ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Austin as a political journalist and establishing this as the primary factor behind his appointment to the laureateship, will also through practice demonstrate the difficulty – in fact the near impossibility – of researching one nineteenth-century journalist in isolation. It investigates his journalistic career in detail and focuses on how his political affiliations, marked by his work as a journalist, influenced his selection as laureate. The chapter demonstrates some of the approaches through the material discovered and also focuses especially on Austin's route to the laureateship. It also demonstrates that in order to fully understand Austin's career, it is necessary to consider the relationship between his poetry and prose as well as his signed and unsigned publications. The chapter examines his exchanges with fellow critics and writers in periodicals; his journalistic collaborations with political allies; and the relationship between his biography as a journalist and the history of the National Review.
