Tales of Terror from Blackwood's Magazine

Book excerpt: The tales of terror and hysteria published in the heydey (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. This edition selects some of the best tales from the magazine's first fifteen years, and includes works by well-known writers such as Walter Scott, James Hogg, and John Galt alongside talented but now almost forgotten authors like William Godwin, Samuel Warren, and William Mudford.