Victorian journalist, businessman, and constitutional writer (1826–1877) who enters the series through Harold Innis' habit of quotation. Cameron, re-reading Innis' Political Economy in the Modern State, finds Bagehot cited on the modern city — Innis' "London was like a newspaper," glossed by Bagehot's "everything is there and everything is disconnected" — as proof that the disconnection the French symbolists would dramatize was already visible to English intellectuals in the 1850s. Bob, hunting his own "eye-ear ideologues," recognizes the name and reads out Bagehot's 1872 Physics and Politics. The page tracks Bagehot as one of Innis' buried nineteenth-century sources.
Across the dialogues
Surfaces through Innis' quotation habit as an 1850s witness to the disconnected metropolis — the Victorian journalist whose "London was like a newspaper" gloss prefigures the symbolist and McLuhan reading of modern perception
Cameron reads Bagehot (via Innis) on London as newspaper — the metropolis where "everything is there and everything is disconnected," a mid-1850s glimpse of modern perceptual overload.
"he wrote an article on Charles Dickens already in 1858, and what he says is... everything is there and everything is disconnected."
Bob places Bagehot as the journalist-businessman writer on government and economics — the reason Innis, a political economist, would know him.
"he's a journalist and businessman who wrote extensively about government and economics."
Bob summarizes Bagehot's Physics and Politics (1872) on how civilizations sustain and then liberalize themselves — a hereditary "accomplished man / rude man" distinction contemporaneous with the French search for a link between ideas and the body.
"He wrote a book in 1872 called Physics and Politics, in which he examines how civilizations sustain themselves."
Bob files Bagehot among the nineteenth-century "eye-ear ideologues" — the sensory-battle tradition he is trying to source behind Innis' quotations.
"the eye-ear ideologues."
Connections
Innis cites Bagehot on London — 'everything is there and everything is disconnected' — as evidence that mid-nineteenth-century England already saw the problems the symbolists would develop.
Bob files Bagehot among the "eye-ear ideologues" — the nineteenth-century sensory-battle tradition Vincent Sherry traces through Pound and Lewis.