The mock arts written by Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and their circle touched on issues of mechanical instruction, but their satire depended on its application to incongruously non-mechanical subjects. It was in Gulliver’s Travels that Swift turned more directly to descriptions of material production and mechanical ingenuity. The framing of those descriptions in a travel narrative recalls Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Both texts reduced scenes of human ingenuity and manufacture to a proto-anthropological ground zero in distant and solitary locations. But reading Gulliver and Crusoe from a mock-technical perspective reveals a surprising reversal in their authors’ attitudes to mechanical ingenuity. Defoe, the propagandist for commerce, is sceptical about the value and cognitive significance of handicraft skill. Swift, by contrast, uses his commentary on mechanical technique to depict different richly-imagined ecologies of mind in the four parts of Gulliver’s Travels.

This exposé of some very unreliable media highlights the need for all of us to be critically assessing our media sources, in order to be well-informed on the key issues of our day. Scrutinising press behaviour, for example phone hacking, and the role of think tanks, the chapter ends with useful criteria by which to assess the credibility of an information source and what each of us can do to improve standards of truth in media.

Although a product of his time – the literary traditions of Pope, Addison, and Swift; the Toryism and churchmanship of the eighteenth century – Samuel Johnson also transcended it through his own gifts and forceful character. After a difficult early life, marked by melancholy, a troubled relationship with his family, and an early departure from Oxford University, Johnson began to find his way in the 1730s. He married Elizabeth Porter, moved to London, and began to make his mark through work at the Gentleman’s Magazine and works such as the Life of Savage. He achieved renown as an essayist and fame as the compiler of the Dictionary but also suffered from bereavement and continuing financial insecurity. After the award of a government pension in 1762, Johnson’s works have a more relaxed style, and his final major work, the Lives of the Poets, helped to establish this era as the Age of Johnson.

British reviewers often opposed the distasteful ‘physiological’ experiments of their European neighbours while simultaneously embracing laboratory principles and methods to dissect the practice of criticism. Chapter 8 surveys the newspapers and periodicals of the period to show that vivisectional terminology was remarkably sprawling in its applications and meanings. Experimental physiology’s modus operandi was used to shape and articulate key methodological and ideological principles emerging in late-Victorian literary-critical theory and practice. Namely, allusions to ‘vivisection’ expressed a growing professionalism and a shift from an ‘illustrative’ to a dispassionate ‘analytical’ mode, paralleling the trend towards ‘scientific’ historiography. Certain authors such as George Eliot, William Thackeray, and Charlotte Brontë were persistently labelled ‘literary vivisectors’, and the chapter ends by arguing that romanticised notions of the sympathetic female author presented one obstacle to objective, ‘vivisectional’ fin-de-siècle literary criticism.

This chapter explores the erosion of trust in public facts and the crisis within commonsense conceptions of reality. It traces the evolution of scientific practices, emphasizing the role of early experimental scientists like Robert Boyle in grounding them. Ezrahi argues that the contemporary breakdown of epistemological norms, which previously upheld facts as sociopolitical currency, inevitably undermines the foundations of contemporary democracy. The citizens' diminished confidence in understanding why political actors behave in specific ways, coupled with the disparities between motives and visible effects, fosters the proliferation of conspiracy theories. The current breakdown of epistemological norms manifests itself in the “post truth” era and the ascent of “alternative facts.” Ezrahi scrutinizes the challenges of discerning facts from opinions in journalism and underscores the perils of exposure to fake news. The chapter investigates the erosion of a shared commonsense perception of reality through the lens of the Brexit campaign and the Trump presidency. Ezrahi highlights that the blurring of the cosmological dichotomy between Nature and humans has made it increasingly challenging for the public to differentiate between facts and fiction. Finally, he advocates for an awareness of the public’s role in defining political causes and facts.

This chapter explores the range of essayistic writing in nineteenth-century newspapers: leaders (political and topical in focus and the principal genre of the Victorian daily and weekly press), middles (a shorter version of the leader and characteristic of some weeklies), correspondence columns from journalists at home and abroad, and reviews of both books and theatre. It charts the expansion of the press at mid-century following the abolition of the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’ and an influx of literary talent that raised the quality of newspapers, and it notes the transformation of newspapers at the end of the century with the creation of literary pages, supplements, and special features (following the demise of many quarterly reviews and monthly magazines). The second half of the chapter examines the newspaper writing of John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, and argues that each made a unique contribution to the newspapers of their day.

