The Effects of Context: Carlyle and the 'Examiner' in 1848

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By 1848, the first full year ofJohn Forster's editorship of the Examiner, he and Thomas Carlyle had become closely acquainted and Forster was acting as the older man's literary agent.1 It was to be expected that the Examiner would provide Carlyle with a platform from which he could pronounce on major issues of the day. In 1848 the Examiner was a weekly of sixteen pages. Its first and longest section, 'The Political Examiner', usually began with a substantial leading article and continued with shorter pieces on political or social subjects, plus an occasional invited contribution. Then came 'The Literary Examiner' and, invariably, 'The Theatrical Examiner', where Forster had made his reputation as a reviewer. The three 'Examiners' comprised the 'original' part of each number. The rest, about eight pages, was culled from other publications: background information, extracts from Hansard, miscellaneous social, political, and literary snippets, financial news, and, finally, three or four pages of advertisements. During I848 Carlyle contributed three essays on political subjects: 'Louis-Philippe' (4 March, pp. 145-46), 'Repeal of the Union' (29 April, pp. 275-76), and 'Legislation for Ireland' (13 May, p.308). Each was included in 'The Political Examiner' as an unannounced bonus for regular readers. Those readers, of course, read the Examiner for its other, familiar features, and so would have read their way towards or away from each essay by Carlyle. That is, most, almost certainly all, of those readers read each essay in context. This article studies the relationship between essay and context, and so is much concerned with the holistic character, the total effect, of each issue. In research on periodicals 'holistic problems' have received 'comparatively little attention'.2 One reason for this may be that such research has been dominated by the historian and the literary historian. Though their work is obviously essential to a full understanding of any periodical, that understanding remains incomplete without awareness of a periodical's formal literary characteristics. The apprehension, for example, of an issue's unity,