A Year of Provincial Correspondence to the Corte: Bahia, 1868

This paper analyzes a little-known and scarcely-used genre of article common in the Brazilian press from the late 1840s to the 1880s—the provincial correspondents’ letters to the major newspapers in the Brazilian capital of Rio de Janeiro. Always written anonymously and in an epistolary style, these letters appeared irregularly and covered a wide range of topics from provincial politics to the weather (important for those who traded in agricultural commodities), from cultural activities like the latest theater productions to the deaths of prominent individuals, and from happenings of interest to provincial expatriates in the capital to provincial events that mattered to residents of the capital. In these ways, the genre shares much with the contemporary weekly crônicas (literally, chronicles, weekly articles on local events of interest to newspaper readers) that have received some scholarly attention.

As a first effort toward inventorying and analyzing the genre, this paper is based on all of the provincial correspondence from Bahia published in Rio de Janeiro in a single year in the Jornal do Commercio (not part of the Hemeroteca Digital Brasileira) and the other major dailies including the Correio Mercantil and the Diário do Rio de Janeiro. It identifies the number of correspondents active in Bahia, provides a content analysis of their correspondence, and analyzes their competing portrayals of major political events, notably the rise of the Conservatives to power in July 1868, and the Paraguayan War. Like so much of the rest of the press, the provincial correspondents were deeply enmeshed in the partisan politics of the period.