For 35 years, Seumas O’Sullivan’s The Dublin Magazine gave writers and artists a place within the changing culture of independent Ireland. Today’s Dublin Magazine respects that history, but it is a new and independent publication with a different purpose: opening local publishing to the people, communities and organisations of Dublin.
Search for Dublin Magazine and another publication soon appears from the archive: The Dublin Magazine, the literary and arts journal founded by Seumas O’Sullivan in 1923.
It is an important part of Ireland’s cultural history. It also deserves to be described accurately.
Today’s Dublin Magazine is not a relaunch, revival or institutional successor to O’Sullivan’s journal. There is no claim of an inherited editorial lineage. The connection is one of place and respect, not continuity.
The historic magazine documented a country finding its cultural feet. The new Dublin Magazine has another job: to document the city as it is lived now, and to make it easier for local people to take part in that record.
A magazine born with a new state
The first issue of The Dublin Magazine appeared in August 1923, less than a year after the establishment of the Irish Free State. Its editor was the Dublin poet Seumas O’Sullivan, born James Sullivan Starkey, who would remain in charge for the publication’s entire 35-year life. The National Library of Ireland catalogue records the complete run from 1923 to 1958, while O’Sullivan’s surviving papers and correspondence are held by institutions including Trinity College Dublin and Indiana University’s Lilly Library.
The first series was a monthly publication. According to Eva Comerford’s detailed Trinity College Dublin Open Collections project, an issue was around 70 pages and cost one shilling. Its blue-and-gold cover was designed by Harry Clarke, the celebrated stained-glass artist and illustrator. Clarke placed an elegantly dressed Regency couple before a silhouette of Georgian Dublin, with Nelson’s Pillar visible in the distance.
The beauty of the object did not shield it from ordinary production problems. The first two issues carried an apology because strike conditions had delayed the special paper ordered for the magazine. Around the opening 15 pages could be occupied by advertising, much of it for expensive goods aimed at an affluent readership. Literature, art, printing, paper, subscriptions and advertising all had to work together before a single issue could survive.
Its contents ranged across poetry, short stories, plays, essays, criticism and reviews of Dublin’s arts. Photographs, woodcuts and other illustrations made the early issues as much visual objects as literary ones. Comerford’s study of the magazine’s art shows how it brought Irish work into conversation with the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Nouveau and European modernism, while retaining a recognisably Dublin setting.
Reinventing the magazine to survive
The lavish monthly model proved difficult to sustain. In January 1925, O’Sullivan appealed to readers to support a proposed company through 1,000 shares priced at £1 each. The first series ended in August that year after 25 issues.
It did not stay away for long. In January 1926, it returned as The Dublin Magazine: A Quarterly Review of Literature, Science and Art. The colour cover gave way to plain grey card. The price rose to two shillings and sixpence, the average issue grew to roughly 76 pages, and the balance of the publication changed. There was less reproduced art, more reviewing, and a wider interest in science, economics and public affairs alongside literature.
That reinvention gave the magazine durability. The National Library’s holdings extend through 36 bound volumes, ending with the April to June 1958 issue. At a time when many Irish “little magazines” lasted only a handful of editions, 35 years under one editor was an exceptional achievement. A Queen’s University Belfast Special Collections history places that survival in a wider culture where censorship and fragile finances repeatedly ended ambitious publications.
Famous names, forgotten voices and no single school
The list of contributors is formidable. W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Patrick Kavanagh, Mary Lavin, Austin Clarke, Padraic Colum, Liam O’Flaherty, Frank O’Connor and George William Russell all appeared in its pages. International contributors included figures such as the Italian dramatist Luigi Pirandello.
The famous names are only part of its importance. The magazine also preserved work by people who have received far less attention. Its pages brought together Literary Revival writers, modernists, realists, Irish-language work, international translations and writers who did not sit comfortably inside one recognised movement.
That breadth included Irish-Jewish writers and artists such as Hannah Berman, Leslie Daiken, A. J. Leventhal, Harry Kernoff and Estella Solomons. Comerford’s research into their contributions argues that the journal offered a more flexible picture of Irish identity than the narrow Catholic nationalism often associated with the early decades of the State. In the final issue, Leventhal remembered a publication with “no narrow nationalism”.
The magazine’s refusal to become the official voice of one school may help explain both its longevity and its later neglect. It was not easily reduced to a single movement or political programme. Its archive is untidy in the best sense: canonical and forgotten, Irish and international, traditional and experimental, all sharing the same pages.
The people who kept the pages turning
O’Sullivan was the sole editor, but the magazine was never a one-person achievement.
His wife, the artist Estella Solomons, contributed work, found advertising and provided practical and financial support. Solomons was herself a significant Dublin figure: an Irish-Jewish artist, a member of Cumann na mBan and a printmaker whose images included portraits and city scenes.
