Abstract
The 1798 Irish Rebellion and the Act of Union in 1800, together with the impact of the Napoleonic wars, had both philosophical and material consequences for the increasingly difficult articulation of Irish identity in print. The titles chosen for discussion in this chapter are ones that reflect that difficulty. Watty Cox’s politically violent Irish Magazine (1807–1815) attracted the attention of the authorities on more than one occasion, as its pages were full of denunciations of government figures and graphic illustrations of atrocities committed by government forces (Yeomen, Militia, English army troops) during the Rebellion. The Irish Farmers’ Journal (1812–1826) viewed Ireland from the other side of the political divide. It contained crucial practical information for the gentleman farmer/landowner but also provided, as its title suggested, a digest of the latest news from London, Paris, and Dublin, as well as reportage on criminal activity in rural Ireland and elsewhere during a time of economic depression and agrarian unrest. The Irish Magazine gives us the big, though biased, picture; The Irish Farmers’ Journal offered a glimpse of the daily workings of the rising middle and professional Irish classes beyond Dublin after the Union. This chapter tries to determine the ways in which late eighteenth-century political and economic events affected the forms and concerns of early nineteenth-century periodicals in Ireland. As we shall see, the two perspectives on Ireland were intertwined in more ways than one.
‘Your colossal edifices are propped on our mud cabins.’
Denis Taaffe , Ireland’s Mirror, exhibiting a Picture of her Present State, with a Glimpse of her Future Prospects (Dublin, 1796); quoted in Kevin Whelan , The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction of Irish Identity (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), 79.
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Notes
- 1.
Cormac Ó Gráda, Ireland: A New Economic History, 1780–1939 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994), 159.
- 2.
Ibid., 159–160.
- 3.
Nicholas Goddard, ‘The Development and Influence of Agricultural Periodicals and Newspapers, 1780–1880’, The Agricultural History Review (31.2 (1983), 116–131), 117.
- 4.
Whelan, 90.
- 5.
Ibid., 90.
- 6.
See Goddard, 117.
- 7.
The Dublin Society for Improving Husbandry, Manufactures, and other useful arts was formed in 1731, becoming the Royal Dublin Society in 1820 under the patronage of George IV (hereafter abbreviated, albeit somewhat inaccurately, as RDS).
- 8.
The most complete study of Foster’s position in Irish politics and his stance as ‘improver’ is A.P.W. Malcomson, John Foster (1740–1828): The Politics of Improvement and Prosperity (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011).
- 9.
See Henry F. Berry, A History of the Royal Dublin Society (London: Longmans, 1915); The Irish Farmers’ Journal for 24 April 1813 lists the sums granted for various ‘Irish miscellaneous services’: £10,000 for the Dublin Society; £5000 for the Farming Society. Compare £2876 for the Marine Society, and £2500 for ‘Apprehending Offenders’ (p. 267). In 1828 the Royal Dublin Society assumed the activities of the Farming Society.
- 10.
Berry , 91.
- 11.
Ibid., 93.
- 12.
Robert Fraser, Statistical Survey of the County of Wexford (Dublin, 1807), 54–55, quoted in Cormac Ó Gráda, 27. See also Liam Kennedy and Peter Solar, Irish Agriculture: A Price History (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy Press, 2007), 94.
- 13.
See James W. Phillips, Printing and Bookselling in Dublin, 1670–1800 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998), 164–167.
- 14.
Thomas Bartlett, ‘Informers, informants and information: The secret history of the 1790s reconsidered’ in Bartlett, et al., 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), 409.
- 15.
Whelan , 82 and passim. See also Brian Inglis, The Freedom of the Press in Ireland, 1784–1841 (London: Faber & Faber, 1954).
- 16.
