Pérolas no esterco:

tatuagem, imprensa, polícia e ciência em crônicas de Machado de Assis

Abstract

In his series of chronicles "A Semana", Machado de Assis wrote several times about the police news published in the newspapers of Rio de Janeiro. Of particular interest to him were the attention given to those events by the press and, more importantly, how the information collected was used and the intimate lives of anonymous people was exposed. Through the analysis of a chronicle by Machado de Assis from 28th July 1895 about a crime in the Brazilian capital, this article intends to discuss the author's attitude towards the conduct of the press and how the technical and scientific criteria were deeply ingrained in many sectors of the Brazilian society of the end of the 19th century, leading to an association of the lower classes with "dangerous, ignorant classes”. By identifying the dialogs between different texts published by carioca press at the time, the goal is to point out the independence that the writer enjoyed in the making of his crônicas, which allowed him to criticize the very own media he was writing for.