‘Damn these printers … By heaven, I'll cut Hoey's throat’: The History of Mr. Charles Fitzgerald and Miss Sarah Stapleton (1770), a Catholic Novel in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

Abstract

The History of Mr Charles Fitzgerald and Miss Sarah Stapleton (Dublin, 1770) is a satirical marriage-plot novel, published by the Roman Catholic bookseller James Hoey Junior. The essay argues that the anonymous author was himself a Roman Catholic, whose work mischievously interrogates the place of English-language prose fiction in Ireland during the third-quarter of the eighteenth century. By so doing, the fiction illuminates the issue, so far neglected by Irish book historians, of how the growing middle-class Roman Catholic readership might have read the increasingly popular ‘new species of writing’, as produced by novelists in Great Britain and Ireland. The essay concludes by reviewing the question of the authorship of The History and offering a new attribution to the Catholic physician and poet, Dr Dominick Kelly, of Ballyglass, Co. Roscommon.