Emotional Rhetoric and Early Liberal Culture: The Examiner, the Spectator, and the 1832 Reform Bill

Abstract

This chapter explores the affective dimensions of two weekly reviews, the Examiner (established 1808) and the Spectator (established 1828), during the passage of the 1832 Reform Bill. Although both periodicals were strongly pro-reform and can be seen as early examples of liberal culture, the Examiner drew on a long tradition of emotionally generated political critique and demotic culture that was lacking in the recently established Spectator. The chapter examines the emotional registers of their political judgements at four key moments in the passage of the Bill. In tracing out the differences between the Examiner’s residual post-revolutionary political rhetoric and an emergent Victorian political rhetoric of the Spectator, it demonstrates something of a shift, albeit an uneven one, from emotional to less emotional forms of writing about politics in liberal culture at the end of the Romantic period.