Memoir of John Murray
John Barrow to John Murray, 2 April 1823
Croker has run away to Paris, and left
poor Gifford helpless. What will become
of the Quarterly? It is very cruel, and I assure you I am exceedingly
sorry for it; for I much fear that what with its delay some sharp-witted fellow
may take the advantage and start a rival. . . . Poor
Gifford told me yesterday that he felt he must give up
the Editorship, and that the doctors had ordered him to do so. As far,
therefore, as he is concerned, I see no reason why you should not go on, and
if, as I hope and trust, he may get a little better, he may then resume his
labour on what remains undone.
John Wilson Croker (1780-1857)
Secretary of the Admiralty (1810) and writer for the
Quarterly
Review; he edited an elaborate edition of Boswell's
Life of
Johnson (1831).
William Gifford (1756-1826)
Poet, scholar, and editor who began as a shoemaker's apprentice; after Oxford he
published
The Baviad (1794),
The Maeviad
(1795), and
The Satires of Juvenal translated (1802) before becoming
the founding editor of the
Quarterly Review (1809-24).
The Quarterly Review. (1809-1967). Published by John Murray, the
Quarterly was instigated by Walter
Scott as a Tory rival to the
Edinburgh Review. It was edited by
William Gifford to 1824, and by John Gibson Lockhart from 1826 to 1853.
