Three Hundred Years of Irish Periodicals E-Book

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1987

Seitenzahl: 221

Beschreibung

An invaluable collection of Irish Periodicals edited by Barbara Hayley and Enda McKay

Das E-Book Three Hundred Years of Irish Periodicals wird angeboten von The Lilliput Press und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:

Leseprobe

Three Hundred Years of Irish Periodicals

Edited by

BARBARA HAYLEY and ENDA McKAY

ASSOCIATION OF IRISH LEARNED JOURNALS, DUBLIN Lilliput Press, Gigginstown, Mullingar, Co. Westmeath 1987

Contents

Title Page

Contributors

Introduction

BARBARA TRAXLER BROWN Three Centuries of Journals in Ireland: the Library of the Royal Dublin Society, Grafton Street

BARBARA HAYLEY ‘A Reading and Thinking Nation’: Periodicals as the Voice of Nineteenth-Century Ireland

JEAN ARCHER Science Loners: The Journal of the Geological Society of Dublin and its Successors

CAOILFHÍONN Nic PHÁlDÍN Na hIrisí Gaeilge

DAVID DICKSON Historical Journals in Ireland: the Last Hundred Years

ENDA McKAY A Century of Irish Trade Journals 1860-1960

PETER DENMAN Ireland’s Little Magazines

Copyright

Contributors

BARBARA HAYLEY is Professor of English Language and Literature at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth and the author of WilliamCarleton’s Traits and Stories and the Nineteenth Century Anglo-IrishTradition (Gerrards Cross, Colin Smythe, 1983) and ABibliography ofthe Writings of William Carleton (Gerrards Cross, Colin Smythe, 1985).

ENDA McKAY is Development Officer of the Association of Irish Learned Journals and Senior Tutor in the Departments of History and the Department of Ethics and Politics, University College, Dublin.

JEAN ARCHER is a Senior Geologist in the Geological Survey of Ireland, and the Editor of the Geological Survey of Ireland Bulletin.

BARBARA TRAXLER BROWN is a Lecturer in the Department of Library and Information Studies, University College, Dublin.

PETER DENMAN is a Lecturer in English at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, and has published a number of articles on Anglo-Irish poetry and fiction.

DAVID DICKSON is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Modern History, Trinity College, Dublin, and is the Author of NewFoundations: Ireland 1660-1800 (Dublin, 1987).

Tá CAOILFHÍONN Nic PHÁlDÍN ar fhoireann Fhoclóir na Nua-Ghaeilge in Acadamh Ríoga na hÉireann. Ina hEagarthóir ar Comhar 1979-1984. Cnuasach Focal ó Uibh Rathach lei le foilsiú i mbliana ag Acadamh Ríoga na hÉireann.

David Dickson

Introduction

Since the first issue of the Mercurius Hibernicus; or the Irish Intelligencer was printed in Dublin in 1663, there have probably been between 8,000 and 12,000 distinct newspapers, magazines, reviews, journals and newsletters published in Ireland. Most have had a short life and were soon forgotten, although twentieth-century titles have almost certainly had a longer life expectancy than those of earlier times. By European standards the Irish harvest is not an unduly large one, but for the period up to the mid-nineteenth century Irish periodical publishing was prolific by any measure, and Dublin an important centre within the English-speaking world. Most Irish periodicals — a few nineteenth-century ones apart — have, of course, been produced for the Irish market, and until the late nineteenth century, for the upper and middle classes, Protestant and Catholic.

The diversity of format, function and fate of Irish periodicals have been so great that it may seem perverse to examine them as a genre. The history behind this collection of essays provides some justification. The Association of Irish Learned Journals, set up in 1978 as a loosely-knit organization catering for the needs of editors of Irish-based scholarly journals, created a new awareness of common problems, institutional, financial, technical and intellectual, in the transmission of research and ideas within Ireland, that united journals and editors in the arts and sciences. Several of the most active members of the association developed an interest in the history of scholarly journals and their educational, intellectual and literary functions; it was felt that by presenting an exhibition of this historical evolution, the current role and importance of scholarly journals would be far more widely appreciated. After the decision to mount an exhibition was taken, the organisers realised that it was impossible to isolate scholarly journals from the far larger and more heterogeneous periodical literature out of which they evolved. And so in both the exhibition and in this volume of essays an attempt has been made to look at several different types of Irish serial publication and their social contexts.

