Abstract: | The paper explores the role of the English periodical press of the eighteenth-century in aspects concerned with moral reformation, social instruction and cultural improvement in general. Analysing the impact of Richard Steele’s and Joseph Addison’s criticism on the society of the eighteenth-century England we can observe that the two inaugurated the emergence of public opinion but they also put forth general human rights, such as the liberty of expression. According to Jürgen Habermas the eighteenth-century English periodicals can account for the genesis of the bourgeois public sphere. But the dawn of public opinion also supported the formation of the eighteenth-century English ideology understood as a system of social beliefs. It seems that the ideological patterns advocated by the journalists or the writers of the eighteenth-century England foregrounded original values for the general public, such as common-sense, morality, wit, taste, or decorum.
We trace the early representations of public communication, the spaces where this public engagement was performed, the aims of the periodical press, the strategies developed for the moral reformation of the community, the categories of readers, while all these aspects ultimately show the way in which writing and printing became active agents in cultural improvement even though they were considered only some middle-class professions. |
