Italian and English Secret Societies in the 19th-Century British Press: News and/or Propaganda?

This article investigates the representation of nineteenth-century Italian and English secret societies – the Carbonari and the Freemasons – in the British press through Letters to the Editor (LTEs). Drawing on the Letters to the Editor on Secret Societies (LESS) corpus, comprising 200 letters (ca. 180,000 tokens) from The Times, The Sunday Times, and local British newspapers from The British Newspaper Archive, the study integrates corpus-assisted quantitative methods with qualitative discourse and evaluative analyses. The findings reveal how LTEs linguistically constructed ideological, moral, and social framings of secret societies, exposing patterns of in-group valorisation and out-group denigration. Whereas the Carbonari were variously depicted as subversive or idealistic, Freemasonry was predominantly associated with civic virtue and moral integrity. In both cases, symbolic significance outweighed representations of concrete agency. The study contributes to the historical and linguistic understanding of LTEs as a discursive site for negotiating ideology, legitimacy, and public perception in nineteenth-century British news discourse.