“Its notorious attacks on the 'The Cockney School' of poetry, and unwarrantedly savage criticism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others gave it a controversial fame which attracted uncommitted talent. Of great interest is the fact that Blackwood's introduced original criticism into the magazine as a more important element than it had ever been before. The magazine is the oldest of the now existing magazines in English. It has been the medium through which many great modern reputations have been made" (Faustus no 52).

In its criticism of literature, Blackwood's sustained a consistently indignant moral tone, whether against Keats and the 'Cockney school' of poets in 1817, or against 'low' novelists like Dickens in the 1840's, or Hardy and the 'anti-marriage' league of novelists in the 1890s.

"One of the rare women able to support a family through her writing, by 1831 [Felicia] Hemans was earning two guineas per page for her poetry from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, more than even Scott commanded." (Adams, p.34)

"Margaret Oliphant (1828-1897), prolific novelist and social critic, enjoyed a 48-year career as a fiction-writer and journalist, most notably for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine" (Kortsch, p.106).