Läsning för Folket : En studie av utländskt material i en svensk tidskrift

Sammanfattning: The society of spreading useful knowledge started to sell its magazine Reading for the People (RFP) in 1834. The idea with the society was to, through the magazine that contained useful knowledge, enlighten the Swedish peasantry. RFP contained articles about agricultural and economy for example. My goal with this essay is to investigate how the use of foreign articles in RFP changed over time. I’m also going to present a field and language categorization of the foreign articles and study the articles from Benjamin Franklin and Charles Dickens and investigate what kind of articles they wrote. My questions of researching are: What sort of articles did Benjamin Franklin and Charles Dickens contribute to RFP? How much was foreign articles used in RFP and from were did the foreign articles come? To reach my goals with this examination I’ve studied the magazine RFP nr 1 -79. The results I have came up with are that the use of foreign articles sank considerably after 35 years and that Benjamin Franklin presented most economical articles and that Charles Dickens presented articles containing more general knowledge. I divided the articles in three different fields that follows in magnitude, non practical but enlightening, practical and religious. The most common foreign language in articles was Danish were historical articles was most common, followed by Norwegian, English, German and French articles.