George Petrie (1790–1866) as a collector of Irish song

This chapter considers the contribution of George Petrie as a collector and publisher of Irish song. His upbringing, his professional career first as an artist and subsequently as an archaeologist, and his role as a leading figure in the Royal Irish Academy, all provided important contexts for his collection of traditional song. As the head of the orthographical and etymological section for the Memoir of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland he worked closely with two of the most important Irish scholars of the time, Eugene O’Curry and John O’Donovan, and their influence proved invaluable when he was made president of the Society for the Preservation and Publication of the Music of Ireland in 1851. The various sources of the songs he collected and his approach to their notation are considered, as are the characteristics of the contents of the only completed publication of the Society for the Preservation and Publication of the Music of Ireland, The Petrie Collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland in 1855.

The Dublin Penny Journal and Alternative Histories

This examination of the Dublin Penny Journal shows how antiquarian history was reshaped along nationalist lines by the penny magazines. These ephemeral publications are unexpected and under-examined repositories of cultural identity and indigenous knowledge. Part of the mandate of the Penny Journal was to popularize and explain to a general audience the ancient chronicles of Ireland. One of the magazine’s early editors was George Petrie, Head of the Memoir Section of the government’s Ordnance Survey in Ireland and prominent member of the Royal Irish Academy. Petrie had procured for the Academy the Annals of the Four Masters, a record of Irish history from the deluge (dated as 2,242 years after creation) to AD 1616, and it was extracts from the Annals that Petrie used as a way of reuniting his audience with their own past. The Annals retold the story of Ireland’s birth and death, a story filled both with glory and with ignominious defeat at the hands of the English. Though ostensibly listing the achievements of the Gaelic nobility, in Petrie’s hands the Annals also suggested that the Irish peasantry might, revenant-like, reclaim their own history, and the penny journal format — cheap, conversational, nationalist – made manifest this reconstruction of reality.