In this lively, erudite study, Richard Cronin focuses on three related aspects of postNapoleonic British literary culture: Byron’s celebrity and the success of Don Juan; the development of new literary journals such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the London Magazine; and the enormously popular novels of Walter Scott. Paper Pellets is framed by discussions of literary duels: the opening chapter considers those between John Scott of the London Magazine and the Blackwood’s associate Jonathan Christie in 1821 and Sir Alexander Boswell and James Stuart in 1822, and the final chapter opens with the duel between Thomas Moore and Francis Jeffrey in 1806. The “cooperative antagonism” (13) of these duels is, for Cronin, symptomatic of a literary culture defined by complex relations of conflict and dependence. In surveying this culture, he addresses a number of significant topics, including the intersection of political and literary “warfare”; literary relations between Scotland and England; the development of new readerships and new forms of authorial address; and the relationship between writing and masculinity. In part, it is a study of genre, specifically how magazine writing incorporates different genres and challenges the distinctions among them. Thus Cronin argues that in the period “novels and poems both aspired to be like magazines” (16). He provides judicious accounts of many of the major authors and texts of the period and makes some fascinating connections between them. I found his carefully contextualized analyses of Scott’s novels particularly enlightening.

This is a substantial book of twelve chapters. As Cronin looks at some writers and ideas from a number of different angles, Paper Pellets is probably better approached as a whole, rather than as a study to dip into. After the opening chapter on literary duels, Cronin turns in the following two chapters to the complex relationship between public and private in the literary culture of the period, and particularly the vexed issue of “personality” (public attacks on private character). These are the least original parts of the book, but they give a necessary foundation for later chapters, such as the astute discussion of Hazlitt’s Liber amoris (1823) in chapter 4. Chapter 5 considers the relationship between publication and intimate address, which leads neatly into the next chapter’s discussion of the new significance of print in the culture of the period. Chapter 7 then focuses on class anxieties and literary professionalization with reference to a wide range of authors and provides a useful way of contextualizing the much-discussed “Cockney School” controversy. Chapter 8 considers the magazine-like nature of novels of the period and has valuable things to say about Ferrier, Scott, Hogg, and Peacock. The following chapter explores the miscellaneous seriocomic nature of Don Juan and its imitators in relation to magazine culture. In chapter 10, Cronin examines the ways in which the literature of the period disdains sympathy, focusing on Pierce Egan, Charles Lamb, and Byron. That there is no discussion here of Lamb’s essay “Imperfect Sympathies” (1821) seems an odd omission. The penultimate chapter addresses the troubled attempt in the period to “re-masculinise the literary world” (204) and includes suggestive readings of Scott, Byron, and Hazlitt. The conclusion returns to the issue of dueling and links it to Wordsworth’s antagonistic yet dependent relationship with periodical culture.

The only notable problem with Paper Pellets is that it is not always the easiest book to navigate. This is partly a result of its compendious, heterogeneous nature (mimicking the magazines it discusses) and its fluent moves between texts and genres. However, it would have been possible to have helped the reader with more signposting: for example, the book opens with detailed accounts of the Scott-Christie and Boswell-Stuart duels, and it is some time before any explanation is given as to why these events are worthy of attention. Similarly, the chapter titles, though witty and apposite, do not actually say much about their contents. One can get quite a long way into a particular chapter without being completely sure about its focus. The reader is not necessarily helped by the chapter summaries in the introduction, which are out of sync with the chapters themselves. For whatever reason, Cronin neglects to summarize chapter 4 (perhaps a late insertion into the book) and presents chapter 4 as chapter 5, chapter 5 as chapter 6, and so on. This is hardly a disastrous error—although it is surprising that it was not noticed during the production process—but it suggests, I think, a certain structural instability in the book as a whole. However, readers who persevere with Paper Pellets will be richly rewarded. A book of critical acuity and remarkable range, as a study of late Romantic literary culture it is simply without rival.