ABSTRACT
This chapter explores William Morris Thackeray's attitude towards 'journalism' as historical realism, his relationship with the main journals to which he contributed in the late 1830s and 1840s, his engagement with the media phenomenon, his view of the newspaper as a cultural signifier of his age, and his own notions of journalistic reporting. As Thackeray observed, the advertising function of journalism was geared towards attracting, pleasing, and stimulating, readerly desire. Thackeray s journalism deals with social issues relating to class and poverty, but does so from the safe distance of the arm chair. However, unlike Benjamin Disraeli, who put together his famous critique of industrialization in Sybil: or, The Two Nations from the contemporary government blue-books, Thackeray concerns himself with representation in the penny press and cheap publications of the day. Thackeray's articles are about revelation; revealing to a readership of Fraser's Magazine, a whole new body of texts that form an alternative history of England.
