The Critical Review was first edited by Tobias Smollett from 1756 to 1763, and was contributed to by Samuel Johnson, David Hume, John Hunter, and Oliver Goldsmith, until 1817.^[1]

The Edinburgh printer Archibald Hamilton started publishing The Critical Review in 1756 with Tobias Smollett as its first editor, and mainly contained book reviews. These reviews were often long and fulsome, and used copious quotations.^[2] Still, the Tory and High Church perspectives of its contributors mentioned above was felt immensely in a time of Whig supremacy.

Because of a libel against Admiral Sir Charles Knowles in The Critical Review, Tobias Smollett was sentenced to a fine of £ 100 and three months in King's Bench Prison. In 1763 Smollett retired from the Review, but left it as a newspaper with far more influence than other newspapers of its time, attracting the conservative philosophers and thinkers Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith and the Scots David Hume and John Hunter.

[edit] Sources

1. ^ James Basker, Tobias Smollett, Critic and Journalist, New York 1988, and James Basker, The Critical Review or Annals of Literature: 1756–1763
2. ^ Encyclopaedia Britannica, Fifteenth Edition, Tobias Smollett