The contributors here are bibliographers and librarians, literary historians and specialists in Anglo-Irish literature, social historians, and geologists and historians of science. It is hoped that the reader will sense in the diversity of our contributions certain common themes in the intellectual history of Ireland. The periodicals produced by a society, when viewed in all their kaleidoscopic variety, offer sign-posts, some written large, some subtly sketched, to the mental world of that society.

For all the strengths of Irish bibliographical studies, there has been very little contextual work done on the Irish periodical press. R. R. Madden’s History of Irish Periodical Literature (London, 1867), Brian Inglis’s Freedom of the Press in Ireland 1784-1841 (London, 1954), and Robert Munter’s History of the Irish Newspaper 1685-1760 (Cambridge, 1967), are the only full-length monographs, although more recent periodicals have been examined in Terence Brown’s Ireland: A Socialand Cultural History 1922-1979 (London, 1981). Major literary and philosophical magazines have been the subject of specific articles over the years, but analysis of the evolution of the Irish newspaper press, for example, has been extraordinarily limited; special commemorative issues, now quite common, have rarely been reflective or critical.

The Association of Irish Learned Journals, with over three-dozen affiliated journals, hopes by sponsoring this project to heighten awareness of the richness of our intellectual and literary history, to draw attention to the many aspects of it that are still quite unexplored, and to assert the continuing centrality of the specialist periodical in the dissemination of knowledge, complex and practical, despite the near-total absence of direct support from the state or state-funded institutions, the small scale of our readerships in nearly all cases, and the challenge of new electronic information systems.

We are grateful to those who have sponsored the exhibition and this publication, in particular our printers the Elo Press, Eason and Son Ltd., the Leinster Leader, Dundalgan Press, the Library Association of Ireland, the Royal Irish Academy and Trinity College, Dublin.

Particular thanks are due to Bill Bolger and his team in the Department of Graphic Design at the National College of Art and Design, whose enthusiasm and professionalism have made possible this book and the exhibition.

Barbara Traxler Brown

Three Centuries of Journals in Ireland: the Library of the Royal Dublin Society, Grafton Street

Two hundred years ago in Grafton Street, Dublin, there stood an unassuming three-storey Georgian building, its facade illuminated by lamplight in the evenings. The site today corresponds to Nos. 112-113 Grafton Street, just opposite the Provost’s House of Trinity College. In 1786 the original Georgian building, Navigation House, was the venue for meetings of the (Royal) Dublin Society, with a resident Assistant Secretary, Drawing-Schools at the rere and on the second floor — a library with a display of artefacts and a large mahogany reading-desk. Founded over fifty years previously, in 1731, the Dublin Society (the title “Royal Dublin Society” dates only from 1820) acquired the Grafton Street site in 1767 and thereby the facilities to house and develop a reference collection of both its own publications and those of similar societies throughout Europe. From the vantage point of the Grafton Street library the Irish reader had a unique and for us surprisingly cosmopolitan view of his contemporary world. Thanks to a surviving record of the Library’s holdings we are able to sketch in some of the horizons of that world as follows, beginning first with the publishing opportunities presented by Dublin itself.1

The circulation of research news in Ireland before 1800

Ordered, That an advertisement be inserted in the newspapers, notifying the Society’s Intentions to publish from time to time, the result of their Experiments, and all such Communications … as may deserve the Publick Attention, and requesting the Communication of any New and Useful Observations in Mechanics, Husbandry, Arts, or Manufactures to be directed to the Rev. Mr. Peter Chaigneau, at the Society’s House, whom the Society has appointed to answer letters and give any Information which the Collection of the Society can afford.2