In 1809 Dix (1748–1824) was recorded as Registrar of the Farming Society, at a salary of £53.9.10, a job he combined with that of Secretary of the Society at a further salary of £250. By 1810 his salary is recorded as £300, presumably as the two positions were merged. He is also listed as collecting subscriptions: a total of 316 guineas (at 1s 1d each) for 1810 (for which he received a further £17.2.4), 337 guineas for 1811, 261 guineas for 1812, 589 guineas for 1813, 477 guineas for 1814. From 1815 no fee is recorded for collecting subscriptions, and his salary as Secretary remains steady at £300. Dix retired in 1821 and died in 1824. (See Journal of the House of Commons, from August the 4th, 1818, … to November the 2d, 1819). (https://books.google.ie/books?id=0h5DAAAAcAAJ&pg=PP9#v=onepage&q&f=false)
- 17.
Goddard , 123. Goddard is quoting J.C. Morton, who made these calculations in 1865.
- 18.
G.E. Fussell, ‘Early Farming Journals’, The Economic History Review, vol. 3. No. 3 (April, 1932), 417–422; 417.
- 19.
Irish Farmers’ Journal , 1.i (5 September 1812), 8.
- 20.
Statistics on this volume were compiled by Dr Paul Rooney, my research assistant on a 2015 Irish Research Council project on trade periodicals in Ireland. I am grateful for his painstaking work.
- 21.
Gillen D’Arcy Wood, ‘1816, The Year without a Summer’ (http://www.branchcollective.org). Wood says that the year was nicknamed ‘Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death’ in New England; 1817 was called ‘The Year of the Beggar’ in Germany. A wet Switzerland in the summer of 1816 is also famous as the place in which Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein .
- 22.
Irish Farmers’ Journal , 15.i (19 August 1826), 3.
- 23.
Ibid., 5.
- 24.
Ibid., 5.
- 25.
It is worth noting here that much of John Foster’s landholdings in Co. Louth were considered ‘waste lands’.
- 26.
Irish Farmers’ Journal , 15.ii (26 August 1826), 12.
- 27.
Opinion remains divided on Watty Cox’s character. He is described in the Dictionary of Irish Biography as a ‘journalist and informer’. See C.J. Woods, ‘Cox, Walter’. Dictionary of Irish Biography, ed. James McGuire and James Quinn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature (1996), eds. Robert Welch and Bruce Stewart, omits any reference to Cox’s Castle connections.
- 28.
See Whelan , p. 78.
- 29.
Waterloo Directory lists four numbers (or rather single sheets) issued from summer 1797 to 1798, after which Cox went into exile for a time.
- 30.
‘By the Lord Lieutenant and Council of Ireland, A Proclamation’, Dublin Gazette , 25 July 1797.
- 31.
Cox’s public service included attempting to file off the head of a statue of King William in Dublin during the Rebellion in 1798, “but having miscalculated that the figure was composed of brass, he was obliged to decamp without effecting his object, and deep traces of the ‘limae labor’ of the editor of the ‘Irish Magazine’ were subsequently discovered on the neck of the statue”, J.T. Gilbert, A History of the City of Dublin, vol. 3 (Dublin: James Duffy, 1861), 51–52.
- 32.
Hereafter abbreviated as Irish Magazine .
- 33.
“New Farming Society”, Irish Magazine (November 1807), 30.
- 34.
Whelan , 146.
- 35.
“They will look to restoring the parliament and to filling the vacancies [left] by the purchased boroughs with popular elections, in which they will hope for a majority; and if this comes to pass, a catholic government and consequent separation will be the effect...” (A.P.W. Malcomson, John Foster: The Politics of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 351. In the Dictionary of Irish Biography Malcomson notes that Foster was “widely accused of having a despotic love of power” (Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)).
- 36.
‘An Essay on Mowing, With an appropriate Engraving’, Irish Magazine (August 1810), 339–340.
- 37.
Richard Robert Madden, The United Irishmen, their lives and times, 2nd ed. (Dublin: James Duffy, 1858), xiii.
- 38.
Madden , The United Irishmen (vol. 1, xiii–xiv).
- 39.
Ibid., 21.
- 40.
Irish Magazine (January 1810), 2–3.
