Analytical Review

The Analytical Review was an English periodical that was published from 1788 to 1798, having been established in London by the publisher Joseph Johnson and the writer Thomas Christie. Part of the Republic of Letters, it was a publication, which offered readers summaries and analyses of the many new publications issued at the end of the eighteenth century.

Perhaps most important, the Analytical Review provided a forum for radical political and religious ideas. Although it aimed at impartiality, its articles were often critical of the British government and supportive of the French revolutionaries. While the journal had low circulation numbers for its day, it still influenced popular opinion and was feared by the conservative government of William Pitt the Younger. In late 1797, the Anti-Jacobin Review, the self-styled nemesis of the Analytical Review, was founded by supporters of the government and other reactionary interests; it criticized the radical politics of the Analytical and monitored it for unpatriotic and irreligious sentiments.

Organized into separate departments, each with its own chief reviewer, the Analytical Review focused on politics, philosophy, natural history, and literature. To promote a disinterested air, its reviewers were anonymous, signing their work with pseudonymous initials. Nevertheless, the journal recruited several prominent writers, such as the poet William Cowper, the moralist William Enfield, the physician John Aikin and the polemicist Mary Wollstonecraft.

The Analytical Review suspended publication in December 1798 after the deaths of Christie (1796) and Wollstonecraft (1797), the conviction of Johnson for seditious libel (1798) and the retirement of other contributing editors.

The Whig Monthly Review, founded in 1749 by Ralph Griffiths, and the Tory Critical Review, founded in 1756 by Tobias Smollett, were the first journals dedicated to reviewing books in Britain. Although they were joined by smaller publications such as the Analytical Review, these two journals dominated reviewing in the second half of the eighteenth century. They focused on poetry, novels, drama, belles-lettres, travel literature, biographies, science writing and other forms of popular literature. They did not review many complex theological or scholarly works, particularly those in foreign languages.

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