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The tales of terror and hysteria published in the heyday (1817-32) of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine became a literary legend in the nineteenth century. Blackwood's was the most important and influential literary-political journal of its time, and a major institution not just in Scottish letters but in the development of British and American Romanticism. Intemperate in political polemic and feared for its literary assassinations, the magazinebecame just as notorious for the shocking power of its fictional offerings. These set a new standard of concentrated dread and precisely calculated alarm, and were to establish themselves as a landmark in the development of the short magazine story. The influence of Blackwood's quickly reached manymajor authors, including Dickens, Emily Bronte, Robert Browning, and Edgar Allan Poe. This edition selects some of the best and most representative tales from the magazine's first fifteen years, including work by Walter Scott, James Hogg, and John Galt, alongside talented but now almost forgotten figures like William Mudford, William Godwin (son of the philosopher), and SamuelWarren.

These seven stories, written between 1965 and 1975 while the author was serving in the Royal Navy, take the reader on travels across the world, from the old Portuguese colony of Maco in China to the sardine fishing grounds off Lisbon; from the island of Lamu on the east coast of Kenya to the cockpit of an Airborne Early Warning aircraft on patrol off Mozambique, and from Pulau Tioman, an island off the east coast of Malaya, to the remote Portuguese vineyards of Vargelas in the upper Douro. Together they form a vivid snapshot of the world as it was in the mid twentieth century. Blackwood's Magazine was founded in 1817 by the publisher William Blackwood. "'Maga, '" as it came to be called, published the works of leading British romanticists Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Other famous contributors include the novelists George Eliot, Joseph Conrad and John Buchan. Blackwood's Magazine finally stopped publication in 1980, having been owned and edited throughout its lifetime by the Blackwood family.

The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer is an 1871 novella by George Tomkyns Chesney, starting the genre of invasion literature and an important precursor of science fiction. Written just after the Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian War, it describes an invasion of Britain by a German-speaking country referred to in oblique terms as The Other Power or The Enemy. Excerpt: "You ask me to tell you, my grandchildren, something about my share in the great events that happened fifty years ago. 'Tis sad work turning back to that bitter page in our history, but you may perhaps take profit in your new homes from the lesson it teaches. For us, in England, it came too late. And yet we had plenty of warnings if we had only made use of them."

In The House of Blackwood, David Finkelstein exposes for the first time the successes and failures of this onetime publishing powerhouse. The value of the archive Finkelstein studies is its completeness, the depth of the ledger material, and the extraordinary longevity of the firm.