Dublin University Magazine - Early Days

Early Days

The year 1832 had been one of political and ecumenical upheaval: disturbances in Britain led to the Reform Act of that year, the Tithe War was raging in Ireland and the new Whig government was gaining influential supporters in Trinity College, Dublin. A number of young men associated with the College, including Isaac Butt, John Anster (translator of Goethe's Faust) and John Francis Waller decided to found a magazine with the objective of discussing the new developments and defending the Tories. Although all the founders were Trinity educated, there was no official connection with the College. The first issue appeared in January 1833.

The magazine was modeled on British magazines such as Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and Fraser's Magazine of London, and was Protestant and Unionist in outlook. However, this did not preclude a keen interest in Irish life and letters. The publishers were William Curry Jun. and Company. Their agent for the magazine was a Scotsman, James McGlashan, who became the publisher himself in 1846. Its first editor was Charles Stanford.

Part of the cultural programme of the magazine was to counter the Catholic claim to possession of a Gaelic past by showing how Protestant minds and hearts could respond to Irish literature and history.

Through the 1830s and 1840s the chief ideologist of the magazine was Mortimer O'Sullivan, a Grand Chaplain of the Orange Order in Ireland, a role he shared with his brother Samuel. Editors during the 1840s and 1850s were James Wills, Charles Lever and John Francis Waller, all of whom also contributed articles.

At its best the magazine gave encouragement, relatively generous payment and an audience ranging beyond Ireland itself to emerging writers. It shared readers and sometimes writers with British magazines and even with the Nationalist The Nation (for example, the Young Irelander Michael Joseph Barry, a friend of Sheridan Le Fanu's brother William, who was arrested in 1848 on a charge of treason).