Agricultural Journals in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Abstract

In 1731 the Dublin Society for Improving Husbandry, Manufactures, and other Useful Arts was formed, becoming the Royal Dublin Society in 1820. The publication of new, practical methods of farming was part of the activities of the Dublin Society from the outset. Most successful at communicating such information was the Dublin Society’s Irish Farmers’ Journal, and Weekly Intelligencer (1812–26), a publication that catered to the agricultural community as a whole, covering its practicalities, economics, politics and social life. Its middle-class (as opposed to aristocratic) credentials were announced at the outset, and its remit – to provide not only information but also matter for reflection – was made manifest both in its publication date and in its contents. The Irish Farmers’ Journal was published on Saturdays, allowing for perusal of its practical articles, its snippets of news garnered from Irish and foreign newspapers, and its announcement of market prices for crops and animals. But the Journal also devoted at least two columns per issue to ‘Sunday Readings,’ fulfilling the promise of its subtitle to include ‘Essays, Religious, Moral, and Miscellaneous.’ While the religious sections might have seemed rather dry, the miscellaneous sections most often included the reproduction of information about general violence, murders – both at home and abroad – house-breaking and highway robbery – gleaned from the London and Irish papers. How can we understand this miscellaneity in a specialist paper which is the organ of a learned society? Is it simply ‘filler’ designed to appeal to subordinate members of the patriarchal farmer’s family? Perhaps the Journal is concerned to integrate its specialist area of work into wider social concerns and anxieties, and to assist in the realisation of a particular vision of the Irish economy that combines political ideology, religion and attitudes to and the practice of work. To test this hypothesis, this chapter will use the Irish Farmers’ Journal as an entry point to an understanding of the place of periodical publications in the development both of Ireland’s general economy and culture, and particularly of Ireland’s print trade before its collapse in the 1840s.