The vitality of local printing and publishing was essential for the Dublin Society’s aims for communication with the broad reading public outside its direct membership. In pursuit of these aims new publishing series and formats were created; alternatively, ones already existing in the city were modified to further their needs. That the local publishing scene proved to be so responsive to those needs should come as no surprise. In a city one-sixth the size of eighteenth-century London or Paris, with its printers and booksellers strung along the alley-ways of Dame Street, Christchurch, the theatre and music-hall neighbourhoods, competition and the struggle to stay in business resulted in a majority of short-lived enterprises. Few family firms out of over 267 (a conservative estimate by the bibliographer E. R. McClintock Dix in 1932, still undergoing revision) documented from 1700-1800 lasted more than one generation. The key to survival lay in securing income either by means of patronage — regular account holders — or by a market speciality, for example newspapers or text-book publishing. In this milieu we find the Dublin Society resorting both to established publishers of reputation, such as George Faulkner, the printer who issued the Collected Works of Jonathan Swift during the key decades after the author’s death, and to much lesser-known entrepreneurs who were quick to seize the new market opportunities which the Society’s needs represented. Accordingly, in the decades after 1731 we find the gradual orchestration of three channels of communication, namely

(i) constant paid advertising and general news coverage of the Society in the city and country newspapers;

(ii) the granting of patronage to one particular printer — for occasional publications, posters, pamphlets and reprints of members’ material, the scale of edition ranging from 500 copies in the case of pamphlets to 1,000 or 2,000 for advertising premium awards;

(iii) the allocation — from 1764 — to their nominated printer of the Proceedings of the Society, intended as printed records of their monthly or bi-monthly meetings for the information of their wider non-resident or travelling membership.

The newspapers in which the Society featured during its first six decades included the following titles: the Dublin Gazette, the DublinJournal, Pue’s Occurrences, the Dublin News-Letter, the Publick Gazetteer, the Dublin Chronicle, the Hibernian Journal, Saunders’s News-Letter, Sleater’s Dublin Chronicle. The largest scale of edition noted was in July 1772, when 4,000 copies of William Sleater’s newspaper, with lists of the Society’s prizes or premiums, were required for distribution throughout the kingdom.3

This was exceptional in comparison to previous cases. In December 1736 the printer Richard Reilly of Cork-Hill, at the top of Dame Street (the present site of the City Hall), had negotiated an agreement with the Society whereby for regular coverage of their “Weekly Observations” in his Dublin Newsletter the Society promised to buy 500 copies of each issue for half a guinea, that is 10s.6d. This would have resulted — had Reilly survived — in an annual income of 21 guineas per year; and the dissemination of the Society’s Observations at a cost price of one farthing per newsletter! The retail price to the reader was generally 1d. or 1½d., at least until the imposition of Stamp Duty in 1774. Therein lay the great attraction of the news-sheet format for the circulation of the Society’s research news, that the latter “may at the cheapest rate fall into more hands, and that their instructions to husbandmen and others may become more useful by being more universal”.4

In 1739 Reilly, capitalising on the interest the series aroused, published a collected edition of the best of the Weekly Observations for 2s.3½d.; which was subsequently pirated in following years in Paris and London, Glasgow in 1756, and reprinted in Dublin in 1763.5 It is the reprint, rather than the original copies of the Dublin Newsletter, which was archived in the Society’s library for consultation.

The newspaper format for the circulation of research never fell entirely out of use; exactly fifty years later, in November 1787, we find the Society considering the request of their printer, William Sleater, to borrow “any one Essay or Book belonging to the Society, upon his written Promise to return it in one Week, for the purpose of extracting useful Information to be laid before the Public thro’ the Channel of the Dublin Chronicle published by said Sleater; and so from time to time during the pleasure of the Society”.6

