Crossing the Atlantic: Reading Rooms and Foreign-Language Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

Reading rooms, a totally unprecedented kind of institution in a country newly independent from Portuguese rule, started being set up in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro in the late 1820s. Catering mainly for the foreign communities, their fare consisted for the most part in imported printed material. Although it might sound like an exaggeration to claim that Rio was flooded with newspapers, books and periodicals, they became gradually and increasingly available to its inhabitants. The establishment of the British Subscription Library in 1826, the Portuguese Circulating Library in 1837, and the Biblioteca Fluminense in 1847 played a pivotal role in the circulation of British and French periodicals, allowing for the dissemination of news, ideas, key political, social and economic issues, as well as the diffusion of fiction and literary news. This essay reveals the presence and circulation of some of the foreign periodicals in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro libraries and reading rooms and traces their impact on the local Republic of Letters.