Their mixture of satire, reviews and criticism both barbed and insightful was extremely popular and the magazine quickly gained a large audience.

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

The four surviving Brontë siblings were avid readers and mimicked the style and content in their Young Men's Magazine and other writings in their childhood paracosm, including Glass Town and Angria.

[citation needed] One late nineteenth century triumph was the first publication of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in the February, March, and April 1899 issues of the magazine.

[citation needed] 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.

[citation needed] The Blackwood's name lives on in the name of the bar at the Nira Caledonia Hotel in Gloucester Place, Edinburgh, the former home of John Wilson from 1827 until his death in 1854.

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

[8] In Dorothy Sayers's detective novel Five Red Herrings (1931) the Scottish Procurator-Fiscal working with Lord Peter Wimsey is mentioned as "reading the latest number of Blackwood to wile away the time" as they spend several boring night hours while waiting for the murderer to reveal himself.

[citation needed] In George Orwell's Burmese Days, the main protagonist, James Flory, associates the magazine with mediocre crassness as he thinks about the other British at the European Club: "Dull boozing witless porkers!