The socialisation of print culture. Frontier ways of reading that promoted «El Tío Clarín» (Seville, 1864-1867) and «La Campana» (Seville, 1867-1868)

Abstract

This paper addresses circumstantially the different ways in which the Seville satirical weeklies El Tío Clarín (1864-1867) and La Campana (1867-1868) –the latter replacing the former after its suspension– might have been read. By studying their editorial strategies on the basis of the footprints left by their editors, it is possible to determine how satirical journalism participated in the socialisation of print culture, which developed into informational graphics, despite the paradoxical confluence of three factors: the political instability in the final years of the reign of Isabella II, the tight censorship to which the press was subjected in 1867 and the slow but continuous progress in modernising the publishing market. Based on the combination of satirical cartoons, humour and popular genres, both weeklies made current affairs more accessible through critical reasoning and by appealing to the senses, with revealing indications of the simultaneous ways of addressing such a subject. Textual reading gave way to the graphic kind, reading aloud to doing so in silence, while the spaces in which this occurred, between the public (the street) and the private sphere (the parlour at home), and the collectives involved, namely, women and children, were determined. It was these ways of relating to the two weeklies, established by their readerships, that were behind the popularity of the satirical press before the Glorious Revolution of 1868 and the transition to publication capitalism.