Nicknamed Maga, it was affiliated with Tory politics and a controversial tone described by scholars as "brilliant, troubling, acerbic"; "bold and forceful"; "rioutous ...blackguardly"; and full of "puffery, and scurrilous critique".

[2] For all its conservative credentials the magazine published the works of radicals of British romanticism such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge,[2][3] as well as early feminist essays by American John Neal.

[5] In 1824, Blackwood's became the first British literary journal to publish work by an American with an essay by John Neal that got reprinted across Europe.

[1] The editors of a six-volume 2016 academic collection of Blackwood's articles called it "the most brilliant, troubling, acerbic and imaginative periodical of the post-Napoleonic age".

[11] Literature scholar Fritz Fleischmann described the magazine as subscribing to an "aesthetic belief in original thoughts expressed in bold and forceful language".

[15] Important contributors included: George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, John Buchan, George Tomkyns Chesney, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Felicia Hemans, James Hogg, Charles Neaves, Thomas de Quincey, Elizabeth Clementine Stedman, William Mudford, Margaret Oliphant, Hugh Clifford, Mary Margaret Busk and Frank Swettenham.

[17][3] Edgar Allan Poe published a short story entitled "How to Write a Blackwood Article" in November 1838 as a companion piece to "A Predicament".