The Valparaiso Review: Victorian press on the move

Abstract

Among the periodicals published in Chile in the late 19th century, The Valparaiso Review stands out as a monthly magazine published in English. Produced by the British colony of Valparaíso, the Review covered the colony’s economic, political, social, sporting, literary and cultural events between 1894 and 1896. In analyzing the foreign-language press, the choice of language is never neutral but rather reveals a desire on the part of the editors to communicate in an alternative discourse with a defined audience, both inside and outside the country of publication (Deschamps 25). In this essay, we analyse the ways that English literature becomes, as Terry Eagleton explains, a vehicle for transmitting an ideologically-charged discourse in order to promote sympathy and brotherhood to bond disparate classes in the larger service of British imperialism (Eagleton 21-22). Even as The Valparaiso Review intervened in the local cultural scene of Valparaíso and promoted the circulation of ideas from Britain, however, we argue that this first English-language magazine in Chile also assumed the role of cultural mediator, thereby contributing to the cultural hybridisation of foreigners in Valparaiso. To trace the complex cultural role played by The Valparaiso Review in Chile, we follow Jude Piesse’s model of the circulation of Anglophone texts in Empire: Piesse argues that such texts serve as simultaneously stabilizing and destabilizing forces (forces of fixity and forces of flow), a model that illuminates the complex and sometimes contradictory positions adopted by this “alternative voice” in Chile.