William Blackwood, a publisher from Edinburgh, started Blackwood's Magazine, a monthly periodical in April, 1817. Blackwood started the magazine as a Tory rival to the Whig supporting Edinburgh Review. The first editor of the magazine was John Lockhart, who led the campaign against what he called the Cockney School of Poetry of Leigh Hunt and William Hazlitt.

In 1821 John Scott, the editor of the London Magazine, accused Blackwood's Magazine, of libel. A representative of the journal, J. H. Christie, challenged Scott to a duel. Scott accepted and died as result of the wounds received during the fight.

Although a Tory periodical, Blackwood's Magazine did support the work of the radical poets, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The magazine ceased publication in 1980.