The Power of Public Opinion and the Rise of "Both Sides": Formal Constraints in the British Controversialist

Abstract:This essay raises the profile of the understudied British Controversialist (1850–72), a monthly magazine that distinguished itself from peer cultural miscellanies by foregrounding opinion essays by working-class readers that the editors framed as a dialogic forum for gauging and augmenting what they called "the power" of "public opinion." But if the Controversialist sought and achieved a significant expansion of the conversational demos, this essay argues, its pluralist ambitions were also compromised by the editors' self-imposed formal constraints, including limitations on style and authorship. Ultimately, these issues presage contemporary questions about how debate should be orchestrated and who should participate.