 Frontispiece of volume 1 (Jan-Apr 1824) | |
| Frequency | Quarterly |
|---|---|
| Founder | Jeremy Bentham |
| Founded | 1823 |
| First issue | January 1824 |
| Final issue | 1914 |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Based in | London |
| Language | English |
The Westminster Review was a quarterly British publication. Established in 1823 as the official organ of the Philosophical Radicals, it was published from 1824 to 1914. James Mill was one of the driving forces behind the liberal journal until 1828.
In 1823, the paper was founded (and funded) by Jeremy Bentham, [1] who had long pondered the possibility of establishing a journal for propagating Radical views. [2] The first edition of the journal (January 1824) featured an article by James Mill (continued in the second by his son John Stuart Mill), which served as a provocative reprobation of a rival, more well-established journal, the Edinburgh Review , [3] castigating it as an organ of the Whig party, and for sharing the latter's propensity for fence-sitting in the aristocratic interest. [4] The controversy drew in a wide public response, much however critical: the Nuttall Encyclopædia , published in 1907, notes that the Breeches Review became a nickname for the journal because Francis Place, a breeches-maker, was a major shareholder in the enterprise. American critic and activist John Neal also published many articles in these early years while serving as Bentham's personal secretary. [5]
The review quickly reached a circulation of three thousand, [6] but, despite that, was not able to break even; and when by 1828 the original funding was exhausted it was sold to another proprietor and no longer functioned in the Radical interest. [7]
In 1834 Sir William Molesworth funded a new Radical review, to be edited (informally) by J S Mill, and called the ‘’London Review’’. [8] Shortly after, Molesworth bought the Westminster Review’’ and merged the two; and from April 1836 to March 1840 the journal resulting from the merger was published under the title London and Westminster Review. After March 1840 and for the following decade publication continued under the title Westminster Review, [9] [10] but with William Edward Hickson in place of Mill as editor. [11] Though financial difficulties continued, Mill concluded of the period that “it is highly creditable to him [Hickson] that he was able to maintain, in some tolerable degree, the character of the Review as an organ of radicalism and progress”. [12]
In 1851 the journal was acquired by John Chapman based at 142 the Strand, London, a publisher who originally had medical training. The then unknown Mary Ann Evans, later better known by her pen name of George Eliot, had brought together his authors, including Francis Newman, W. R. Greg, Harriet Martineau and the young journalist Herbert Spencer who had been working and living cheaply in the offices of The Economist opposite Chapman's house. These authors met during that summer to give their support to this flagship of free thought and reform, joined by others including John Stuart Mill, the physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter, Robert Chambers and George J. Holyoake. They were later joined by Thomas Huxley, an ambitious young ship's surgeon determined to become a naturalist.
John Oxenford's anonymous 1853 article, "Iconoclasm in German Philosophy", was translated and published in the Vossische Zeitung . This led to a new interest in Schopenhauer's writings.
Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) became assistant editor and produced a four–page prospectus setting out their common beliefs in progress, ameliorating ills and rewards for talent, setting out a loosely defined evolutionism as "the fundamental principle" of what she and Chapman called the "Law of Progress". The group was divided over the work of Thomas Malthus, with Holyoake opposing it as the principle of the workhouse which blamed the poor for their poverty, while to Greg and Martineau this was a law of nature encouraging responsibility and self-improvement. Chapman asked Herbert Spencer to write about this divisive matter for the first issue, and Spencer's "A Theory of Population, deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility" actually appeared in the second issue, supporting the painful Malthusian principle as both true and self-correcting.
After 1853 John Tyndall joined Huxley in running the science section of the Westminster Review and formed a group of evolutionists who helped pave the way for Charles Darwin's 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species and gave evolutionary ideas backing in the ensuing debate. The term "Darwinism" was first put in print by Huxley in his review of The Origin, in the April 1860 issue of the Westminster Review, which hailed the book as "a veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism", promoting scientific naturalism over theology and praising the usefulness of Darwin's ideas while expressing professional reservations about Darwin's gradualism and doubting if it could be proved that natural selection could form new species. [13] [14] In 1886 the Review published an essay by Eleanor Marx, "The Woman Question: From A Socialist Point of View".
After a change of ownership in 1887, when it converted to a monthly, it ceased to function on the same progressive and intellectual level. [1] John Chapman died in Paris on the 25th November 1894, as the result of being run over by a cab, [15] and his wife Hannah took over the editorship of the Review. [16]
The Foreign Quarterly Review was an independent London-based quarterly that published from July 1827 to July 1846 (volume 37). In October 1846 the Foreign Quarterly Review merged with the Westminster Review. Until January 1847 the journal resulting from the merger was simultaneously published under two different titles: the Foreign Quarterly and Westminster Review and the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review; after January 1847, the journal was published under the title the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review. [17] The last issue under the title Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review was published in October 1851 (volume 56, no. 2); after that issue the journal was published under the title Westminster Review and continued thus until it ceased publication in 1914.
Darwinism is a theory of biological evolution developed by the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and others, stating that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual's ability to compete, survive, and reproduce. Also called Darwinian theory, it originally included the broad concepts of transmutation of species or of evolution which gained general scientific acceptance after Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, including concepts which predated Darwin's theories. English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley coined the term Darwinism in April 1860.
Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876). As with Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, she emerged from provincial England; most of her works are set there. Her works are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place and detailed depiction of the countryside. Middlemarch was described by the novelist Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" and by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.
