Novels and News: exploring the nineteenth-century mass media

What do Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and H.G. Wells have in common? Besides being British authors, they all wrote for the nineteenth-century periodical press, something that was standard practice for writers across Europe at the time. Researcher Adele Guyton explores how these magazines influenced their literary works and how Victorian thinkers grappled with … fake news.

Writing for periodicals was the rule for writers throughout Europe in the 19th century. In this lecture researcher Adele Guyton will introduce key nineteenth-century English literary figures, discuss how their famous works were shaped by writing for periodicals, and introduce the audience to the periodicals themselves as cultural objects. To conclude, she will introduce Victorian thinkers who grappled with 'information overwhelm' and 'fake news' in the nineteenth-century press and think together with the audience about how this nineteenth-century context might be useful for us today.

About the speaker

Adele Guyton is a postdoctoral researcher with the FNRS at UCLouvain. In April 2025, she obtained her PhD from KU Leuven with a dissertation on the role of science in periodicals during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is fascinated by popular literature—from nineteenth-century science fiction to twenty-first-century fan fiction and by the relationship between literature and science.