Regional News in ‘Peacetime’: The Dumfries and Galloway Courier in the 1820s

On 28 January 1817, the Dumfries and Galloway Courier led with an editorial explaining that Rev. Henry Duncan was handing editorial control to John McDiarmid, then arriving from the newly-established Scotsman in Edinburgh. In that notice, Duncan outlined the challenges faced by the paper, noting ‘the increasing difficulty of conducting a Newspaper in times of peace and domestic embarrassment’ and contending that ‘in such a period as the present […] the part of those who conduct the vehicle of intelligence becomes more arduous and complicated.’ This chapter addresses the response of McDiarmid’s Courier to this newly ‘complicated’ newspaper milieu. Updating longstanding tensions about literary register in the press for the 1820s, McDiarmid’s Courier took on a newly lyrical voice, not least in a commitment to history, tales, topography and other subjects intelligible under the category of ‘local description’. Periodicals like the Courier played a distinctive place-making role for an emergent world-system predicated in print, with regional space emerging from interactions between local, national and global cultures. However, the 1820s Courier also demonstrated an emphatic commitment to its locale that is characteristic of regional periodicals at large and which underlines the role of the literary imagination in the work of geography.