Ann Andrews's Newspapers and Newsmakers is a welcome addition to a growing body of work on Irish newspaper and periodical history, an increasingly vibrant subfield of Irish Studies that is at long last receiving the attention and energy it deserves. While it is part of this trend, Newspapers and Newsmakers offers a somewhat different approach than much of the current work on Irish journalism, telling a well-known story (the development of Irish nationalism from the early 1840s through the 1860s) primarily through content analysis of the Dublin newspapers that contributed so vitally to the ideology, vocabulary, and organization of the evolving nationalist movement. Andrews aims to explore not only the symbiotic links between these publications and contemporary nationalist organizations, but also how the journalists writing for these papers established or foreshadowed some of the themes that later helped define Irish nationalism, such as tenant right, an independent parliamentary party, and cultural recovery. Most importantly, she seeks to trace how the Dublin press came around to firmly support revolutionary nationalism. Andrews can make this latter argument largely because the book is concerned almost solely with the advanced nationalist press, most notably the Nation, the Irishman, and the Irish People. These periodicals' moderate or mainstream peers, most importantly the Freeman's Journal, receive little attention. The end result is less a comprehensive examination of the Dublin nationalist press in this period and more an exploration of the roles played by several very influential papers in the development of Irish nationalist organizations and ideology and how these organs helped establish “ideological pathways for future generations” (262).
Andrews begins with a helpful overview of recent scholarship on the Irish press and then explores the selected newspapers in four chronological chapters. In the first of these she investigates the critical part played by the Nation in Daniel O'Connell's Repeal Movement. As Andrews points out, the rapid growth in its circulation and readership in the early 1840s was mirrored by a strong increase in popular support for Repeal. In her estimation, the principal contributions of the Nation were threefold: it offered an inclusive conception of Irishness that helped to win middle-class and Protestant support for the Repeal Association; it elevated many of the Young Irelanders to public prominence; and, of course, it essentially created modern Irish cultural nationalism. The second chapter observes how the press could also play a divisive, destructive role, investigating the Nation's part in the 1846 split between O'Connell and the Young Irelanders, and then the split among the Young Irelanders themselves and the abortive rebellions that followed. This chapter also investigates the revival of republican revolutionary nationalism in the Dublin press, principally in the pages of John Mitchel's United Irishman, which she credits with “changing the course of Irish history, forcing the pace and direction of action” (129). In Andrews's opinion, the ruptures of this period were a tragedy that helped to initiate a pervasive pattern of destructive splits among Irish nationalists.
While the larger arc of the book's narrative is well known, the period covered in the third chapter (1849–59) is often passed over in popular and scholarly accounts, which typically skip from the Famine to the Fenians. Andrews helpfully and skillfully charts how the Dublin press helped to revive Irish nationalism after the social and political disasters of the Famine and the 1848 rebellion. The vacuum created by the exile or imprisonment of the leading Young Irelanders was initially filled by short-lived papers such as the Irishman (1849) and the Tribune. These papers were soon overshadowed by the returned Nation, but together these periodicals helped to sustain the nationalist movement and, especially after the arrival of the new Irishman in 1858, move the center of gravity toward revolutionary nationalism. Whereas the Nation of the 1840s gave shape to the cultural revival movement, as Andrews sees it, the press in this period germinated some other key features of later Irish nationalism, such as tenant right and a first foray at an independent Irish parliamentary party. The final chapter focuses squarely on James Stephen's Irish People, examining its powerful advocacy of revolutionary nationalism and consistent hostility toward constitutional nationalists and their newspapers, an antagonism which she believes helped retard the development of constitutional nationalism in these years. The often bellicose rhetoric of the paper, its anticlericalism, and its call for Irish-American soldiers currently fighting in the American Civil War to afterward liberate their homeland are all well established. Typically less noted are the paper's plans for land reform and social revolution and its celebrations of Irish literature and culture. Andrews's exploration of these themes is one of the more original and interesting aspects of her analysis and demonstrates one of the ways in which these ideas survived and were passed on to succeeding generations of Irish nationalists.
Specialists in Irish newspaper history will find much of Newspapers and Newsmakers familiar, and some may disagree with aspects of Andrews's portrayal of the Dublin press as a prime mover of Irish nationalist ideology in this period. Others will find some of her proposed links between selected leading articles from these newspapers and early twentieth-century nationalist thought a bit thin. To be fair, the precise relationship between press, public, and political opinion is a rather slippery subject and certainly not one that can be resolved to the satisfaction of all. On the whole, however, Andrews offers a clearly written and generally persuasive account that that will interest scholars in Irish and British studies as well as those who study the press more generally.
