The Cultural Trope of Sensationalism: Advertising, Industrial Journalism, and Global Trade in Belgravia

Abstract

The cultural trope of sensationalism reflected the process of industrialization that invested many aspects of Victorian culture. In this chapter I shall examine the impact of sensationalism in the rhetoric of advertisements, newspaper articles, and in a novel on the East India Company that appeared anonymously in Belgravia in 1868–69. Sensationalism acted as a powerful social and cultural force upon which separate cultural practices of Victorian England hinged: text-based advertisements for new commodities, newspaper articles, and serial fiction, all circulated self-contained and apparently unrelated narratives that helped spread and naturalize the logic of market economy and the ambitions of imperial expansion. I shall start by focusing on advertising in Belgravia and in other nineteenth-century periodicals, basing my research on the sheets of advertisements or on the rare covers that contained advertisements, which in most cases were lost when the magazine issues were bound in annual volumes. The exemplars that I discuss are from the collections of the British Library in London and the special collections library at New York University. I shall first analyze marketing strategies to outline how the rhetoric of novelty, expanded availability and irresistible lure of the commodities advertised targeted specific identities of consumers such as women and a new democratized “public” of buyers.

He had been brought up amongst people who treated literature as a trade as well as an art;—and what art is not more or less a trade?

—Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Birds of Prey