Nineteenth-century Journalists Research Articles

Fictions of the Press in Nineteenth-Century France by Edmund Birch

 Reviews extraordinary theory of ocean currents and tides. ese phenomena he attributes (originally in the Fourth ‘Étude’ of ) to the alternate melting and refreezing of the icecaps at the North and South Poles. Adducing particular maritime and other observations laboriously compiled, he develops a vast imaginative construct—at once ideologically progressive (global currents bring humankind together) and poetically powerful (currents are to the globe ‘comme la sève dans les végétaux, et le sang dans les animaux’: quoted by Joël Castonguay-Bélanger, p. )—which animates Nature and vindicates Providence. No less typically, he inexhaustibly defends it against what he perceives as a conspiracy against him by the academies and the elites. B, U  L R H Fictions of the Press in Nineteenth-Century France. By E B. (Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature) London: Palgrave Macmillan. . ix+ pp. £. (ebk £.). ISBN –––- (ebk ––– –). ‘Newspapers are an evil,’ says the world-weary author Claude Vignon in Balzac’s Illusions perdues (–). at comment is typical of pervasive hostility towards journalism in nineteenth-century French fiction. ‘And yet,’ as Edmund Birch notes of Vignon’s remark in Fictions of the Press in Nineteenth-Century France, ‘newspaper and novel become inseparable in this period’ (p. ). Novels, including Illusions perdues, were frequently serialized in newspapers; and most novelists, chief among them Balzac, doubled as newspaper critics and columnists. In the words of Marie- Ève érenty, who has led a recent wave of scholarship in this area, the rapidly expanding press became ‘the laboratory of literature’ (‘Pour une histoire littéraire de la presse au e siècle’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France,  (), – (p. )). Given the disparity between that creative ferment and the vitriolic portrayals of journalism found in nineteenth-century French fiction, érenty and her collaborators have tended to pay only secondary attention to the latter, which they view as an unreliable guide to literary and journalistic history. By contrast, Birch places the ‘novel of journalism’ at the centre of the frame in Fictions of the Press, which, along with Kate Rees’s e Journalist in the French Fin-de-siècle Novel (; reviewed in MLR,  (), –), is the first book in English to take its lead from their research. Beginning with a theoretical overview that situates érenty and her collaborators ’ work within broader debates about realism’s mimetic function and journalism ’s claims to epistemological authority, Birch devotes his subsequent chapters to readings of Illusions perdues, the Goncourts’ Charles Demailly (), and Maupassant’s Bel-Ami (). Echoing Balzac’s Vautrin, Birch argues that these works of fiction offer insights into a volatile secret world of journalistic skulduggery that nineteenth-century journalists generally passed over in silence. In Illusions perdues, Lucien de Rubempré’s entry into the Parisian press becomes MLR, .,   ‘a rite of passage’ (p. ) that allows him to see through and manipulate the ever deceptive public record created by the newspaper. But that journalistically mediated education in social realities proves to be inadequate as the novel’s hero is overwhelmed by the nefarious forces he unleashes. As Birch points out, that failure is paralleled in two of Balzac’s less familiar works from the late s, Les Employés and Une fille d’Ève, which similarly dramatize struggles for mastery of the press. In Charles Demailly, the corrosive power of the press seems stronger still as the eponymous hero is driven insane by a scurrilous campaign waged against him by his erstwhile journalistic colleagues. Birch offers a nimble interpretation of the Goncourts’ story as emblematic of pervasive anxieties about the erosion of privacy during the Second Empire, when censorship pushed newspapers to forsake political news in favour of society gossip. Political concerns again come to the fore in his reading of Bel-Ami, which traces dense connections between Maupassant’s journalism of the early s about French colonialism in North Africa and the novel’s critique of the press’s complicity in colonial expansion. Here we see a clear example of érenty’s ‘laboratory of literature’ in action. Birch’s account of Bel-Ami, which was serialized in the newspaper Gil Blas, also shows how the press could accommodate works of literature that went against the grain of...

Sympathy, Madness, and Crime: How Four Nineteenth-Century Journalists Made the Newspaper Women's Business

Sympathy, Madness, and Crime: How Four Nineteenth-Century Journalists Made the Newspaper Women's Business

Fragmentos de ética: figurações do historiador oitocentista em Alexandre Herculano

Este artigo parte da análise de textos do jornalista, escritor e historiador português oitocentista Alexandre Herculano (1810-1877), ainda pouco explorados pelos estudos de História da historiografia brasileiros. Majoritariamente produzidos entre 1841 e 1850, eles retratam o âmbito de discussões acerca do processo de reformas liberais portuguesas. Ao examinar os embates de Herculano com os clérigos de Lisboa no que se refere à educação pública e às crenças religiosas por ele revistas em suas obras históricas, o objetivo geral deste texto é verificar a construção da figuração propriamente historiográfica do discurso produzido pelos historiadores, tanto por meio de suas práticas de crítica e instrumentos de verificação, quanto, sobretudo, pela atuação pública daqueles que se dedicavam ao estudo do passado. A experiência de leitura de tais documentos aponta para importantes questões que dizem respeito ao processo de historicização do papel do historiador como crítico da sociedade, o que viria a ser concebido depois como uma função central do intelectual.

