Seriality and Characterisation in the Press: Death Club Sensationalism, the 1848 Revolutions, and Reviews of Mary Barton

Abstract: Newspaper reporting on Mrs. May, executed for poisoning her brother-in-law in 1848, offers one example of how journalism used narrative techniques to shape public opinion about the working classes. That same year, English newspapers likewise employed literary devices and allusions when representing France’s revolution, which forced King Philippe I to abdicate. Concurrently, book reviews in the periodical press on Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton debated the veracity of its working-class representations. Methodologically, this article works with periodical studies and its intersection with narratology and media theory. Without ignoring financial stakes such as advertising, this analysis argues that less-visible structures embedded in the nineteenth-century press entrenched or constructed anti-working-class, popular biases.