Ireland, America, and Mathew Carey: Special Issue Introduction

Abstract

Ireland, America, and Mathew CareySpecial Issue Introduction Cathy Matson and James N. Green Mathew Carey (1760–1839) rose quickly as an influential journalist and editor in Ireland at the end of the eighteenth century, and he became the most important publisher living in America during the early nineteenth century. He was also one of the era’s most significant political economists, and, although he generally labored behind the scenes and often wrote anonymously, he had a profound effect in shaping the early republic’s political culture. Indeed, Carey crossed paths with some of the most eminent figures in early American political, economic, and cultural affairs, and probably with all its printers and publishers. He lived during the rapid ascent of an Atlantic world of circulating print, as well as the heady era of transnational revolutions and developmental transformations, and Carey placed himself willingly, even urgently, at the center of this era’s deepest controversies. So it was fitting to hold a major trans-Atlantic conference to explore the contributions of this remarkable figure. The first part of this conference was held October 27–29, 2011, cosponsored by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Program in Early American Economy and Society, the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, and the Library Company of Philadelphia, which holds almost every printed piece published or written by Carey. Most of the contributions in this special issue have been drawn from the many papers presented in a two-day discussion that reflected on two overlapping themes in Carey’s influential and multifaceted contributions: [End Page 395] his innovative strategies in the business of printing and publishing, as well as his role at the center of political and economic discourse during the heady years between 1780 and 1830. Another article was presented during the second leg of this trans-Atlantic conference, which was held in Dublin, November 17–19, 2011. The afterword weaves the articles’ themes together and reflects on Carey’s contributions to the worlds of print and political economy.1 As the authors in this issue make clear, Carey forged the ideological zeal and business strategies that catapulted him into North American prominence while still in his native Ireland. Born in Dublin in 1760, he set his head and heart on becoming a printer while he was still quite young. But as he learned the skills of printing and publishing, Carey developed the intellectual convictions that he would doggedly defend for the rest of his life. He also became convinced in these early years that injustices, whether stemming from personal or governmental wrongs, must be brought into the light of public discussion and resolution. There was no better remedy for injustice than an informed citizenry instructing an enlightened government, and no better place for this to unfold, argued Carey, than in the era’s flourishing print culture. Early in his career, while he was still an apprentice printer, Carey’s intellectual convictions, as well as his penchant for expressing them in print, put him at the center of a controversy over a proposed repeal of the Penal Laws that had long oppressed the Catholics of Ireland. In 1781 he wrote and began to print a pamphlet called The Urgent Necessity of an Immediate Repeal of the Whole Penal Code Candidly Considered. The mere advertisement of the title alarmed the Protestant ascendancy and rankled the Catholic establishment, which was waging a more gradualist campaign for repeal. The pamphlet was suppressed before the printing was complete, and Carey was whisked off to Paris to avoid prosecution for sedition. He made the most of his time abroad by meeting (and doing some printing for) Benjamin Franklin and befriending the Marquis de Lafayette. By 1783 the threat of prosecution [End Page 396] had dwindled, so he returned to Dublin and became the editor of the Volunteers Journal, the voice of the militias organized to defend Ireland from French invasion when regular British soldiers were withdrawn to fight in America. In 1784 his newspaper’s staunch support of a protective tariff for Ireland, a measure that he believed would bolster the island’s manufacturers and small producers in the face of historically harmful English competition, got him into...