The Mass Distribution of Geographical Literature in Ulster 1750-1850

Abstract

The extent to which geographical knowledge penetrated to the common reader has been little studied in the past. This paper examines the question in relation to late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Ulster. In the eighteenth century the material distributed around the countryside consisted largely of fictional and actual accounts of voyages (though some readers had access to better material via private libraries or local reading societies). Early in the nineteenth century the Kildare Place Society of Dublin issued huge numbers of small books, many of geographical interest, and in Ulster these were sold and imitated by two Belfast printer/publishers. By'this time, the coming of a national system of education in Ireland heralded a variety of geographical textbooks, bringing accurate (if dull) geographical knowledge to a wide public for the first time.