This dissertation examines the work of Wenceslao Ayguals de Izco (1801-1875) and Antonio Flores Algovia (1818-1865), specifically their newspapers and serial novels published during the years of Isabel II’s reign in Madrid. These years (1833-1868) are significant because of the sudden growth in popularity of serial publications, visual media, and the novelas de folletín, or serial novels.
The central thesis of this project is the concept of reciprocal development, which allows for Georg Simmel’s notion that the city enters and affects the mind of the individual. However, it also acknowledges Henri Lefebvre’s view that the city is a collective creation of its citizens, and that a person has the capacity to project emotions and significance upon an external environment. Within the context of reciprocal development, this project shows how the print publications of Ayguals and Flores were shaped by the city they lived in, while at the same time, they were consistently projecting forth opinions, complaints, ideas, visual representations of the city, and their understanding of what it meant to be a madrileño, or resident of Madrid.
There are three topics examined that appear frequently in the novels and articles of Ayguals and Flores, all of which can be understood through the lens of reciprocal development. The first is space; spatial boundaries and transformations did indeed have a profound effect on the urban dweller, but periodistas also had the capacity to endow the spaces of the city with emotional, moral, or historical significance, as well as to suggest reforms or changes to the built environment. The second topic is psychology; while the lived experience of the city did affect the mental state of the periodistas, they also used the spaces and technologies of the city to express personality and imprint language onto the urban textual palimpsest. The third topic is technology, a realm in which we see reciprocal development at work through a comparison of Ayguals and Flores; Flores spoke out against the dangers of technology on individual personality, while Ayguals was an innovator in printing technology who traveled abroad to procure new machines for his publishing house. All of these sub-topics exist within the larger concept of modernity, a cultural and societal shift over time that the reading public found at once jarring and exhilarating.
The popular press operated as an agent of reciprocal development due to a constant conversation that took place between the periodistas of the time period and their readers. Through the exchange of gossip, letters, or simple conversations on the street, a public opinion was formed that was then documented and disseminated throughout a readership. Additionally, if we take into account Edward Soja’s concept of Thirdspace, we can understand the newspaper as a realm in which the lived city and imagined city interacted by means of a dialogue that took place between the consumers and producers of the printed, serial publications in 19th-century Madrid.