ABSTRACT
The rise of the periodical press is the great event in modern history’ – this according to E. S. Dallas, the Marshall McLuhan of the mid-nineteenth century, who, in a two-part article in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, defined the term in the broadest sense to include impartially ‘a daily paper, a weekly journal, a monthly magazine, or a quarterly review’ (Dallas 1859a: I 100–101). Dallas claimed that the application of industrial operations to the press – pulp paper making, stereotype setting, steam roller printing, and the rest – constituted a media revolution as far-reaching as the creation of the alphabet or the invention of printing. His interest, though, was less in the economic and technological causes than in the social and political consequences of this third revolution, less in quantitative than qualitative signs of change. In drawing attention to serial publication as the crucial innovation of the age, Dallas thus concentrates less on the emergence of journals of mass consumption – the Family Herald (from 1843), London Journal (1845), and other penny weeklies, then circulating in the hundreds of thousands, as discussed in the previous volume of Blackwood’s (Oliphant 1858) – than on the proliferation of what he calls ‘class journals’ (Dallas 1859a: I 103), that is, periodicals targeting not the indiscriminate mass but rather those finely differentiated categories of readers affiliated to specific religious, political, professional, social, regional, and cultural communities. In this development Dallas perceives a virtuous circle of interaction among authors, publishers, and readers that serves to promote the healthy cultivation of public opinion.
