Together with its peers, the Edinburgh-based Blackwood's Magazine and Fraser's Magazine in London, the Dublin University Magazine (DUM) was the principal conduit for German literature into the British Isles in the Victorian Age. In the following I will consider the part played by the DUM in propagating German gothic in Ireland and Britain between 1833 and 1850. One indication that the founders of the DUM had a taste for the gothic is the choice of the name “ Anthony Poplar” for the editorial voice — a name recalling the “ Anthony Evergreen” of the earlier New York magazine Salmagundi, which possessed its own exponent of German gothic in Washington Irving. There were numerous purveyors of the gothic among the contributors to the magazine, although Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is the only one to enjoy a significant posthumous reputation. The group of gothic contributors to the DUM overlapped — but was not identical with — those authors engaged in propagating German literature in Ireland. Within this group James Clarence Mangan occupied an outstanding position, both as a practitioner of the gothic and as an interpreter of German literature.

In order to understand the significance of the DUM as an organ of cultural transfer between Germany and the British Isles, it is necessary to clarify the position occupied by that publication in the cultural and political life of the Irish nineteenth century, which in turn requires knowledge of the origins of the magazine and the goals of its editors.