A great deal of our primary information about the history of Irish periodicals comes from a slim volume on the subject by nineteenth-century bibliographer John Power.1 On the first page of his pamphlet Power set the tone for what came after with the following (unattributed) quotation from 1840: āNever was there a more fragile history than that of [I]rish periodical literature: like that of our ancient monarchs, it comprises little more than a narrative of untimely deaths.ā Another quotation, from an 1858 issue of the Irish Quarterly Review , was offered as a corollary to this: āIt is melancholy to look back on the mass of brilliant but unsuccessful periodicals which rose and fell in Ireland like meteor lights.ā And in case the message had not quite hit home, Power quoted from Thomas Mooreās Diary, at the point where Moore talked about the late eighteenth-century journal Anthologia Hibernica , noting that it ran for two years and then ādied, as all such things die in that country, for want of money andāof talent; for the Irish never either fight or write well on their own soilā.2 The point was clear: Irelandās cultural and economic fortunes were bound up with those of England and any history of its literature would need to take this into account.
In 1867, the year following Powerās publication of his bibliography,
Richard Robert Madden published
The History of Irish Periodical Literature, From the End of the 17th to the Middle of the 19th Century .
3 Madden was primarily concerned with
newspapers, and his project was political in the sense that it used the vicissitudes of the periodical press to illustrate the ways in which Ireland had been stifled in its attempts to create its own literary tradition. In his Preface Madden said,
For my part I do not think there is any country in Europe in which it is more desirable to foster and encourage, to patronize and protect, literary tastes and intellectual recreations than Ireland, unhappily circumstanced as that country is, the great bulk of the food and the property of the land being transmitted to anotherāthe former consumed, and the latter spent in a foreign land; without a resident nobility and gentry, the natural patrons in every independent country of literature, art, and science.4
Madden
understood the late development of printing and publishing in Ireland
5 as part of what he called the ādegrading influences of the English Pale Government in Irelandā
6 and his history illustrated these influences. Unfortunately, he completed only two of the projected three volumes of his work, with the result that his analysis ended well before the middle of the nineteenth century.
7If there was one political event that defined nineteenth-century print culture in Ireland, it was the
Act of Union, passed in 1800. In his analysis of this time period, book historian
Charles Benson quoted the testimony of
William Wakeman, bookseller and wholesale agent for a London publishing firm in Dublin, testifying before the Commissioners of Inquiry in 1821 āinto the collection and management of the revenue arising in Irelandā. Wakeman was asked:
Do you know anything of the printing of books here?āIt is comparatively nothing in Ireland, except a description of Catholic books of a very cheap sort, which are sold at so low a rate, that they could not be printed in England for the same money, and also a few school-books used exclusively in Ireland.
Is it diminished or increased?āsince the Act of Union it is almost annihilated; it was on the same footing as America previous to that time, and every new book was reprinted here; but since the Copyright Act has been extended, that cannot now be done openly.8
By the 1830s, however, and particularly with
Catholic Emancipation in 1829, the tide seemed to be turning, following on from the easing of restrictions on Catholic participation in the economic and political affairs of Ireland and with a new generation of nationalists ready to begin again.
William Carleton, in his general introduction to his very successful
Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1842) noted with satisfaction that his work was published in Ireland and was selling extremely well both at home and abroad. Moreover,
[t]he number, ability, and importance of the works which have issued from the Dublin press within the last eight or ten years, if they could be enumerated here, would exhibit the rapid progress of the national mind, and satisfy the reader that Ireland in a few years will be able to sustain a native literature as lofty and generous, and beneficial to herself, as any other country in the world can boast of.9
While book production around this time remained relatively low, by 1833 a host of new periodicals, both conservative and radical, had appeared in competition with English and Scottish rivals. The failure rate remained high, but that was the case whether the title originated in Ireland or in England and is a constant to be factored into any discussion of periodical culture. Ultimately, periodical publishers and proprietors in Ireland would have encountered the same fickle audience base, the same difficulties obtaining sufficient paper and type, and the same labour problems as their counterparts in England. What does distinguish Ireland is its dependence on England in the nineteenth century, along with the continual governmental interference that was an inescapable part of everyday life in the country, both before and after Irelandās official annexation to the Kingdom. Periodicals and newspapers are essential parts of any rebellion, and nineteenth-century Ireland afforded many opportunities for these to flourish.
Marie-Louise Legg, in her ground-breaking 1999 study of the Irish provincial press, reminded readers of the sort of detective work necessary in uncovering the history of newspapers in Ireland. Her work identified about 218 provincial newspapers available between 1850 and 1892 (the limits of her study), the number based largely on entries in Newspaper Press Directory volumes.10 In the century as a whole more than 500 newspapers were published in Ireland, and the Waterloo Directory of Irish Newspapers and Periodicals: 1800ā1900 11 lists the titles of another 3500 periodicals beyond the daily press. In this book I have tried to concentrate on weekly and monthly periodicals to the exclusion of daily newspapers, except as points of reference. It is as well to confess at once that my selection of titles is just that: a selectionābut I hope it will be clear that there are connections between the titles chosen, and that they are representative of both their time and their intended audience. I am interested in the genesis of these titles and the ways in which they articulated changing cultural patterns in Irish life, as distinct from the ways in which they are frequently mined for material as part of the historical record. In other words, periodicals are examined in this book as material commodities, as part of a theoretical debate that takes form as well as content into account.
Chapter 2 examines two titles that appeared before 1830: The Irish Magazine, and Monthly Asylum for Neglected Biography (1807ā1815) and The Irish Farmersā Journal, and Weekly Intelligencer (1812ā1826). The series of political events that occurred in quick succession around 1800, the 1798 Irish Rebellion, the Act of Union (enacted 1801), the Napoleonic wars (1803ā1815), had profound effects on the increasingly difficult articulation of Irish identity in print. The titles chosen here are ones that reflected that difficulty. The Irish Magazine was published by the slippery, controversial figure of Watty Cox: United Irishman, possible Castle spy, canny self-publicist and virulent hater of government forces during and after the Rebellion. The pages of his monthly journal were full of denunciations of those Cox considered traitors to the cause and graphic remindersāsome ten years after the events took placeāof atrocities committed by the English during the Rebellion. In complete contrast to Coxās work, The Irish Farmersā Journal was sponsored (in both philosophical and economic terms) by the relatively conservative Dublin Society. It contained crucial practical information for the large farmer/landowner, but it also provided, as the title suggested, a digest of the latest news from London and Paris, as well as invaluable information regarding Ascendancy attitudes regarding rural Ireland during a time of economic depression, war, ...
