“Shaking Foundations”: Unearthing Fact and Ideology in British Press Reports of the 1783 Earthquake in Sicily

This chapter examines how British newspapers reported and framed the devastating 1783 Calabrian and Sicilian earthquake sequence, with particular attention to the portrayal of Messina. Drawing on a corpus of seventy articles published between March and October 1783, the study combines digital humanities methods with comparative discourse analysis to explore the interplay of factual reportage, rhetorical strategy and ideological framing. It argues that the press did more than inform: it shaped readers’ emotional and political responses through recurring tropes— including sublime imagery, scientific authority, and narratives of royal compassion. The case of Sir William Hamilton is analysed as an anchor of epistemic credibility, while representations of King Ferdinand illustrate the ideological function of disaster discourse as a form of soft diplomacy. The paper also traces the influence of earlier British travel writing on the narrative structures used to describe Sicily, demonstrating how pre-existing cultural scripts informed the reception of seismic news. Ultimately, the chapter situates this coverage within broader Enlightenment concerns with knowledge, identity, and transnational alignment, showing how disasters became key sites of meaning-making in eighteenth-century media.