Read the full edition here TCD – A College Miscellany TCD A College Miscellany , was founded in 1895 and is still running today, having been relaunched in 2013 as Misc Magazine – making it Ireland’s oldest student magazine. It now appears once a term, but in its first few decades, it was published every Thursday during the six weeks of Lecture Term We are grateful to student Suzanne Chapman for sending in the 15 June 1922 issue, which her family has preserved from when her grandfather was a student. Exactly a hundred years old this month, it is an astonishing period piece. A browse through the content reveals that Trinity students a century ago were much more poetic and whimsical than they are today and much less political and on trend. You wouldn’t know from these pages that Ireland has just gained independence and the anti-Treatyites have just occupied the Four Courts, that there is an election in three days’ time, and that the country is about to erupt in violence. You also wouldn’t know that Joyce has just published Ulysses , and Proust Sodom et Gomorrah and Nosferatu has just screened in Germany. Actually, you wouldn’t know that there is any such thing as film or jazz or blues or flappers or Dadaism or aeroplanes. Reading the waggish humour and forlorn love poems – ‘everywhere the beauty of the world stabs me with pain’ – there is nothing to tell you that you’re not still in the Edwardian, or Victorian, age. The motion in a recent Hist debate is typical: ‘That the 19th century is superior in every way to the present age’ - a Mr P Bourke, opposing, claims that ‘roses and terriers were better now than they were in the last century’. The advertisements tell their own story. The vast majority are for tailors or tobacconists, reinforcing the impression of young men in well-cut suits puffing languidly while Ireland burns. But it would be a mistake to dismiss them as ivory tower elitists. The blanking of the political and the modern is too extreme. Praising roses and terriers in the age of flight and cubism is an obvious pose, but a pose born of trauma. These undergraduates with their painfully puerile jokes and wistful nostalgia are survivors of the Great War, the Easter Rising, the War of Independence and the Spanish flu – their world has been turned upside down: the map of Europe is redrawn, Ireland has left the UK, women have gained the vote, Marcel Duchamp has displayed a urinal and called it art, workers have taken over Russia, and millions of young Europeans no older than themselves lie dead of war or virus. This journal isn’t written by actual veterans of the trenches but in its extreme escapism it bears all the marks of shell-shock.
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