The Press in Novels: Credit, Power, and Mobility in William D. Howells's Modern Instance and Lima Barreto's Recordações do Escrivão Isaías Caminha

Abstract

The Press in Novels:Credit, Power, and Mobility in William D. Howells's Modern Instance and Lima Barreto's Recordações do Escrivão Isaías Caminha Renata Wasserman (bio) In a recent New York Times column, Nicholas Kristoff lamented the disrepute into which journalism was falling and the "dwindling credibility" reporters commanded; he suggested ways of regaining not only the trust of the public but also the protections that journalists traditionally enjoyed in their pursuit of the facts and the truth. Letters to the editor in subsequent days showed agreement about the symptoms and doubts about the diagnosis and the treatment, but the implicit consensus was that journalists and newspapers had been better and more respected in the past.1 Yet distrust of journalism is not new, and appeared at much the same time as the medium gained influence—though, as usual, history does not repeat itself exactly. These days the problem for journalism is that it faces stiff competition from electronic media and from other informal and highly efficient means for the dissemination of news (ever more loosely defined) against which it needs to assert itself as much as against its institutional or individual detractors. An increase in the reach of journalism, and of public consciousness of its impact, took place at the end of the nineteenth century, as part of a larger constellation of changes, and left its mark on literature in the form of novels with journalists as main or important characters. Such novels emplotted perceived problems with the growth in the volume and acceleration in the spread of information, including its use for political or economic ends, not all of them laudable or honest; they also addressed the opportunity for social mobility offered by the increasing prominence of journalism in an era in which both social mobility and journalism were seen as desirable and [End Page 44] destabilizing. These developments were global, and the literary attention paid to them appeared in different languages, literatures, and polities. I will examine two novels, one from the United States—A Modern Instance (1882) by William D. Howells—and one from Brazil—Recordações do escrivão Isaías Caminha (1909) by Lima Barreto—that lay out for public scrutiny and discussion the relation between economics, truth, information, and life events. Both authors are key figures in the literature of their times, addressing in their works some of the more fractious problems of the period, political and domestic, and one of these was the role of the press in public life. Both wrote, or had written, for periodicals. Barreto had worked for O correio da manhã, an important newspaper in Rio de Janeiro, then the Brazilian capital, where he eventually ran afoul of the management. Howells, who had learned the business from his father, a printer and newspaperman, was a longtime editor of the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Magazine, where he welcomed early works of novelists who later became prominent and was particularly hospitable to women and African Americans. Their careers were dissimilar and so is the history of the press in the two environments where they wrote, but their "newspaper novels" drew on their direct knowledge of the field and show that the anxieties surrounding the power of the press were similar in both places. Some historical data and a few numbers give an idea of the material background justifying the focus in the late nineteenth century on the increasing importance of journalism: in 1850 there were 1,902 weeklies in the Unites States and 8,633 in 1880. In 1880, there were also 971 dailies in the United States. Economic as well as technological changes spurred increases in production and circulation: between 1880 and 1890 the price of wood-pulp paper, which had been as high as fifteen cents per pound in 1867, fell from four cents to about one and half cents per pound in the larger cities (and the switch to wood pulp-paper after the Civil War had itself cheapened the production of newspapers). Newspaper production also became more efficient as a result of several important technical innovations introduced after the Civil War. First, the placing of type on a revolving cylinder sped...