This chapter examines the British essay in the age of the Internet, a period which has radically reshaped literary culture. Online magazines and journals now outnumber their print precursors, vastly increasing the venues available to budding essayists. But this transformation was predated by a more pivotal online trend: blogging. Beginning in the early years of the new millennium, and ending, effectively, with the rise of social media, the golden age of blogging allowed a wave of self-published writers to revolutionise literary criticism and cultural theory. Free from professional aims and ambitions, experimental and avidly personal, their essays left a lasting impression on both literary journalism and the academy. This chapter explores the underacknowledged possibilities and legacies of blogging, surveying the ways in which prominent bloggers reimagined the essay form.

Augustus Hardin Beaumont has been acknowledged as a fleeting but important figure in British working-class radical literature during the reform agitation of the 1830s. Little consideration has been given, however, to Beaumont’s past as a Jamaican planter and defender of slavery. Formerly a slaveholder, magistrate, and member of the Jamaican Assembly, Beaumont fought in the French and Belgian revolutions of 1830 before organising a militia to put down the 1831−2 Jamaican Slave Revolt. Ostracised for proposing a gradual scheme of emancipation, Beaumont moved to Britain and became a radical abolitionist despite benefiting from the £20 million fund established to compensate former slaveowners. Far from aberrant, the apparent contradictions of Beaumont’s political career and literary output were underpinned by his admiration for America, the country of his birth, and the influence of Jeffersonian republicanism. He is, furthermore, illustrative of the broader ambiguity within British radicalism’s response to emancipation in the 1830s, which, although nominally anti-slavery, incorporated apologias for chattel slavery, especially in the United States.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon was one of the most prominent figures in the 1830s literary scene. She became known, and was often condemned, for a ‘fatal facility’: a tendency to write too easily and too frequently for a market that was itself so overproductive that its grasp on posterity’s regard has proved unstable. Landon’s work in the 1830s mirrors the decade in its variety, its speed of production, its dubiety about cultural status, and its self-conscious reflection on its own potential place in literary history. This chapter explores a wide range of Landon’s 1830s work, work that has typically been passed over by her critics. It explores her interactions with the market via such forms as Silver Fork fiction, short fiction, essays, literary criticism, and ‘hack’ journalism. Her work is shaped by her unstable place as both a literary celebrity and a worker for the press, a combination of identities that was especially difficult for a woman writer. She became the decade’s chronicler: her experiments in 1830s literary forms produce a mode of understanding the uncertain temporality of this unusually self-conscious decade.

Dean John Wade, who replaced the great torts scholar William Prosser on the Restatement (Second) of Torts, put the finishing touches on the defamation sections in 1977.1 Apple Computer had been founded a year before, and Microsoft two, but relatively few people owned computers yet. The twenty-four-hour news cycle was not yet a thing, and most Americans still trusted the press.2

This chapter addresses an underappreciated source of epistemic dysfunction in today’s media environment: true-but-unrepresentative information. Because media organizations are under tremendous competitive pressure to craft news that is in harmony with their audience’s preexisting beliefs, they have an incentive to accurately report on events and incidents that are selected, consciously or not, to support an impression that is exaggerated or ideologically convenient. Moreover, these organizations have to engage in this practice in order to survive in a hypercompetitive news environment.1

What is the role of “trusted communicators” in disseminating knowledge to the public? The trigger for this question, which is the topic of this set of chapters, is the widely shared belief that one of the most notable, and noted, consequences of the spread of the internet and social media is the collapse of sources of information that are broadly trusted across society, because the internet has eliminated the power of the traditional gatekeepers1 who identified and created trusted communicators for the public. Many commentators argue this is a troubling development because trusted communicators are needed for our society to create and maintain a common base of facts, accepted by the broader public, that is essential to a system of democratic self-governance. Absent such a common base or factual consensus, democratic politics will tend to collapse into polarized camps that cannot accept the possibility of electoral defeat (as they arguably have in recent years in the United States). I aim here to examine recent proposals to resurrect a set of trusted communicators and the gatekeeper function, and to critique them from both practical and theoretical perspectives. But before we can discuss possible “solutions” to the lack of gatekeepers and trusted communicators in the modern era, it is important to understand how those functions arose in the pre-internet era.

The commercial market for local news in the United States has collapsed. Many communities lack a local paper. These “news deserts,” comprising about two-thirds of the country, have lost a range of benefits that local newspapers once provided. Foremost among these benefits was investigative reporting – local newspapers at one time played a primary role in investigating local government and commerce and then reporting the facts to the public. It is rare for someone else to pick up the slack when the newspaper disappears.