The dispersal of Gaelic speakers throughout the colonies of the British Empire in the course of the nineteenth century coincided with, and to an extent contributed to, a rise in Gaelic secular publishing, and in particular the emergence of a Gaelic periodical press. The contribution of emigrant Gaels to nineteenth-century Gaelic literature took a variety of forms including, for example, subscribing to Gaelic dictionaries, with a substantial proportion of the subscribers to two Gaelic dictionaries published in the 1820s based in the West Indies. These were for the most part temporary migrants and this financial support for Gaelic scholarship and publishing provided them with an opportunity to retain a cultural connection with a homeland to which they hoped to return. Periodicals, on the other hand, offered an opportunity for an ongoing connection and commitment and, as Jude Piesse has noted in the wider context of the English language press, ‘played a crucial and overlooked role in performing and dramatizing the central dynamics that characterized settler emigration’.

There is a growing body of scholarship on Gaelic literature in North America and indeed on the maintenance of diasporic Gaelic identity more generally. This includes work which deals specifically with diasporic literary networks such as Robert Dunbar's on the first weekly Gaelic newspaper, Cape Breton's Mac-Talla (Echo) (1892–1904), and Michael Linkletter's on the networks of the Canadian Gaelic scholar and writer, Rev. Alexander Maclean Sinclair. This chapter takes a broader perspective in considering the pre-Mac-Talla period, concentrating on two periodicals, Cuairtear nan Gleann (The Traveller of the Glens) (1840–3) and An Gaidheal (The Gael) (1871–7), and considers the emer-gence, and nature, of Gaelic literary networks in the course of the century.

The focus of the chapter is initially on the periodicals of the first half of the century, periodicals with aims which were frequently inextricably entwined with the agendas of landlords in promoting emigration. It moves on to consider the ways in which the embryonic literary networks nurtured by these journals expanded in the middle decades of the century through the work of Glasgow publishers with discussion of Islay–Glasgow–Ontario links in particular.