Irish Literary Magazines: An Outline History and Descriptive Bibliography (review)

The history of publishing in Ireland is complicated, full of lacunae and exasperating dead ends. And yet in Ireland, as elsewhere, the work of book historians is gaining momentum. The multi-volume Oxford History of the Irish Book is due to be published in the next few years, and conference papers, articles and courses specifically dealing with Ireland are to be found both in English and in History Departments across the island. The foresight of nineteenth-century Irish librarians ("never throw anything away") is proving the basis for a new generation of studies linking Ireland's cultural and political pasts through their material remains. Tom Clyde's Irish Literary Magazines: An Outline History and Descriptive Bibliography is one of the first full length works to be produced out of this flurry of activity. Clyde is editor of The Honest Ulsterman, a long-running literary periodical from Belfast, and his area of interest is the twentieth-century little magazine in Ireland. Nevertheless, he shows himself ready to take on uncharted territory; Irish Literary Magazines lists some 300 years of titles, from 1710 to 1985. All are sifted, weighed, included enthusiastically or given scathing reviews, according to a set of criteria that includes their contribution to a collective and shifting notion of 'Irishness.'

Clyde has divided the book in two: Part One breaks the period under scrutiny into significant sections and provides histories of the most important literary productions that have survived. The sections include what Clyde calls 'prehistory', followed by the eighteenth-century, 1800– 1829, 1830–1849, 1850–1869, 1870–1891, 1892–1922, 1923–1939, 1941– 1952, 1953–1985. While rather arbitrary, these divisions make it possible for Clyde to arrange his material in terms of trends; the pattern he sees is one in which political activity is swiftly followed by a time of rich cultural production. Amply defended with maps and graphs, the theory is persuasive. The histories of each period are, however, tantalizingly short – often only two or three pages long – and Clyde's dismissive attitude towards popular periodicals is sometimes grating. His sections on the nineteenth-century repeat the familiar words of Barbara Hayley (from 300 Years of Irish Periodicals), who asserts that "In the first three decades of the century, the only kind of magazine to flourish was political or religious" and the editor of the 1826 Bolster's Quarterly: "in Periodical writing, we ... have produced absolutely nothing!" (16). The nineteenth-century is summed up as follows: "The final stage in the decline of nineteenth-century popular magazines in Ireland, from the lively penny papers of the 1830s, through to the more sickly Fireside Magazines of the 1850s, reaches its nadir here, from which point popular magazines in Ireland largely bid adieu to any relationship with the serious literature of their country" (31). The twentieth-century popular press doesn't fare much better. The Irish Storyteller (1935), for instance, is dismissed with the following remark: "An entertaining, popular paper, with some poems, anecdotes, and so on, as well as stories; none of them is any good" (189). But rather than throw his hands up in despair, Clyde sets about rehabilitating the reputation of early nineteenth-century Irish literature by pointing to the number of new titles emerging from the regions outside Dublin and noting the confident (pre-Catholic Emancipation) nationalist tones of many of the periodicals, not to mention the swift adoption in Ireland of technological developments like the steam printing press and paper making machines. The so-called golden age in Ireland – 1830–1845 – is given good coverage, and Clyde attempts the difficult task of tracing distribution and sales networks from the few source materials that remain.

Part Two is arranged chronologically; Clyde maintains that this arrangement shows the development of trends over time. I'm not quite sure how it does this, and the constant need to consult the index to find titles is rather awkward, but this is to quibble about small things...