The first sustained attempt at a Scottish Gaelic periodical, An Teachdaire Gae’lach (The Highland Messenger; 1829−31), in its initial editorial, stressed the transnational nature of its endeavours as it looked for support to ‘gach fior-Ghaidheil anns gach cearna don t-saoghal anns am faighear iad’ (every true Gael in each part of the world in which they are to be found) (May 1829: 3) (see Figure 11.1).

The nineteenth-century Highland diaspora, the tens of thousands of Gaelic speakers who left the Highlands for the Lowlands and colonial destinations overseas due to economic and social factors, was a core readership base for the Gaelic press as it developed over the nineteenth century. Almost all nineteenth-century Gaelic periodicals were published in the Lowlands or abroad, and Highland-based production was limited, for the most part, to the Gaelic columns of a small number of newspapers in the later decades of the century. The entire corpus of publications, from home and abroad, is small, with twelve periodicals produced in the course of the century which were entirely, or mainly, in Gaelic, and a further four with a roughly equal balance of Gaelic and English content. Furthermore, their runs were generally short, with only three surviving beyond three years. This chapter will consider the Scottish Gaelic press within this international context, and the challenges which it faced. It examines three broadly defined categories that marked Gaelic press production over the course of the century, namely the educational, the religious and the cultural. And it offers insights into the readership of such press outputs.

In the interests of contextualisation, it is worth noting that the Census of 1891, the first to produce reliable figures for Scottish Gaelic speakers, recorded 43,738 monoglot Gaelic speakers in Scotland and 210,677 individuals who spoke both Gaelic and English, numbers which would have been higher earlier in the century before the language experienced increasingly rapid erosion (Census 1892: xxi). This figure, which by its nature, does not include the international audience for Gaelic periodicals, demonstrates the potentially sizeable readership for the periodical press which emerged in the course of the century.