- 41.
‘Dublin Society’, Irish Magazine (September 1812), 401. Thorpe (or Thorp, d. 1817) was a master builder, first Alderman and then Mayor of Dublin in 1800. He was a member of the Dublin Society Fine Arts Committee. Charles Mulvany (or Mulvaney) set up a glass-making factory in the North Strand around 1785. Henry Sirr (1764–1841) ran an extensive network of spies for Dublin Castle during and after the Rebellion and was responsible for the arrest of Lord Edward Fitzgerald. No other public figure was attacked so often as was Sirr in Cox’s magazine. Sirr was also a prominent member of the Orange Order.
- 42.
There were three ‘series’ of the work, published between 1842 and 1846 and revised thereafter. For the complicated publication history of Madden’s United Irishmen, see C.J. Woods, ‘R.R. Madden, historian of the United Irishmen’, in Thomas Bartlett, et al., 1798: A Bicentenary History (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), 502. By 1887 Madden had published 11 volumes on the United Irishmen (Bartlett, 503). For specific information on Cox see v. 3: 102–21, and 1st series (1842): 55–80, and 2nd series (1857–1860), ii. 270–88.
- 43.
‘Biographical Account of the Dublin Magazine Periodicals Who Have Lived and Died Since the Union’, Irish Monthly Magazine , 1 (May 1832), 7.
- 44.
See Nancy J. Curtin, The United Irishmen: Popular Politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1797–1798 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 227 and passim.
- 45.
See Jane Hayter Hames, Arthur O’Connor: United Irishman (Cork: The Collins Press, 2001), 236.
- 46.
Thomas Bartlett, ‘Informers, informants and information: the secret history of the 1790s re-considered’ in Thomas Bartlett et al., 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), 411.
- 47.
Paul Bew, Ireland: The Politics of Enmity, 1789–2006 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 81.
- 48.
See Archbold , ‘Periodical Reactions: The effect of the 1798 Rebellion and the Act of Union on the Irish monthly periodical’ in John Hinks and Catherine Armstrong, eds., Book Trade Connections from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries (New Castle, Delaware and London: Oak Knoll Press and The British Library, 2008), 135–159; 137. Archbold in turn draws on Niall Ó Ciosáin’s Print and Popular Culture in Ireland: 1750–1850 (London: Macmillan, 1997, rpt. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2010) for this information.
- 49.
Malcolm Ballin, Irish Periodical Culture, 1937–1972: Genre in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 83 and passim.
- 50.
Whelan , 74.
- 51.
Irish Magazine (May 1808), 229–230.
- 52.
Irish Magazine (June 1814).
- 53.
This fact may lend credence to the theory that someone else (someone better educated?) actually controlled the content of the magazine, though there is no conclusive evidence for this.
- 54.
‘Exhibition of Mr. Walter Cox’, Irish Magazine (April 1811), 145.
- 55.
Dublin Journal (12 March 1811).
- 56.
Giffard was in receipt of £1600 per annum in government print subsidies. See Douglas Simes, ‘Ireland, c. 1760–1830’, in Hannah Barker and Simon Burrows, eds., Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 120.
- 57.
Madden , United Irishmen , vol. 3, 112–13.
- 58.
Irish Magazine (February 1813).
- 59.
Quoted in Séamus Ó Casaide, Watty Cox and His Publications (Dublin: Three Candles Press, 1935), 22.
- 60.
Quoted in Ó Casaide, 23.
- 61.
Madden , The United Irishmen , Their Lives and Times, James J. O’Neill, ed., 3 vols (Dublin: Martin Lester, n.d.), vol. 3, 102–21 and passim. Youtube video on Watty Cox https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHzirj9aOIM.
- 62.
The Waterloo Directory suggests 5000 copies per month, which is still a very healthy circulation for a journal costing 1s 3d per issue.
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Tilley, E. (2020). Post-1800 Periodicals. In: The Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Ireland. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30073-9_2
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