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The Quarterly Review was a literary and political periodical founded in March 1809 Courier (London newspaper), March 1, 1809, "Published this day". The first issue, however, bore a title page date of February, 1809. by London publishing house John Murray. It ceased publication in 1967. It was referred to as The London Quarterly Review, as reprinted by Leonard Scott, for an American edition.
Early contributors included Secretaries of the Admiralty John Wilson Croker and Sir John Barrow, Poet Laureate Robert Southey, poet-novelist Sir Walter Scott, Italian exile Ugo Foscolo, Gothic novelist Charles Robert Maturin, and the essayist Charles Lamb.
Under Gifford, the journal took the Canningite liberal-conservative position on matters of domestic and foreign policy, if only inconsistently.Boyd Hilton, '“Sardonic grins” and “paranoid politics”: Religion, Economics, and Public Policy in the Quarterly Review’, in J. Cutmore (ed.), Conservatism and the Quarterly Review: A Critical Analysis (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007), pp. 41-60. It opposed major political reforms, but it supported the gradual abolition of slavery, moderate law reform, humanitarian treatment of criminals and the insane, and the liberalizing of trade. In a series of articles in its pages, Southey advocated a progressive philosophy of social reform. Because two of his key writers, Scott and Southey, were opposed to Catholic emancipation, Gifford did not permit the journal to take a clear position on that issue.
Reflecting divisions in the Conservative party itself, under its third editor, John Gibson Lockhart, the Quarterly became less consistent in its political philosophy. While Croker continued to represent the Canningites and Peelites, the party's liberal wing, it also found a place for the more extremely conservative views of Lords Eldon and Wellington.
During its early years, reviews of new works were sometimes remarkably long. That of Henry Koster's Travels in Brazil (1816) ran to forty-three pages.'Art. IV. Travels in Brazil By Henry Koster', review in Quarterly Review dated January 1817, in bound volume XVI (London: John Murray, 1817), pp. 344– 387
In an 1817 article, John Wilson Croker attacked John Keats in a review of Endymion for his association with Leigh Hunt and the so-called Cockney School of poetry. Shelley blamed Croker's article for bringing about the death of the seriously ill poet, 'snuffed out', in Byron's ironic phrase, 'by an article'.
In 1816, Sir Walter Scott reviewed his own, but anonymously published, Tales of My Landlord, partly to deflect suspicion that he was the author; he proved one of the book's harshest critics. Scott was also the author of a favourable review of Jane Austen's Emma.
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