'That inscrutable something': Business in the Periodical Press

Scholars have repeatedly commented on the marked anti-business bias, the denigration of business and trade, that is an integral part of the critique of capitalism articulated in canonical Victorian novels. Did the same animosity permeate discussions of business in the periodical press? How was the businessman described and evaluated in the pages of Victorian periodicals? My investigation is an experiment in distant or vertical reading: using as database the ProQuest digital archive of British periodicals, I analyze the occurrences of three text segments (“man of business”, “business habits” and “business life”) looking for repeated associations of words and recurrent phraseology. The final section discusses a selection of longer articles in which the question of the 'dignity of business' comes to the fore.