ABSTRACT
The chapter begins by tracing the relationship of Dallas’s series of Blackwood’s articles to more general liberal theory developed earlier in the century concerning the contribution of periodical media to social progress, particularly that of Alexis de Tocqueville in his volumes on Democracy in America (1835–40). At the same time, space is given to situating Dallas’s position in relation to a crucial twentieth-century debate. Media theorists of a technologically determinist bent like Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich Kittler saw the key developments after the industrial revolution as new mechanical and electrical inventions—whether telegraph, photograph, phonograph, radio, or cinematograph. Yet from the sociological perspective of radical critics such as Raymond Williams and Jürgen Habermas, developments in print capitalism, with economic as much as technical determinants, retained more significance during the nineteenth century because they affected the social order to a greater extent. This is broadly the view advocated in the present volume. Finally, the chapter will discuss briefly how this orientation relates to the varying positions of more recent media histories focused specifically on nineteenth-century British journalism.
