"That inscrutable something": Business in the Periodical Press

The business life of the nation, in its commercial and political ramifications, was the object of intense scrutiny in the pages of Victorian periodicals. Combining quantitative and qualitative methodologies, and using as database the ProQuest digital archive of British periodicals, this essay investigates some aspects of the cultural life of business in the second half of the nineteenth century. The first section of the essay contains an experiment in distant reading which analyses occurrences of three text segments ("man of business," "business habits," and "business life"), looking for collocative meanings and patterns of evaluation. The second part focuses on a selection of articles that explicitly take up the issue of the dignity of business.