Christian Examiner and Church of Ireland Magazine, The

Life
1825-1869; fnd. by Rev. Caesar Otway and Dr J. H. Singer; first religious magazine in Ireland assoc. with Church of Ireland; famously publ. early stories of William Carleton from 1828.

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Commentary
Barbara Hayley, ‘Irish Periodicals’, in Anglo-Irish Studies, ii, (1976) [pp.83-108]: ‘to us it seems extraordinarily vicious and proselytizing, but it was no more so than its contemporaries. In the acrimonious spirit of the time, it is destructive and negative, its main conern to pull down Romanism rather than to build up Protestantism. dounded to combat what is called variously ‘Popery and its errors and calumnies’ ‘the usages and spuerstitious obsevances of the now corrupt Church of Rome’, or ‘Roman ignorance, superstition and idolatry’, it never ceases to gird against ‘Popery’s unscriptural deformity’. [...; &c.] (p.86.)

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References
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day Co. 1991), Vol. 2, 873: fictive specification of protestantism in the victims [in The Wildgoose Lodge, 1830], together with concluding biblical allusions, reflect Carleton’s conversion to the Church of Ireland and his literary apprenticeship on The Christian Examiner.

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