Paper Pellets

This book begins with two fatal duels, the famous duel of February 16, 1821, in which John Scott, editor of the London Magazine, fell, and the less well known duel of March 26, 1822, in which Alexander Boswell, son of Johnson's biographer, was killed. The duels, Richard Cronin suggests, bring into sharp focus the distinctive features of literary culture in the years after Waterloo, which was best defined by its antagonisms - between England and Scotland, Whigs and Tories, men and women, and between poets and their critics. This wide-ranging study explores the years in which publishing became an industry serving a mass readership, and focuses on the three publishing phenomena of the age; the novels of Walter Scott, Byron's Don Juan, and the new literary magazines. It attempts a radical reconfiguration of our understanding of literary culture in the years after Waterloo.