ABSTRACT
William Morris Thackeray's entry into the world of London journalism must have been in stark contrast to the image of these men-of-letters. Thackeray's articles treating the character of the modern day journalist suggest that his interest in the 1840s moves away from anxieties about the death of the Romantic man-of-letters to a consideration of how the Victorian writer negotiated the terrain of contemporary journalism. Thackeray's next journalist, the 'Fat Contributor', brought to the magazine-reading public a middle-class world of travel and overseas commerce and established a discourse which mediated between the 'aristocratic' or artistic travel writer of several of Thackeray's reviews and the ordinary London-based reader. The 'Fat Contributor Papers' portray several scenes in which Punch plays the part of cultural imperialist and is held up as a standard of English mercantile pride, in a comic manner. The media, for Thackeray, is an enabling mechanism, it empowers. It also generates profit.
