Blog Article
One of the effects of industrialisation in the early nineteenth century was that there was an explosion of periodicals – of newspapers, journals, and magazines – including some of the first media aimed at a mass market. As this new print culture evolved, certain ways of thinking about the world, certain kinds of information, and certain ideas, were more prominent and more widely shared than others.
This project investigates the way periodicals were used deliberately by publishers and editors to try to influence and drive social change, as well to make money, and asks questions about the kinds of knowledge that gained dominance in the periodical press. In other words, its big question asks what are the historical conditions of knowledge, and how do the structures we use to write and share knowledge shape the way we think?
Britain witnessed wholesale social, economic, and political changes in the decades around the turn of the nineteenth century. The normal mode of living shifted from rural, agrarian settings to urban, industrialised settings with the introduction of the factory system and the mass growth of cities. Between 1800 and the 1850s London, an exemplar of this new urban mode, had doubled in size and was estimated to be governed by at least 300 different bodies (governance was in considerable flux too as it evolved to cope with urban development).
Between 1840 and 1870 the number of books published each year increased by approximately 400 per cent, while periodical publications – magazines, newspapers, anthologies, and so on – steadily grew in number. Magazines, newspapers, and other periodicals were marketed at a wide array of markets based on age, class, sex, religious and political ideology, location, and interests, from targeted titles like The Ladies Cabinet of Fashion (1832-70), Christian Mother’s Magazine (1844-1857), Boy’s Own Magazine (1855-1874), to more general titles like Chambers Journal (1832-1956), Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1817-1980), and Bentley’s Miscellany (1837-1868). This quickly developing print culture acted as the principle means by which knowledge was formulated, exchanged, and packaged for the subjects of this newly industrialised imperial society.
Dr Jonathan Potter, working under the mentorship Dr Serena Trowbridge, will identify and analyse the discursive techniques through which knowledge was constructed in the generalist periodical publications of the period 1830-1860. The project will last two years and is due to conclude in September 2025 with the production of a new book outlining its findings.
Project Aims:
To identify and analyse the discursive techniques through which knowledge was constructed in the generalist periodicals of the period 1830-1860, including analysis of:
- The impact of industrialised technology on the knowledge economy, both as a concept and as a practice(s).
- The cascading relations between texts, publications, genres, publishers, and markets.
- The role of literary imagination in popularising industrial, scientific, and imperial logics to the general public.
Contact:
For more information on the project, please contact jonathan.potter@bcu.ac.uk.