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By Root 2073 0

to the circulation of books, however, remained price. For most Irish, books were expensive luxuries. The London booksellers, for whom Ireland was a minor concern, had little interest in remedying this. A major point of reprints at the outset was therefore that they were much cheaper for local, Irish readers than their London originals. In 1767 the Irish parliament heard that there was even a standardized retail price, twopence per sheet, and those for whom this was too high might find books at one of the proliferating circulating libraries. Individual buyers remained urban rather than rural, Protestant rather than Catholic. This was the domestic readership that the reprint industry addressed and in turn spurred.

Reprinting took its identity from the politics of the Irish capital. These were politics of fragile prosperity, religious tension, and growing nationalism. On the one hand, the city was a cultural hub. It was the home of the Irish parliament and the location ofTrinity College, and the second largest city in the British Empire. Its parliament building, built to the latest neoclassical style, projected confidence in the stability and prosperity of the order it represented - that alliance ofparliament, established church, and imperialism known as the "Protestant ascendancy" But on the other hand, that confidence was more fragile than it looked. It never took much to incite fears of a repeat of the kind of massacre many Protestants believed to have taken place in the uprising of 1641, which had helped spark the civil wars. Memories of that event were kept alive by regular ceremonials and publications. Moreover, urban Protestants too were increasingly inclined to chafe at Westminster's rule. They identified restrictions on Irish exports imposed by Britain's parliament-especially by the Woollen Act of 1699 - as a prime reason for the island's relative poverty. Ireland should be regarded not as a colony, they maintained, but as a truly autonomous kingdom, along the lines of the old "three kingdoms" constitutional model of the previous century. Such arguments easily became critical of British rule. And in fact when Samuel Richardson accused Dublin reprinters in 1753 of assuming the mantle of the Irish nation, he did so in the wake of angry agitation in Dublin for this so-called patriot cause. The catalyst was a Dublin apothecary and a pamphleteer for Whiggish reform named Charles Lucas. Lucas and other patriots took as their rallying cry the claim that English mercantile interests were artificially constricting the Irish economy. They fostered a plea that smuggling, used to circumvent English trade prohibitions, could be avirtuous enterprise. By the early 1750s such convictions were common currency in the newspapers of Dublin, especially Faulkner's Dublin Journal. A passionate political press appeared. And the book guild itself, up to this point a colorless body, declared for Lucas, associating him with the freedom of the press-which was rather a daring stance for a company that, as the lord chief justice pointedly reminded it, was supposed to facilitate government press regulation.?

The reprinting of London titles in Ireland had begun long before this. As early as 1663, London booksellers had accused the king's printer in Ireland of plotting to reprint copies in Dublin for sale in London. And they could be heard warning again in 1702 that printers in Dublin would "strike off and send over" enough copies, "whether correct or incorrect," to ruin sales of Archbishop King's De Natttra Mali'. Their concern was probably not property as such, but the undercutting of London journeymen by cheaper Irish laborers. At that point Ireland's printing industry was still tiny and posed no general threat. Two decades later the situation was different. In the 1720s reprinting became a routine, customary activity. By 1726 the bishop of Derry was reporting that "the Stationers of this Town have lately fallen into a Rappareeing Way of reprinting all Pieces of Note that are published in England"-a rapparee being a renegade soldier of the Jacobite