With the exception of Reilly’s venture, however, newspaper coverage was neither sufficiently sustained nor systematic nor, in its physical form, capable of being archived for consultation in the same way as series of bound periodicals, complete with indexes. It was also, where advertising was concerned, increasingly expensive. During the year October 1763-September 1764 George Faulkner was owed £41 8s. 9d. by the society for advertising in the Dublin Journal alone.7 Accordingly, it is of considerable interest to note, from March 15 1764, the launch of a new publishing series, namely the Proceedings of theDublin Society. In sharp contrast to the newsletter formats, the Proceedings were intended as the printed record of the Society’s committee meetings, for the information of the wider non-resident or even temporarily absentee membership base. The latter had fluctuated in size from a peak of 267 members to just over 150 after the Society’s incorporation in 1750. In contrast to the communication and review of actual research findings, the Proceedings were purely an administrative record. At most, with the help of their accumulated indexes, one could have obtained information about the Committee members responsible for a particular area, or about resolutions adopted, repairs or restructuring of premises, purchase of books, newspapers and implements, commissioning of publications. This was the kind of information disseminated in the Proceedings; for the discursive communication of research findings we have to consult the Society’s occasional publications instead. This divorce between the vehicle offered by the Proceedings as a regular serial, and the allocation of research material to more occasional and sporadic publications is neatly underlined in 1765 when a prolific author in the subject area of agriculture, John Wynne Baker (d.1775), was voted £200, and his Experiments in Agriculture, based on his experimental farm at Loughlinstown, Celbridge, were henceforth annually from 1765 to 1771 published in 500 copies. No transcript of this publication appears in the 1765 Proceedings, nor of his Plan for Instructing Youth inHusbandry, published in 1,500 copies in the following year, 1766. Thus it appears that the potential of a regular serial for archiving as well as publicising research news was underestimated by the Society. Not until 1800 was the decision taken to publish Transactions, and thereby to accommodate both functions.

It was mentioned earlier that the expenses incurred in advertising and publishing could be sizeable, representing valuable patronage and income to the printer so favoured, but on the other hand, the problem of recurrent expenditure in the Society’s annual budget was also a problem. To see this in perspective let us consider some figures extant for 1785-1787. For the year May 1785-May 1786, William Sleater of Castle Street received a total of £88 13s. 5d. for supplying the printed Proceedings, the premiums or prize books, and the stationery used by the Society.8 In 1787 the bill for the Proceedings and the stationery came to £44 13s.4d.; that for the premium books to £25 7s. 4d.9 Such expense seems trivial today, when the typesetting costs for one page of a serious journal may be a minimum of £25. But in 1787 the bill for the Proceedings was considerable in scale, representing two life memberships of 20 guineas each. Thus had the career of one Dublin printer prospered in the service of the Society. It had started modestly enough, when in the mid-1760s, Sleater, as the printer of the PublicGazetteer had volunteered his services for £10 per year, including the lists of premiums, provided that the Society would not make use of other news-sheets such as the Dublin Journal or the Dublin Gazette.10 Such can be the long-term consequences of good bargains. Binding for the Proceedings and other miscellanea was, of course, extra; in February 1784 we find that William Sleater junior was paid £26 2s. l0d. for “binding and marking books’, again more than the cost of one life membership subscription.11 For any normal self-financed learned society, these financial equations would have serious repercussions. Due to the Dublin Society’s parliamentary grant of eventually £10,000 per annum, arrears in subscription payment could even be tolerated until late in the century. Thus parliamentary funding ultimately was supporting the Society’s journal and pamphlet publications, a useful contrast to remember for present-day publishing ventures.

As we have seen, the Transactions of the Dublin Society from 1800 fulfilled the dual purpose of archive and research bulletin. More consistent with the modern idea of subject specialisation in periodicals, however, was the launching in 1770 of an archaeological journal, Collectanea De Rebus Hibernicis. This was edited by the highly esteemed, if somewhat eccentric, Major Charles Vallancey (1721-1812), a founder member of both the Royal Irish Academy and the Society of Antiquaries, as well as one of the most energetic and dedicated of committee members in the Dublin Society. His Collectanea had reached 14 numbers and a second edition by 1786; despite problems of sporadic appearance subsequently it continued to 1804, publication being finally suspended in 1807. The printer of the first of the Collectanea, Thomas Ewing, may thus be accredited with bringing Irish Antiquities to the view of interested Europeans at a time of renewed interest, both in England and on the Continent, in antiquarian studies. An additional attraction of the Collectanea was the inclusion of elegant copper-plate engravings of the Celtic artefacts and sites examined. Several of these were drawn up by another Irish resident of French Huguenot extraction, Gabriel Béranger (1729-1817). Originally from Rotterdam, Béranger kept a print shop and artist’s ware-house in Great George’s Street, Dublin. The great value of his work for Collectanea as in other series of his sketches, lies in the representation of detail which has long since disappeared.12

