Abstract
It is a regrettable truism that literary periodicals usually have a short life, but the case of To-morrow is worst than most. Only two issues appeared in Irish bookshops in August and September 1924, and then, without notice, publication ceased. Yet associated with the periodical were two of Ireland’s major literary figures at the time: Lennox Robinson and W. B. Yeats, as well as several younger writers — Liam O’Flaherty, Francis Stuart and F. R. Higgins. The brevity of its life can be attributed to a number of factors — the inexperience of the editors, the unwillingness of some literary figures to give public support, together with lack of support from other sources — but most of all To-morrow was a victim of an increasingly vociferous obscurantism which saw in this journal all that was immoral, anti-Catholic and anti-Irish. For some indeed it was proof that the Irish people needed protection from certain kinds of literature, so pressure for the censorship of publications increased.
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Notes
Cecil Salkeld, born in India in 1908, studied at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin. He exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy and was an associate of the Academy from 1946. He died in 1968. Con Leventhal’s bookshop was in Dawson Street. He sold it in the late 1920s and moved to Trinity College, Dublin, where he eventually became Professor of English. He was a long-time friend of Samuel Beckett, whose cause he championed in Ireland. For details of his life, see E. O’Brien, A. J. Leventhal 1896–1979: Dublin Scholar, Wit and Man of Letters (Dublin: Con Leventhal Scholarship Committee, 1984).
Lady Gregory, The Journals, I (Gerrards Cross, Bucks: Colin Smythe, 1978) p. 563.
Cited in Joseph Hone, W. B. Yeats 1865–1939, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1960) p. 362.
The editorial is reprinted in full in UP2 438–9; and in Richard Eilmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) pp. 246–7.
Conor Cruise O’Brien, “Passion and Cunning: The Politics of Yeats”, in K. Cross and A. Norman Jeffares (eds), In Excited Reverie: A Centenary Tribute to W. B. Yeats 1865–1939 (London: Macmillan, 1965) p. 251.
Lennox Robinson, Curtain Up: An Autobiography (London: Michael Joseph, 1942) pp. 135–6. Robinson’s summary of the episode: “The whole thing was inexpressively painful to me. It alienated many of my Catholic friends and with some the breach will never be healed…. The Catholic editor of the paper should have been more careful.”
Dermot Foley, “A Minstrel Boy with a Satchel of Books”, Irish University Review, 4: 2 (1974) 210.
F. Keating, “Ireland: Hopes and Fears”, The Month, 144 (Oct 1924) 299.
ALS, Jan 1925, The Letters of Sean O’Casey, I, ed. D. Krause (New York: Macmillan, 1975) pp. 122–3.
Details of the inquiry can be found in Michael Adams, Censorship: The Irish Experience (University, Ala: University of Alabama Press, 1968) pp. 24–37.
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© 1991 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Molloy, F.C. (1991). Francis Stuart, W. B. Yeats and To-morrow. In: Gould, W. (eds) Yeats Annual No. 8. Yeats Annual. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08861-4_13
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