Their friend and neighbour Kathleen Goodfellow also helped to finance and organise the magazine. Writing under the name Michael Scot, she contributed poems, plays, essays and reviews. The correspondence and material preserved in Trinity’s Solomons and O’Sullivan collections make clear that cultural history is often sustained by people whose labour is less visible than the editor’s name on the cover.
Subscriptions and advertising mattered too. The old magazine’s endurance was literary, but it was also logistical and commercial. Printers changed. Addresses changed. The beautiful first cover disappeared. The publishing schedule was rebuilt. Its survival came from adaptation as much as reputation.
Censorship, compromise and the Ulysses dispute
The journal’s relationship with censorship was not simple. It began in a society still marked by revolution and civil war, then lived through the Censorship of Publications Act 1929 and the increasingly restrictive climate around books and periodicals.
O’Sullivan was not a consistently radical editor. A revealing example came in the magazine’s first year. A. J. Leventhal submitted a favourable review of James Joyce’s Ulysses, but O’Sullivan did not publish it after the compositors objected. Leventhal responded by placing the review in a new avant-garde magazine, The Klaxon, which promised to bring “a whiff of Dadaist Europe” to Ireland and survived for a single issue. The episode is reconstructed in Comerford’s study of censorship and the magazine, while the significance of The Klaxon as the home of the first positive Irish Free State magazine review of Ulysses is also documented by Queen’s University Belfast.
Leventhal later worked closely with O’Sullivan and accepted that defying the printers might have destroyed the larger publishing project. It is a more interesting story than a simple tale of courage or cowardice. Editors operated inside real limits. O’Sullivan’s moderation sometimes narrowed what he printed, but it also helped keep a forum open for decades.
The magazine’s intellectual work often happened in its review pages. An index-based study of its book coverage counted 1,462 reviews across the full run. After the 1926 reorganisation, reviews could occupy around 30 pages of an 80-page issue. The publication did not merely print creative work. It helped readers decide which books, arguments and ideas deserved attention.
The name after 1958
O’Sullivan died in March 1958, and the April to June issue was the last of his magazine.
The name later resurfaced in a different literary project. The Dubliner, established in the early 1960s, became The Dublin Magazine in 1965. The painter, publisher and broadcaster John Ryan edited a later phase in the early 1970s. That history matters because it shows that “The Dublin Magazine” has not always described one uninterrupted organisation. It has been used by distinct editorial projects in different periods.
The publication launched by Firefly New Media in 2026 is another distinct project.
What today’s Dublin Magazine is
Today’s Dublin Magazine is a digital local publication covering news, events, history, arts and culture, sport, local business and community life across Dublin and the surrounding area. It is published by Firefly New Media as part of the Magazine.ad network.
It is not primarily a literary review, although literature, art and history belong in its pages. It is designed as a continuously updated record of local life. A public consultation, a sports-club achievement, a new exhibition, a community campaign, a business opening, a piece of neighbourhood history or a set of photographs can all be part of that record when they carry genuine local value.
The largest difference is access. Residents, community groups, charities, clubs, artists, historians, public bodies, organisations and local businesses can submit a story directly. The route does not depend on a personal introduction to an editor, a literary circle or a professional press office.
Open does not mean unedited. Every submission is reviewed by an editor. Publication depends on accuracy, clear Dublin relevance, responsible sourcing and whether the story adds something useful for local readers. Genuine non-commercial local news can be considered without charge. Promotional content follows a transparent commercial route and still has to meet editorial standards.
The principle is simple: add news, not noise.
Positive local news does not mean pretending that a city has no difficult questions. It means resisting empty outrage and giving priority to facts, context, public value, progress, participation and the people affected. Dublin can be celebrated without being simplified.
A different answer to the same civic need
O’Sullivan’s The Dublin Magazine created cultural space in the first decades of independent Ireland. Today’s Dublin Magazine is trying to create publishing space in a crowded information age.
The old journal was printed monthly and then quarterly, focused on literature, art and ideas, and was shaped closely by one editor and his circle. The new publication is digital, continuous, locally focused and built around a direct contribution route. Its subject is not one cultural scene but the wider life of Dublin, from civic decisions and neighbourhood change to history, enterprise, creativity and everyday achievement.
We cannot inherit the achievements of the historic magazine, and we should not pretend to. What we can learn from it is the conviction that a city needs places in which it can see itself recorded.
The archive of The Dublin Magazine placed celebrated writers beside people now nearly forgotten. A century later, the new Dublin Magazine wants to widen that page further: not only to established voices, but to the resident with a photograph, the volunteer with an update, the club with a result, the historian with a discovery and the community with a story that might otherwise pass unrecorded.
The name has history. This publication is new. Its work begins with the Dublin of today.
