Dublin, 1760
The periodic peal of church bells in Ireland’s capital punctuated the sounds of men at work. Carpenters hammered nails, masons slapped mortar on bricks and excavators dug new foundations. Dublin was under construction. Workers razed a tangle of medieval streets and buildings clearing the way for broad avenues and five squares. New buildings of Georgian design imposed an elegant veneer on Ireland’s capital on the Liffey River. From behind the decidedly English doorways in Dublin, a small minority of Anglican Protestants held the reins of power oppressing Ireland’s Catholics and Presbyterians. Irish Anglicans, the ruling class, were the Protestant Ascendancy. Dublin’s new Georgian façades were aptly symbolic of the mask the British and the Ascendancy used to hide the face of the political injustice they imposed on Ireland.
Politically, the Ascendancy answered to the English parliament. Under Poyning’s Law, started during the reign of Henry VIII, the Irish Parliament could pass no law until it suited the British. After 1695 a series of Penal Laws affecting both Roman Catholics and dissenting Protestants, mostly Presbyterians, ensured that only members of the Ascendancy could hold most public offices, vote and practice law. Catholics could not bear arms or serve in British military service. The state did not recognize Dissenter (or Presbyterian) marriages. The laws forbade Catholics from attending Dublin’s Trinity College or obtaining an education at a foreign university. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, most of the land owned by Catholics, even English Catholics, had been confiscated. Catholics were not allowed to own land, and owning a horse worth more than £5 was outlawed.
The Royal Exchange from Malton’s Views of Dublin. In the mid-eighteenth century elegant new Georgian buildings, wide streets and five squares replaced a tangle of medieval streets and buildings in Dublin.
Economically, Britain exerted a stranglehold on Irish commerce and exports, whether Anglicans, Presbyterians or Roman Catholics conducted the business. A series of navigation acts passed during the reign of Charles II ensured that Irish exports were loaded into British ships at ports in England with English crews, protecting England’s merchant marine at the expense of the Irish. The Cattle Acts of 1666 and 1680 destroyed Ireland’s lucrative livestock export trade, forcing the Irish into provisioning. The Woolen Act of 1699 prohibited the export of Irish woolens, protecting the English woolen industry. Instead, the Irish were compelled to produce linen. In 1720, Jonathan Swift, an Anglican cleric and Dean of Dublin’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, published a pamphlet of protest, A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture, advocating a boycott of English and foreign goods to encourage Irish manufacturing. It was a bold gesture. Swift usually bridled his opinions with satire.
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) published a pamphlet advocating a boycott of English and foreign good to encourage Irish manufacturing. It was a bold gesture. Swift usually bridled his opinions with satire.
Dublin was a large seaport on Ireland’s east coast. During the eighteenth century, Dublin’s burgeoning population of more than 100,000 made it the second largest city in the British Empire. By 1760, Mathew Carey’s father, Christopher Carey, had amassed a small fortune. He called himself a baker, but he manufactured provisions for the British army and navy. His bakery produced hardtack or sea biscuit, a combination of flour, water and salt baked and re-baked four times to withstand long campaigns or the moist sea air.
Later generations speculated in their correspondence about the English origins of the Carey family. Records of when and where the Carey family immigrated to Ireland, its relationship to the Viscounts Falkland and an old silver plate engraved with the Carey coat of arms, were lost when William Paulet Carey, Mathew’s brother, visited the United States in the 1830s. According to family legend, the Careys came from Cockington, Devon and immigrated to Ireland sometime between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.[1] If any of that mattered to Christopher Carey, indications of it have yet to be discovered. By 1760, Christopher and Mary Sherridan Carey had produced four sons: James, John, William Paulet and Mathew. Four more sons and two daughters followed. Of those children, William Paulet, James, John, Thomas and Margaret would play prominent roles in Mathew Carey’s life.
Christopher Carey (1721-1797) became prosperous supplying the British army and navy with provisions even though he was a Catholic and subject to Irish penal laws.
Two of Christopher Carey’s sons were destined to excel. John Carey became a classical scholar, textbook author, and editor of an edition of John Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s works. William Paulet Carey became an editor, painter, engraver, art dealer, and critic.
William Paulet Carey (1759-1839), Mathew’s brother, was a noted art dealer and critic in London.
Mathew was unremarkable, failing to show the intellectual skill, persistence and ambition that distinguished him in his prime. He was adept at languages and arithmetic. He was fond of books, but algebra and geometry mystified him.[2] He claimed his early education in Ireland was rudimentary, although he was a student of Thomas Betagh, a Jesuit priest who founded two well-regarded schools for Catholics.[3]
“My lameness…was about as great a grievance to me as his to Lord Byron…I have felt the disadvantage almost every day of my life.”[4]
Mathew Carey
Throughout his childhood, his classmates teased him about his deformed foot. Tormented by it, he became shy and awkward. At home, he received harsh discipline. Timidity haunted him throughout his life.[5] Writing was his refuge. With a goose quill, ink and paper, he shed his diffidence seeking to influence others by the power of his words.
Temperamental and irritable, Mathew vied with his impetuous brother James as the son least likely to make a significant impact in Ireland or the United States. Yet it was Mathew who founded the largest publishing firm in America’s early republic. It was Mathew who, as a political economist, doggedly pursued his vision of an American republic free of the economic ties that shackled it to Britain, despite its political independence.
As a boy, he joined a circulating library to read romantic tales. He did so in secret. His parents disapproved of his fondness for fanciful romances.[6] He also read the works of John Locke, James Harrington and Algernon Sidney. His older brother John, flouting the Penal Laws, attended the University of Paris, where he read the writings of Voltaire and Montesquieu. These works also impressed him.[7]
ERA OF REVOLUTION | Apprenticeship at the Hibernian Journal
[1] Excerpts from letters of Elizabeth Sheridan Carey, 15 November 1879-17 April 1882. Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Edward Carey Gardiner Collection 227A, Box 28. This legend comes from the descendants of William Paulet Carey.
[2] Mathew Carey, Autobiography, (Brooklyn: Research Classics, 1942) 2.
[3] Edward C. Carter II, “The Political Activities of Mathew Carey, Nationalist, 1760-1814,” PhD Dissertation, Bryn Mawr College, 1962.
[4] Carey, Autobiography, 3.
[5] Carey, Autobiography, 3.
[6] Carey, Autobiography, 3.
[7] Carter, “The Political Activities of Mathew Carey,” 7.