Abstract
The formation of learned bodies like the Dublin Society reflected the wealth and education of Ireland’s ascendancy class in the eighteenth century, and by the time the Royal Irish Academy received its charter in 1785 as a society for “promoting the study of science, polite literature, and antiquities”, it was only one of many groups beyond the University of Dublin interested in debating and disseminating advances in learning amongst like-minded individuals. From the outset the Academy assumed an antiquarian role and collected items of importance to Ireland’s history: gold ornaments, ogham stones, ancient manuscripts. These objects ultimately became part of the collection of the National Museum, and the Irish manuscripts collected by Academy members over the last 200 years are a priceless record of Ireland’s past.
“… beautiful speeches and long sentences about what Ireland MIGHT be, will not MAKE her so. We must buckle up our sleeves and fall to work. And, fellow-countrymen, believe the Conductor of the DUBLIN PENNY JOURNAL when he assures you, that though, like all men, he looks to his own interest, yet he has your GOOD at heart, and would not, for all the paltry profit of his periodical, either flatter you or slander you.”
‘Agriculture’, Dublin Penny Journal 1.i (30 June 1832): 3.
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Notes
- 1.
The Dublin Society was formed in 1731 and became the Royal Dublin Society in 1820 following the receipt of patronage from George IV (see Chap. 1).
- 2.
Hereafter RIA.
- 3.
See Tarlach Ó Raifeartaigh, The Royal Irish Academy: A Bicentennial History, 1785–1985 (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1985) for a general history of the Academy.
- 4.
The University of Dublin (Trinity College) was founded in 1592 and was closed to Catholics until 1793.
- 5.
Subscriptions were not always promptly paid; RIA minute books detail the extraordinary lengths some members went to avoid paying.
- 6.
See Lloyd Praeger, Index to the Serial Publications of the Royal Irish Academy (Transactions, Proceedings, Cunningham Memoirs, Todd Lecture Series, and Irish Manuscript Series) , from 1786 to 1906 inclusive (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, 1912).
- 7.
As recorded in the Minutes of the Committee of Publication, Royal Irish Academy, 24 May 1837. Barbara Traxler Brown has noted the cooperation and commercial drive of local booksellers and publishers in handling such specialist material as they aimed ‘to survive in a none too lucrative market’. See Brown, ‘Three Centuries of Journals in Ireland: The Library of the Royal Dublin Society, Grafton Street’, in Hayley and McKay, eds., Three Hundred Years of Irish Periodicals (Mullingar: Lilliput Press, 1987), 25 and passim.
- 8.
For example, papers produced between 1858 and 1871 were published in one volume (volume 24) and volume 20 contained only one paper: George Petrie’s essay on the round towers of Ireland.
- 9.
William Stokes, The Life and Labours in Art and Archaeology of George Petrie (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1868), 65.
- 10.
R. Lloyd Praeger, iii–iv.
- 11.
Ó Raifeartaigh, Royal Irish Academy , 32.
- 12.
See Joep Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fior-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996).
- 13.
See Minutes of the Committee of Publication, RIA, 14 June 1837.
- 14.
Betham (1779–1853) was knighted in 1812. See the Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge UP, 2009).
- 15.
Minutes of the Committee of Publication, RIA, 26 November 1838.
- 16.
Betham eventually published part of the work offered to the RIA as Etruria-Celtica: Etruscan Literature and Antiquities Investigated; or, the Language of that Ancient and Illustrious People Compared with Iberno-Celtic, and Both Shown to be Phoenician (Dublin: Philip Dixon Hardy & Sons; London: Richard Groombridge, 1842). Betham also theorized that the Round Towers or Ireland were Phoenician in origin; again, Petrie proved his theory incorrect in a highly publicized (and award-winning) RIA paper published in the Transactions.
- 17.
Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy , 25 June 1838, 211.
- 18.
See Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the History and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), 128 and passim.
- 19.
Donald MacCartney, ‘The Writing of History in Ireland, 1800–30’, Irish Historical Studies , 10.40 (September 1957): 351. Later in the article MacCartney says, “Writings on Irish history in the early nineteenth century may be regarded as so many political pamphlets illustrating that part of public opinion which is concerned with what men think about their past” (353).
- 20.
See J.H. Andrews, A Paper Landscape: The Ordnance Survey in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975; 2nd ed. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002): 156.
- 21.
Stokes , 89.
- 22.
See Robin J. Kavanagh, ‘Religion and Illustrated Periodicals in the 1830s’ in James Murphy, ed., The Oxford History of the Irish Book, volume 4: 1800–1891 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 342–356.
- 23.
Hereafter DPJ.
- 24.
The Christian Examiner itself lasted until 1869.
- 25.
This is the SDUK’s non-sectarian Penny Magazine (1832–1845).
- 26.