Sympathy, Madness, and Crime: How Four Nineteenth-Century Journalists Made the Newspaper Women's Business by Karen Roggenkamp, and: Women, Work and the Victorian Periodical: Living by the Press by Marianne Van Remoortel

Sympathy, Madness, and Crime: How Four Nineteenth-Century Journalists Made the Newspaper Women's Business by Karen Roggenkamp, and: Women, Work and the Victorian Periodical: Living by the Press by Marianne Van Remoortel

The Transnational Reception of Improvised Drama: Tommaso Sgricci in Paris and in the Periodicals

The Italian improvvisatore Tommaso Sgricci (1789–1836), known for his ability to improvise tragic dramas on themes requested by audience members, made international tours to Paris in 1824 and 1826. This article examines the impact of his performances in Parisian theatres by way of the reviews that appeared in European periodicals. Differences among national tastes and aesthetic values inform the reception of Sgricci's performances by French, German, and English reviewers, and these differences become further defined as reviewers respond to one another and write for different markets. The transnational reception of Sgricci and other improvvisatori also reveals how nineteenth-century journalists are themselves improvising as they adapt rapidly to new readerships and innovative types of performance.

Dressing down: Costume, disguise and the performance of ordinariness

Abstract Disguise – the substitution of one identity for another – is a deliberate act of construction and an elimination of self. Through costume, signs of self are concealed and erased, and in their place appears an apparently complete alternative identity. Although dress is typically aspirational, reflecting a desire to imitate those of higher socio-economic status, this article observes that there are occasions on which it is desirable to use costume to reduce status, and to escape the perceived pressures and responsibilities of social or economic power. In trans-status disguise, it is necessary to abandon all outward indicators of individuality and status: to perform ordinariness. Performance of ordinariness is a means to an end: a tool to enable behaviour that would otherwise be inappropriate or impossible. Inspired by Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, nineteenth-century journalists used costume to experience life in the poorest sections of society with the aim of increasing trans-status empathy. In screen-based narratives, a disguise can often be pivotal to a plot, particularly since, in these primarily visual media, costume is a key identifying feature of any character. Taking as examples, Coming to America, Superman and The Saint, this article observes how costume permits a perceived lowering of status, which in turn enables liberation. In particular, it will propose that there are parallels between the social experiments of nineteenth-century journalists and the fictional narratives of twentieth-century television and cinema.

La visibilidad de las escritoras del S. XIX en el espacio público de la prensa

The professional relationships of nineteenth-century journalists with women writers of the intelectual circle of Madrid during this century, together with their renown in the Spanish press, ratify one of the first pages in the book of gender equality. From the decade of 1840, Spanish journalism gave visibility to texts signed by women, and many newspapers and magazines started to spread women’s talent and thought, which had been rejected until that moment. A group of friendships and geographic links gave rise to these first collaborations. The names of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Carolina Coronado, Robustiana Armiño de Cuesta, Amalia Fenollosa and Dolores Cabrera y Heredia appeared together in the literary magazine Los hijos de Eva (Eva’s Children), founded and directed by Ventura Ruiz Aguilera, a writer and a journalist from Salamanca.

