The nineteenth century saw the peak in periodical culture in Ireland and Great Britain with nearly 20,000 different titles published. Their average longevity was 28 years and approximately 40 per cent of these journals were religious, most commonly published on a monthly or weekly basis. Patrick Scott has thus suggested that ‘subscription to a periodical, almost irrespective of its content matter, served Victorians as a kind of religious self-identification’, a means of feeling part of a broader, more dynamic, movement than that provided by the local chapel. Methodism contributed to this trend: its first monthly magazine, the Arminian Magazine, launched in 1778 and was published continuously (under various titles) until 1969. Over the course of its run, Arminian Magazine was joined by a multiplicity of complementary and competitive journals, amongst which were: the Watchman (1832–84); the Methodist Recorder (1861–present); the Methodist Times (1885–1937); and the first dedicated Irish journals, the Irish Evangelist (1859–84) and the Irish Christian Advocate (1883–1971). Each of these journals originally represented an ascendant wing of the church, and reflected the contemporary theological and political debates. Thus, the theological and political shifts within Methodism can be charted through the pages of these journals. The emergence and decline of each of these newspapers also suggests that subscription was a method of identifying with particular ideas and thus of defining identity through a reading community.

It is notable therefore, that the first significant Irish publication, the Irish Evangelist, did not appear until 1859, during the Ulster Revival. Until then, Irish Methodists were dependent on receiving denominational content and news from periodicals published in England. Overall, Methodists were a highly literate section of the Irish population. In 1861, the census recorded that 73.1 per cent of Methodists over the age of five could read and write, with the figure rising to 91.5 per cent in 1901. Ulster Methodists had the lowest levels of literacy at only 66.7 per cent in 1861, rising to 95.7 per cent in 1901, lower than the other three provinces who all recorded figures in 1901 over 99 per cent.