Thomas Henry Huxley was an English biologist and anthropologist who specialized in comparative anatomy. He has become known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
Harriet Martineau was an English social theorist. She wrote from a sociological, holistic, religious and feminine angle, translated works by Auguste Comte, and, rarely for a woman writer at the time, earned enough to support herself. The young Princess Victoria enjoyed her work and invited her to her 1838 coronation. Martineau advised "a focus on all [society's] aspects, including key political, religious, and social institutions". She applied thorough analysis to women's status under men. The novelist Margaret Oliphant called her "a born lecturer and politician... less distinctively affected by her sex than perhaps any other, male or female, of her generation."
George Grote was an English political radical and classical historian. He is now best known for his major work, the voluminous History of Greece.
Herbert Spencer was an English polymath active as a philosopher, psychologist, biologist, sociologist, and anthropologist. Spencer originated the expression "survival of the fittest", which he coined in Principles of Biology (1864) after reading Charles Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species. The term strongly suggests natural selection, yet Spencer saw evolution as extending into realms of sociology and ethics, so he also supported Lamarckism.
St. George Jackson Mivart was an English biologist. He is famous for starting as an ardent believer in natural selection and later becoming one of its fiercest critics. Mivart attempted to reconcile the theory of evolution as propounded by Charles Darwin with the beliefs of the Catholic Church but was condemned by both Darwin and the Church. His belief in a soul created by God and insistence that evolutionism was not incompatible with the existence of such a God brought him into conflict with other evolutionists, while his theological theories on hell and on the compatibility between science and Catholicism led him to clash with the Church.
The Thinker's Library was a series of 140 hardcover books published between 1929 and 1951 for the Rationalist Press Association by Watts & Co., London, a company founded by the brothers John and Charles Watts and then run by the latter's son Charles Albert Watts. The name was suggested by Archibald Robertson, a member of the company's board of directors, who took an active interest in setting up the series and was later to write several volumes himself. The Thinker’s Library was intended as a successor to the cheap paperback “Sixpenny Reprints” from the same publisher, the aim being to bring humanist, philosophical and scientific works to as wide an audience as possible. Unlike the previous series, the volumes in the Thinker’s Library were small hardbacks bound in brown clothette, with grey dustjackets, priced at one shilling. The covers of the early editions featured title, author’s name and a brief description of the book between Doric columns, with the image of Rodin’s The Thinker at the foot. The design would change several times over the course of the series, but the figure of the Thinker remained ever-present.
Francis William Newman was an English classical scholar and moral philosopher, prolific miscellaneous writer and activist for vegetarianism and other causes.
George Jacob Holyoake was an English secularist, co-operator and newspaper editor. He coined the terms secularism in 1851 and "jingoism" in 1878. He edited a secularist paper, the Reasoner, from 1846 to June 1861, and a co-operative one, The English Leader, in 1864–1867.
The immediate reactions, from November 1859 to April 1861, to On the Origin of Species, the book in which Charles Darwin described evolution by natural selection, included international debate, though the heat of controversy was less than that over earlier works such as Vestiges of Creation. Darwin monitored the debate closely, cheering on Thomas Henry Huxley's battles with Richard Owen to remove clerical domination of the scientific establishment. While Darwin's illness kept him away from the public debates, he read eagerly about them and mustered support through correspondence.
The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin is a book published in 1887 edited by Francis Darwin about his father Charles Darwin. It contains a selection of 87 letters from the correspondence of Charles Darwin, an autobiographical chapter written by Charles Darwin for his family, and an essay by Thomas Huxley "On the reception of the 'Origin of Species'".
The Philosophical Radicals were a philosophically minded group of English political radicals in the nineteenth century inspired by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and James Mill (1773–1836). Individuals within this group included Francis Place (1771–1854), George Grote (1794–1871), Joseph Parkes (1796–1865), John Arthur Roebuck (1802–1879), Charles Buller (1806–1848), John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), Edward John Trelawny (1792–1881), and William Molesworth (1810–1855).
Edward Clodd was an English banker, writer and anthropologist. He had a great variety of literary and scientific friends, who periodically met at Whitsunday gatherings at his home at Aldeburgh in Suffolk.
John Chapman was an English publisher who acquired the influential radical journal, the Westminster Review. His assistant editor and lodger Mary Ann Evans later wrote classic novels under the name George Eliot.
Religion of Humanity is a secular religion created by Auguste Comte (1798–1857), the founder of positivist philosophy. Adherents of this religion have built chapels of Humanity in France and Brazil.
The Rationalist Association, originally the Rationalist Press Association, is an organization in the United Kingdom, founded in 1885 by a group of freethinkers who were unhappy with the increasingly political and decreasingly intellectual tenor of the British secularist movement. The purpose of the Rationalist Press Association was to publish literature that was too anti-religious to be handled by mainstream publishers and booksellers. The Rationalist Press Association changed its name to "The Rationalist Association" in 2002.
John Chapman (1801–1854) was an English engineer and writer. At different times in his career, he was involved with lace-making machinery, journalism, Hansom cabs and the promotion of railways, cotton and irrigation in India.
William John Birch (1811–1891) was an English rationalist writer.
Robert William Mackay (1803–1882) was a British philosophical and religious author. He is best known for The Progress of the Intellect (1850). Charles Hardwick in his Christ and other Masters grouped Mackay's religious views, with those of William Johnson Fox and Theodore Parker, as falling under a heading "absolute religion".
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain : Alger, John Goldworth (1901). "Chapman, John (1822-1894)". In Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography (1st supplement). London: Smith, Elder & Co.