Becoming the Second City: Chicago’s Mass News Media, 1833-1898

Becoming the Second City: Chicago's Mass News Media, 1833-1898. By Richard Junger (University of Illinois Press, 2010. Pp. 235; notes, index. Cloth $69.97. Paper $15.00). In Becoming the Second City: Chicago's Mass News Media, 1833-1898, Richard Junger seeks to answer the question that Chicagoans themselves asked from the time of incorporation 1833 until today: why can Chicago not be the biggest, most populace and prosperous city in the United States. Why does Chicago have to be the second city in all things of importance to New York? Junger's answer to the question of why Chicago became second class to New York lies in the way mass media - mainly newspapers like the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Times - influenced Chicago's growth. For Junger, the media acted as a accelerant (x) to Chicago's rapid urbanization and population boom. As discussed in chapter one, titled From Zero to 29,963 in Just Fifty Years, the rate at which Chicago grew demographically indeed resembled that of a rapid, chemical chain reaction. unbridled boosterism of Chicago's mass media and the sensational reporting of not only Chicagoans on their own city but other city's newspapers did much for the city. This kind of journalism acted congruently with the thousands of people migrating to Chicago throughout the nineteenth century to nearly make the city into the powerhouse media visionaries wanted it to be. At the same time, those same newspapers both in Chicago and elsewhere helped regulate the flow of people into Chicago by their sensational reporting of events like the 1871 fire (chapter three) and violent instances of labor unrest as in 1886 with the Haymarket Riot and in 1894 with the Pullman Strike (chapter four). Thus the media helped to both give Chicago its prominence while also ensuring that it could never rise above its main competitor in New York. Junger warns his readers, however, of the dangers of using the sensational journalism en vogue in the nineteenth century as documents to demonstrate Chicago place as the nation's second city to New York. Too often historians take historical newspapers at their word and extrapolate broad conclusions without reading them with a critical eye. As a trained journalist and professor of communications and English, Junger possesses the training to use the Chicago Tribune, for instance, as a source more in the way nineteenth century journalists did: to prove a point rather than any strict fidelity to strict, objective reporting. Comparing Junger's use of historical newspapers to nineteenth century journalism is not to accuse Junger of yellow journalism since Junger knows of the kind of journalistic practices common in the nineteenth century where newspapers were often a promotional tool rather than solely a record of daily events. Newspapers thus help to prove his point for him. For Junger, the penultimate promotional event for Chicago media came with the 1893 Chicago's World Fair covered in chapter five, titled The Beauty. By the 1880s, as related in preceding chapters, newspapers around the country and in Chicago contributed to the city's hyperbolic urban growth. Yet for all of Chicago's enthusiasm for demographic and geographic enlargement, it still could not match the size and population of New York City. And when it came time for the United States to host the World's Fair (originally scheduled for 1892), New York thought itself the natural host for such a global event. Meanwhile, Chicagoans saw the fair as an opportunity to put aside the city's rampant corruption, pollution, social disorder, disease, and poverty (126) and show the world that Chicago could outdo not only pretender hosts like New York, but also Paris which held the 1888 World's Fair that featured the Eiffel Tower. …

Values and Competencies from the Clash of Professional and Academic Cultures

College-level journalism education was advanced as early as 1869 by the Missouri Press Association, whose members pointed to the beneficial results on both the preparation of professional journalists and on the influence the press would have on the destiny of the country. This attitude stood in contrast, however, to the general scorn and ridicule that most nineteenth-century journalists heaped on the notion of journalism education, including the first, short-lived program established at Washington College that same year by Robert E. Lee.1 When Willard Blyer at the University of Wisconsin articulated his vision for journalism education in 1906, he specified a four-year degree program that included one-fourth journalism courses and three-fourths science and humanities courses. In contrast, Walter Williams' freestanding professional school at the University of Missouri opened in 1908 with an emphasis on hands-on training and the practical aspects of journalism.2 These two competing visions for journalism education have defined the culture ever since. In addition to the academy's own schizophrenic approach, five national newspaper associations worked alongside the major educational institutions at the time in creating the first journalism accreditation organization in 1939. Hence, the cultural transmission of knowledge to succeeding generations of journalism educators has included both a deeply embedded defensive reaction to the scorn of professionals who discount the entire endeavor, and an attempt to court professional endorsement (through the accreditation process and efforts to help students secure jobs upon graduation) while meeting the standards of the academy. Of course, this is not unique to journalism education. Professional fields such as law, medicine, architecture, and engineering have faced the same issues in navigating the proper balance between transmitting a set of specific professional skills, and preparing students with as much analytic and reasoning ability as possible for facing any situation that may arise. One observer argues that medicine and engineering education tends toward the first model while architecture and law education tends toward the second.3 This same observer argues that journalism education (along with social work, nursing, teaching, and librarianship) falls into a third category in which educators are unable to agree on the knowledge base or the appropriate pedagogy for their profession. According to this argument, because journalism education suffers from ambiguity of purpose, the students who graduate from these programs suffer a lack of status relative to the graduates of programs that have a coherent set of beliefs and values. These problems, among others, may have provided the impetus for the recent changes in journalism accreditation standards, which include an articulation for the first time of the core and that journalism and mass communication graduates must master in order for the educational institution to be accredited. The very terms values and competencies suggest that journalism educators may be trying to locate the balance between habits of mind and skill acquisition that could resolve some of the historic ambiguity of purpose in journalism education. At the same time, sweeping social, economic and technological trends are influencing the practice of communication and the traditions of the academy. Both media organizations and academic institutions are finding it difficult to meet the diversity standards that a global society requires. Both are under severe ettonomic pressure. And both the media industry and educational institutions at all levels are struggling to understand and keep up with the technological changes that are challenging every assumption they have had for decades. These much larger social, economic, and technological influences on both higher education and the media professions color the relationship between the two. …

