| In 1832, William Chambers and his younger brother, Robert, utilized the newly invented steam printing press to publish the first cheap nineteenth-century periodical. The successful weekly periodical was titled the Chambers' Edinburgh Journal (1832--1853). The goal of the CEJ was to educate the rapidly expanding working classes and suitably instruct all members of the emerging middle-class family. In order to reach this goal, the topic of animals became an integral part in the journal's reform effort. Britain's educational system insufficiently addressed the needs of the laboring population; it was insensitive to educating the poor and the State's curriculum did not include traditionally elite subjects such as science. As the industrial revolution created leisure hours for artisans, miscellaneous publications such as the CEJ and its illustrated rival, Charles Knight's The Penny Magazine, endeavored to fill the void. Both journals revered natural history for its instructive and entertaining properties and capitalized on the subject of animals to encourage readership.;Popular natural history provided enlightenment to all classes, but proved exceedingly worthwhile in educating the working classes. As the idea of the structured family unit became emblematic of a strong empire, animals as companions also reflected the ideal social entity. My project investigates how the editors of the CEJ wrote about improving the nineteenth-century working-class society through the infusion of scientific and sentimental discourse. Animals promoted social improvement by reinforcing the need for stewardship over inferior species, environmental awareness, and accentuating human values. I argue that the periodical's depiction of human and animal relationships demonstrated an effort to motivate autodidactism, and reflected and shaped popular opinion about the positive attributes of natural history. As a result, readers of the CEJ were exposed to innovative discourse about the way people should think about, and behave toward, other beings. In addition, animal-themed articles encouraged independent thinking while reinforcing gender roles. Finally, the CEJ introduced evolutionary topics to a new reading public through the essays of Robert Chambers, the anonymous author of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), fifteen years before Charles Darwin discussed his theory of natural selection. |
