The Eclectic Review - Founding and Competition

Founding and Competition

Modeled on 18th-century periodicals such as the Monthly Review and The Critical Review, issues of the Eclectic Review typically included several long reviews in addition to many short notices. Its long reviews included both "review articles", which reviewed several books on the same subject, and "review essays", which used a single book as a way to begin discussing a larger subject of interest. However, unlike its 18th-century models, the Eclectic was able to successfully compete in the early 19th-century market, with the Edinburgh Review, the Quarterly Review, and the Westminster Review. As James Basker explains in his short history of the Eclectic, the Edinburgh Review was its "most illustrious and its most antagonistic rival", and like it, the Eclectic "offered sophisticated criticism that moved almost completely away from the old-fashioned techniques of quotation and abstract toward a genuine critical evaluation of books and their significance in the broader contexts both of the author's canon and of their formal or intellectual tradition". Basker writes that "the Eclectic grew to become what is now a massive and invaluable archive of the literary and intellectual history of the nineteenth century".

The Eclectic was founded on but not dominated by nonconformist principles. Unlike most periodicals at the time, it was a non-profit publication. From its foundation, all profits were donated to the British and Foreign Bible Society. The religious affiliation of the periodical, while non-denominational, may have affected its content. Basker speculates that its religious foundations are connected to its "high proportion of serious intellectual discussion and rather less than usual treatment of lighter literary from such as drama and the novel".