Regional Periodicals

Periodicals are increasingly recognised as central to eighteenth and early nineteenth-century literary culture, but scholarship has tended to focus on a limited range of metropolitan titles. This chapter unearths a neglected regional archive of periodicals in southwest Scotland that were essential to the burgeoning cultural production of regionality. Robert Rae’s short-lived Dumfries Mercury (1721) was a pioneering early newspaper and was eventually followed by the Tory-leaning Dumfries Weekly Journal (est. 1773) and liberal Dumfries and Galloway Courier (est. 1809), as well as a series of monthly magazines and smaller journals. With particular attention to the sophisticated Courier under the editorship of John McDiarmid in the 1820s, the chapter examines the porous relationship between newspaper and magazine writing in the period. Crucially, it finds that the emphatic geographical identity of regional periodicals brings sharply into focus the dynamic and highly literary sense of place they seek to mediate for readers.