Stokes , 67. Petrie began contributing articles and artwork from the seventh number.
- 27.
Dublin Penny Journal , 1 (1832–1833), 21.
- 28.
Ibid., 16.
- 29.
Ibid., 16.
- 30.
See Waterloo Directory of Irish Periodicals . See also Francesca Benatti, ‘A National and Concordant Feeling: Penny Journals in Ireland, 1832–1842’ (unpub. PhD diss., National University of Ireland, Galway, 2003), and DUM (January 1840), 112.
- 31.
Benjamin Clayton (1786–1862), engraver. See Walter G. Strickland, A Dictionary of Irish Artists (Dublin and London: Maunsel and Co. Ltd., 1913).
- 32.
‘Preface’, Dublin Penny Journal , 1 (1832–1833), n.p.
- 33.
Ibid., n.p.
- 34.
Ibid., 16.
- 35.
See ‘Appeal to the Public’, Dublin Penny Journal (vol. 1, no. 3 (14 July 1832), 24). There were also those who complained that the journal was too Irish, to which the editors replied: “we say, Ireland is our peculiar province—there are abundance of cheap publications for general literature, and we would not interfere with any of them” (ibid.).
- 36.
See Tom Dunne, ‘Towards a National Art?’ in Peter Murray (ed.), George Petrie (1790–1866): The Rediscovery of Ireland’s Past (Cork: Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, 2004), 125–36.
- 37.
J.N. Brewer, The Beauties of Ireland: Being Original Delineations, Topographical, Historical, and Biographical, of Each County (London: Sherwood, Jones, 1825).
- 38.
Dublin Penny Journal , 1.9 (25 August 1832), 65.
- 39.
Dublin Penny Journal , 1.41 (6 April 1833), 323.
- 40.
Ibid., 323.
- 41.
Dublin Penny Journal , 1.45 (4 May 1833), 359.
- 42.
There were four occasional articles in the series, each illustrated: 2 February, 1833; 9 March 1833, 30 March 1833, 13 April 1833.
- 43.
J.S. Folds, ‘Machinery’, Dublin Penny Journal , 1.28 (5 January 1833), 222.
- 44.
Dublin Penny Journal , 1.45 (4 May 1833), 357.
- 45.
Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), 128.
- 46.
Dublin Penny Journal , 2.56 (27 July 1833), 32.
- 47.
Hardy edited the Dublin Literary Gazette in 1831, taking over from Charles Lever. See ‘Hardy, Philip Dixon’ by Bridget Hourican in Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge, 2009).
- 48.
See Stephen Brown, Ireland in Fiction: A Guide to Irish Novels, Tales, Romances, and Folklore (Dublin and London: Maunsel & Co., 1916), 108.
- 49.
‘To Our Readers’, Dublin Penny Journal , 2.57 (3 August 1833), 33.
- 50.
Ibid., 33.
- 51.
Dublin Penny Journal , 4 (1835–36), unpaginated preface.
- 52.
See Scott Bennett, ‘Revolutions in Thought: Serial Publication and the Mass Market for Reading’, in The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings, ed. by Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982): 225–57; 236. See also Francesca Benatti, ‘Dublin Penny Journal’, in Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (eds.), Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism (London: Academia Press and The British Library, 2009), 182–183.
- 53.
‘Our Portrait Gallery’, Dublin University Magazine , 14.85 (December 1839), 638.
- 54.
P.D. Hardy, ‘To the Editor of Saunders’s News-letter’ (Saunders’s News-letter, 6 December 1839).
- 55.
Charles Benson reported that Hardy had publicly blamed the closure of the paper on ‘the restrictive practices of his journeymen printers’ (Benson quotes from Second Report from the Select Committee on Combinations of Workmen, H.C. 1837–8 (646), viii, 346, 26). See Benson , ‘The Dublin Book Trade’ in Oxford History of the Irish Book, v. 4, 38.
- 56.
Samuel Ferguson, “The Dublin Penny Journal” Dublin University Magazine , 15 (January 1840), 112–128.
- 57.
Ibid., 124.
- 58.
Ibid., 128.
- 59.
Pic Nics from the Dublin Penny Journal, being a selection from the legends, tales, and stories of Ireland, which have appeared in the published volumes of the Dublin Penny Journal (Dublin: Philip Dixon Hardy, 1836).
- 60.
‘To Our Readers’, The Irish Penny Journal 1.1 (4 July 1840), 8.
- 61.
Ibid., 8.
- 62.
Ibid., 8.
- 63.
Petrie himself designed a new Irish typeface in the 1830s. See Dermot McGuinne, Irish Type Design: A History of Printing Types in the Irish Character (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1992).
- 64.
‘To Our Readers’, The Irish Penny Journal 1.52 (26 June 1841), 416.
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Tilley, E. (2020). The Antiquarian Journal. 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_3
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