromandel Coast, Poetry and Music of the Italian Opera, and Histoire Politique de la Revolution en France.

[44] Consistent with Joseph Johnson's attitudes, the Analytical Review tended towards a "moderate radicalism", meaning that it opposed the Pitt administration and celebrated the general values of Paine's Rights of Man.

[45] It advocated a moderate reform of Parliament, emphasized the benefits of representative government, and outlined the protections afforded by a separation of powers.

While the journal supported the ideals of the French Revolution and opposed Britain's war against France, it did not endorse the violent methods of some of the revolutionaries.

Furthermore, Johnson chose as his theological reviewer, not a Dissenter as his friend Joseph Priestley urged, but Alexander Geddes, a talented Scot who had been ordained in Paris as a Roman Catholic priest.

[52] However, modern scholars have suggested that he did so not for religious reasons, but because Geddes lived in London and had close connections both to Wollstonecraft and Johnson's friend, Henry Fuseli.

It is by his orders to men whom he pays for scribbling in his miserable Review, that every writer who exposes the defects, as they are delicately termed, of Mr. Wakefield's pamphlet, is abused in the most scurrilous and indiscriminate manner.

We advise, therefore, these critics, in future, to throw off a mask which will no longer conceal their object, and boldly, if they dare, pronounce a eulogy on the loyalty of this favorite publisher and friend of the PRIESTLEYS, the DARWINS, the GODWINS, and other unprejudiced authors, who have kindly taken upon themselves, for the last twenty years, the important task of enlightening the public mind.

[59] After Johnson was convicted on 17 July 1798, and before he was sentenced on 12 February 1799, he tried to prove that he had "uniformly recommended the circulation of such publications as had a tendency to promote good morals instead of such as were calculated to mislead and inflame the Common people".

[60] Periodical scholar Stuart Andrews therefore argues that the last issues of the Analytical Review "must be read in the light of Johnson's impending sentence".

[61] The June 1798 issue focused on travel literature and female fashions, and although it reviewed Mary Hays's Appeal to the Men of Great Britain on Behalf of Women, it did not do so with any "political bite".

[65] Butler writes that "one marker of the end of the bourgeois republic of letters was the jailing in 1798 of the doyen of publisher-booksellers, Joseph Johnson".

Black-and-white engraving of a half-length portrait of a man seated in a chair. He is wearing a dark colored jacket with a high collar and a white shirt. He has his hands clasped in front of him.
Joseph Johnson , co-founder of the Analytical Review (engraving by William Sharp after a painting by Moses Haughton )
Page reads "Prospectus of the Analytical Review, or New Literary Journal, on an Enlarged Plan; Containing Scientific Abstracts of Important and Interesting Works; A General Catalogue of Such as are of Pres-Consequence, with short Characters; Notices, or Reviews of All Valuable Foreign Books; Criticisms on New Pieces of Music and Works of Art; and Literary Intelligence, Foreign and Domestic ..."
The prospectus for the Analytical Review (1788) outlined the journal's intention to present readers with objective summaries of important new publications.
Half-length portrait of a woman leaning on a desk with a book and an inkstand. She is wearing a blue-striped dress and a gray, curly wig crossed by a white band of cloth.
Mary Wollstonecraft , by John Opie (c. 1791). Wollstonecraft was a friend of Joseph Johnson and one of the Analytical Review' s major editors.
On the left-hand side of the painting, a building with towers is being attacked and is bathed in flames. On the right-hand side, black smoke billows around. At the base of the piece, small people are fighting and destroying the building brick by brick.
Prise de la Bastille (1789) by Jean-Pierre-Louis-Laurent Houël
Half-length portrait of a man sitting in a chair wearing a formal, high collared jacket and a white shirt. The palette of the drawing is light grey.
William Gifford , the founder of the Anti-Jacobin Review
Page reads "On the 1st of March will be published, No. I. For January, and No. II. For February, of the New Series of the Analytical Review; Printed for the Proprietor, and sold by T. Hurst, Paternoster-Row."
Title page and advertisement for the first and second issue of the Analytical Review (New Series)