In its 12 February 1828 issue, the Dumfries and Galloway Courier reports on a major art exhibition in the market town of Dumfries. Before moving into descriptions of individual paintings, the newspaper's editor John McDiarmid pays tribute to this ‘important day in the town’, using the event to mark the prosperity of a Scottish burgh that had long been at the forefront of a culture of civic improvement in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Reviewing the exhibition in a characteristically studied prose, McDiarmid writes of ‘the witchery which resides in the painter's art’. With quotations from Byron, he records ‘a complete transformation’ of the town's New Assembly Rooms:

Walls that were formerly bare and unbroken, seemed instinct, for the first time, with life and feeling; and many an eye that had witched others, when ‘music arose with its voluptuous swell,’ and ‘lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men,’ now became witched in their turn.

These reflections say as much about the Courier itself as the exhibition. ‘The genteel pretensions of Dumfries were well established’ by the 1820s and supported by a whole range of improving activities from public lighting to police Acts, with the Courier itself a significant cultural institution. While seeking to materialise the life of a community in southwest Scotland and to interpret global affairs on their behalf, the 1820s Courier consistently draws attention to its own efforts at ‘witchery’. This newspaper does not reach the aesthetic overabundance of some of the decade's periodicals – notably Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine – but it is highly conscious of the literary texture of its medium. ‘Who would have known that Fingal fought, had not his countryman Ossian sung?’ McDiarmid writes, making clear the artistic imperative in the successful manifestation of culture. In pursuing its own work of literary geography, the Courier is a telling contribution to the periodical culture of the 1820s that mediates a complex sense of place from a specific regional perspective.

The first issue of the Courier had appeared in print on 6 December 1809, under the editorship of the Reverend Henry Duncan, minister of Ruthwell parish in Dumfriesshire. Duncan is better known for the Ruthwell Parish Bank he instituted the following year (an influential early example of a savings bank) and under his stewardship the early Courier was also explicitly a vehicle of social improvement.