John L. O'Sullivan and his times

The life of nineteenth-century journalist, diplomat, adventurer, and enthusiast for lost causes John Louis O'Sullivan is usually glimpsed only in brief episodes, perhaps because the components of his life are sometimes contradictory. An exponent of romantic democracy, O'Sullivan became a defender of slavery. A champion of reforms for women, labor, criminals, and public schools, he ended his life promoting spiritualism. This first full-length biography reveals a man possessed of the idealism and promise, as well as the prejudices and follies, of his age, a man who sensed the revolutionary and liberating potential of radical democracy but was unable to acknowledge the racial barriers it had to cross to fulfill its promise. Sure to be welcomed by scholars of the Jacksonian era and others interested in nineteenth-century American history, John L. O'Sullivan and His Times presents an in-depth examination of O'Sullivan's ideas as they were expressed in the Democratic Review and other newspapers and literary magazines that he edited. O'Sullivan was a crusader whose efforts to end capital panishment came within a hair's breadth of ending hanging in New York; an editor who called down the wrath of the people upon speculators, promoters of privilege and monopoly, and eloquently praised the virtues of majority rule and citizens' right to control and transform their government; a political operative who supported the radical wing of the Democratic party, battled nativists, and plotted strategy with a young Samuel J. Tilden; a promoter of a fresh American literature who significantly aided Hawthorne's career and familiarized his readers with the works of Whitman, Poe, Whittier, and Thoreau. Through extensive research of primary materials - including contemporary correspondence and journals of public figures such as Martin Van Buren, William Marcy, Benjamin F. Butler, Samuel Tilden, and James K. Polk - author Robert D. Sampson explores the many facets of this enigmatic figure, a man described by Nathaniel Hawthorne as one of the truest and best men in the world.

‘Magic Bits of Paste-board’

‘Magic Bits of Paste-board’

FROM THE DAGGER TO THE BOMB: KARL HEINZEN AND THE EVOLUTION OF POLITICAL TERROR

Historians and political scientists have been quick to draw a continuum between the tyrannicide theories of years gone by and the modern terrorism of today. Yet the underlying motivations and intended results are very different in tyrannicide and terrorism. The question this raises is what changes occurred in the theory of political violence to make the transition between tyrannicide and terrorism possible? In this article, the author looks at the writings of a little-known nineteenth-century journalist, Karl Heinzen, to gain insight into the connection made in the mind of a terrorist between tyrannicide theory and terrorism.

Brer Rabbit, Uncle Remus, and the 'Cornfield Journalist': The Tale of Joel Chandler Harris (review)

In 1975 critic Robert A. Bone surveyed two decades of scholarship to find that charges of racism had put Joel Chandler Harris "in bad odor among the younger generation of literary men." But to most readers and even many scholars today, Harris is not only odorless but invisible—forgotten, ignored. Walter M. Brasch discovered this when he mentioned Harris and his Uncle Remus stories in passing to an upper-level college journalism class. "Who?" asked one brave soul, while the rest simply jotted down the unfamiliar name in their notebooks. Brer Rabbit, Uncle Remus, and the 'Cornfield Journalist' is Brasch's response to this student's question. It is also a comprehensive biography of Harris that presents a wide array of source material and offers the most extensive account of Harris's (and Brer Rabbit's) long-term influence in American popular culture to date. Writing primarily to reintroduce Harris to a new generation of readers, Brasch restores Harris's name in another sense: by ably demonstrating what a "web of contradictions" this late nineteenth-century journalist and literary giant was, Brasch [End Page 94] makes it far more difficult for modern-day observers to dismiss Harris as simply another racist southern white.

The Treatment of the News in mid-Victorian Newspapers

This paper is concerned with the way in which news was handled by the four main London dailies, The Times, the Daily News, the Daily Telegraph and the Standard which, by the late 1870s, enjoyed the largest circulations. They differed from each other considerably in character and history, and in the kind of historical record which they have left behind. Much more is known about The Times than about any of the others. In the 1860s it was a 16-page paper, costing 3d, with a circulation declining slowly from 65,000 to 60,000. The fact that it could maintain this circulation, when it was three times as expensive as its main rivals, is by itself evidence of the value that contemporaries placed upon it. It had far greater assets than any of its rivals, and the Walter family were willing to invest heavily in the paper as and when funds were needed. Its greater resources were shown, partly in its technical equipment, and partly in the range and quality of writing in the paper itself. The Times had more correspondents reporting more frequently and fully from more European capitals than its rivals, and much of its prestige had been derived from that fact. It also employed in London a staff of educated writers such as George Brodrick and Robert Lowe. Unlike its rivals it could afford to pay salaries which enabled it to impose on its writers the condition that they wrote for it exclusively. (The lives of a number of notable late nineteenth-century journalists show that they tried to make up income by writing too much simultaneously, for too many different publications.)