Of even greater interest were those acquisitions inspired by direct personal links between members of the Dublin Society and their similarly motivated contemporaries on the Continent. Generally such series are represented by short runs as membership changed, but even so, they provide fascinating glimpses into lines of communication previously unsuspected. Thus in March 1765 a M. Vavesseur, Secretary of the Royal Society for Agriculture at Rouen, founded in 1761, launched a successful period of contact between his “Royal Agricultural Society” (one of nineteen such in France) and that of Dublin. Hence the arrival in the journal collection of the Déliberations etMémoires de la Société Royale d’Agriculture de Rouen.15 Later in the century contacts became particularly strong with Bordeaux, as represented in the membership of John Barton, of the famous vintner family in that region.16 This personal contact was paralleled by the inclusion of the award-winning Dissertations qui ont remporté les prix del’Académie de Bordeaux in the Society’s Library.

Similar expansion in contacts can be noted for the Netherlands. It was presumably due to the membership of the Rev. C. Chais, minister of the Walloon Church at The Hague, that eventually 65 volumes of Verhandelingen or Transactions from Dutch learned societies at Amsterdam, Haarlem, Rotterdam and Flushing arrived in the Dublin Society’s Library. The Reverend Chais, as “a member of the Society for the encouragement of Sciences at Haerlem (sic)” was in contact with Dublin in October 1764, volunteering his services as a correspondent.17 The Haarlem Society, founded in 1752, was one of twenty major scientific societies instituted in the Netherlands after 1750. Just over two decades later, in 1787, Colonel Hamilton was voted 50 guineas by the Dublin Society for translating the indexes of the accumulated thirty-two volumes of both the Haarlem and Flushing societies.18

Brussels, another significant centre, was also linked to the Dublin Society through the Honorary Membership of the Abbé Raynal, “now resident at Brussels in Brabant”, in April 1782.19 As a parallel we find the Mémoires of the Brussels Academy in the Society’s journal collection.

Whilst these lines of communication with North-West Europe were especially useful for agricultural, technological and pure scientific research, it was actually a more distant network — one extending far into central Germany — which had a major impact on the Society’s teaching resources for mineral exploration and botany/medicine. Through the accession of George I of Hanover to the English throne in 1714, access to centres of research and learning in German-speaking Europe gradually became more common-place. The contents of a non-academic but highly cultured journal such as The Gentleman’sMagazine, reprinted in Dublin by the Exshaw dynasty from 1741 to 1792, assisted in this process of familiarisation. Two of the best-known centres were Göttingen, one hundred kilometres south of Hanover, and Berlin, a city, like Dublin, of approximately 172,000 inhabitants prior to 1800. The journal series of the Göttingen Royal Society (in twelve volumes), and the Mémoires of the Berlin Academy (41 volumes) were both available in Dublin. Apart from these centres, the Mining Academy, or Bergakademie, at Freiberg in Saxony also provided an international mecca of instruction and practice. Freiberg, located some 90 kilometres directly south-east of Leipzig, was famous for its Professor, Abraham Gottlob Werner (1747-1817). Under his aegis, one of Ireland’s first mineralogists, Thomas Weaver, received his education. Later, on the Dublin Society’s behalf, Weaver conducted mining operations at Glendalough, Luganure and Cronbane.20 Another of Werner’s pupils, Nathaniel Gottfried Leske (1751-1786), who went on to become Professor of Natural History at Leipzig in 1775, had a two-fold connection with the Dublin Society. In 1781 he had taken up the editorship of a well-known Leipzig journal, the Leipzig Commentaries in Science and Medicine, which was well represented at Dublin, spanning the period 1752-1773 in 24 volumes. It thereby extended the Society’s holdings of one of the oldest European learned journals, the famous Acta Eruditorum Lipsiensa, or “Leipzig Learned Proceedings”, launched in 1682 and continuing to 1746 in 83 volumes. During his editorship of the Commentaries from 1781 to 1785, Leske had begun to arrange his collection of over 7,000 mineral and geological specimens assembled in previous years; after his death the work of description and advanced classification was continued and in 1792 this collection, the “Leskean Cabinet” came on to the international market for purchase. Thanks to the initiative of Dr. Richard Kirwan (1733-1812), a Fellow of the Royal Society at London, who had become active in the Dublin Society after 1787, the unique and unrivalled Leskean Cabinet was acquired for Dublin at a cost of £1350.21 It arrived and was housed in Hawkins Street (in the Society’s warehousing storage) in November 1792, and as a teaching resource contributed greatly to the diffusion of more exact knowledge on the subject of mineralogy in Ireland.

