William Maginn made the transition from a learned Cork schoolmaster corresponding anonymously with British periodical editors to one of the central figures of the London press. He began by writing gratis for Blackwood’s Magazine, and then, fearful of the ‘cheerless prospect’ of Cork in the ‘Captain Rock’ years, moving to London as a working professional. While he avoided the trap of writing chiefly on the ‘Irish question’ as some expected, he was enveloped in the persona of ‘Morgan Odoherty’, a comic Irish figure invented in Blackwood’s by others. Maginn and Odoherty for some became one – a similar situation to that faced by James Hogg with the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’. In his last fifteen years, Maginn used multiple periodicals to both practise the art of humbug and attack, especially in politics, the humbugs of the age. His founding in 1830 of Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country was his central innovation in literary magazines and Tory politics during the Reform era.

The vibrant periodical culture of the nineteenth century was significantly formed by writers and publishers from Ireland and Scotland. These journalists were often athwart what we now regard as canonical Romantic and Victorian writing, and in their work crafted a satiric, parodic counterpoint to new valorisations of poetic insight, imaginative originality and aesthetic disinterestedness. The work of William Maginn and Francis Sylvester Mahony demonstrates the transnational, polyglossic and multifaceted authorial games that periodical culture enabled. Whether remembered as proto-postmodern critics of poetic afflatus, or embittered hacks squandering their potential for a pay cheque, periodical writers created a literature teetering between brilliant comedy and tedious sniping. Undermining ideas of authenticity and authorial originality, periodical literature brought to the fore tensions inherent in nineteenth-century celebrations of national culture and aesthetic idealism.