Chapter 7 - Enlightened Ulster, Romantic Ulster: Irish Magazine Culture of the Union Era

Summary

Emerging from four nations romantic scholarship and recent historical revisionism, this chapter challenges the negative view of the liminal period 1798–1800 as a dark and silent moment, following the collapse of United Irish republicanism and its associated publications. Pushing beyond 1798, public print and private correspondence discoveries in relation to key figures among elite and working-class circles alike yield evidence of continued collaboration towards the goal of a more high-brow, if less overtly political, northern periodical culture in Ireland. These circles contributed to several ‘enlightened’ periodicals like the Belfast Monthly Magazine (1808–14) and the Belfast Literary Journal (1815), which enabled a productive collision of politically radical writers like James Orr, Dr William Drennan, and Samuel Thomson with the ascendancy of conservatives, particularly the coterie poets of Bishop Thomas Percy. This chapter focuses on a key study of a short-lived Belfast periodical, The Microscope and Minute Observer (1799–1800), a unique publication that represents the convergence of Enlightenment, antiquarian, and romantic literary energies at a pivotal point of historical flux.