Up until the mid-1780s therefore, the Dublin Society and its membership had played an outstanding role in the circulation of research news in Ireland. This situation was further enhanced by the foundation of the Royal Irish Academy in April 1785, and its arrival, from the third meeting onwards, in No. 114 Grafton Street, as a next-door neighbour to the Dublin Society. These premises had become vacant, due to the dissolution of the Commissioners of Inland Navigation in 1787, and the reversion of Navigation House, their headquarters, to the Crown in 1786. The Academy, or “Royal Irish Society” as it was first known, continued to occupy No. 114 Grafton Street from this date for more than sixty years.

The foundation membership of the Academy numbered eighty-eight in all, after its incorporation under royal patronage in 1786 as a society for promoting the study of science, polite literature, and antiquities.13 It thus counterbalanced the much more applied and practical work of the Dublin Society. Given the range of intellectual talent within the membership, it was decided in 1786 to publish a volume of the essays, or papers, which had been communicated, under the title of Transactions. The enterprise soon ran into difficulties. The printer/publisher, Luke White, already involved with Vallancey’s Collectanea, was the Academy’s first choice for the venture, but he proved so slow that in January 1787 the Council directed him to furnish progress reports, and then finally in March replaced him by George Bonham, of Great George’s Street. Despite these initial setbacks the first of a long series of Transactions appeared in 1787, and six further volumes were published by 1800. The papers were printed in one of three sections as relevant: science, polite literature and antiquities. Science, with 106 essays, had almost twice as many as polite literature (twenty-five) and antiquities (thirty-two) together, before the arrival of volume eight, published in 1803.

In terms of Dublin’s book-trade history, volume II of the Transactions is especially noteworthy. In the sub-section Antiquities occupying pages 9-17, one can see George Bonham’s use of the new Irish typeface designed by Stephen Parker of Grafton Street, the principal Dublin letter-founder of the period. Parker first advertised this Gaelic typeface in the Dublin Chronicle of 31 May 1787, as a “complete fount of beautiful Irish characters”. As James Phillips points out, operational difficulties were probably experienced when printing with the font for the first time.14 Nearly two years were to elapse before the appearance of Volume II of the Transactions in March 1789. Thus those who subscribed to the Academy’s Transactions witnessed the use of this typeface prior to its other and more celebrated appearance in Charlotte Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry, published by Bonham in late July 1789, and advertised in the Dublin Chronicle. In this accommodation of Irish manuscript characters the Dublin printing trade had realised a considerable expansion of resources, for over a century had elapsed since the development in London of Moxon’s Irish typeface in 1680 for the printing of the Old Testament in Gaelic. And thus within a period of fifty years, 1737 to 1787, those interested in the circulation of research in Ireland had witnessed a transition from the basic form of Observations in news-sheet/newsletter format to that of a learned society’s Transactions, published on a regular annual basis by the local book-trade of the city.

The Dublin Society and the acquisition ofcontinental journals prior to 1800

In the creation of a learned journal in eighteenth-century Dublin, personal interests, talent and culture could have a decisive impact in exploiting local publishing resources. This was true for Vallancey’s enterprise where the wealth of his knowledge, and the Irish antiquarian