Introduction

Abstract

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. On the first page of his pamphlet Power set the tone for what came after with the following (unattributed) quotation from 1840: “Never 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.” Another quotation, from an 1858 issue of the Irish Quarterly Review, was offered as a corollary to this: “It is melancholy to look back on the mass of brilliant but unsuccessful periodicals which rose and fell in Ireland like meteor lights.” And in case the message had not quite hit home, Power quoted from Thomas Moore’s Diary, at the point where Moore talked about the late eighteenth-century journal Anthologia Hibernica, noting that it ran for two years and then “died, as all such things die in that country, for want of money and—of talent; for the Irish never either fight or write well on their own soil”. The point was clear: Ireland’s cultural and economic fortunes were bound up with those of England and any history of its literature would need to take this into account.