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By Root 2098 0

for his suspicion to fall on a compositor, Thomas K i l l i ngbeck. In the manner of many print workers, Killingbeck had moved around, and had once worked for a few years in Ireland. He had been a journeyman for Faulkner himself, in fact, where he had worked largely on copy clandestinely obtained from London. Killingbeck protested his innocence, but refused to sign an affidavit. Richardson forthwith dismissed him too. It seemed he had fingered the traitors. But their violation of domesticity still nagged at him. "Of what will not Men be capable," he lamented, "who can corrupt the Servants of another Man to betray and rob their Master?" The printing house was also the master's home, and the Irish had violated both. They had got their copy "at the Price of making an innocent Man unsafe in his own House." For a society that conceived of itself as a vast collection of patriarchal households, redolent of trust and conviviality, such a crime was of rare enormity And the loss of integrity was particularly devastating for a printer. By "dishonouring him," the pirates might well persuade London's powerful copy owners never again to "trust their Property in the Hands of a Man, who cannot secure his own from intestine Traitors." Richardson's household and livelihood had both been violated. And all this over a novel overtly intended to impart moral messages to its readers. (Pointing out that a cheap reprint might actually enhance its effect, as one friend did, was scarcely calculated to mollify him.)

Could the Dubliners' conduct possibly be defended? Faulkner thought it could. His defense rested on the primacy of craft custom. For him, such custom was, as it were, both ubiquitously local and locally ubiquitous. It determined good practice within a city, and also showed commonalities and distinctions across cities. His story was that he had discovered the pirates when he "posted" the title, this being in Dublin the "common Practice" of booksellers. What had given them the better claim was the fact that they already had three times as many sheets as he did. By local custom, the right was theirs. Furthermore, it was "an established, invariable, and constant Custom" that those who obtained part of a London work by the same post might opt to collaborate civilly rather than indulging in destructive feuds. In allyingwith the pirates, then, far from showing baseness, he and they had manifested perfect courtesy. They had upheld "a custom long established" in their trade.

Faulkner then pointed out what to him was the central contrast: the offense Richardson complained of had not been perpetrated in Dublin at all, but in the British capital. The Dubliners had obeyed their proprieties; the Londoners had violated theirs. Richardson's own journeymen were the ones guilty of "villainy and fraud." Indeed, the Irish had noticed the work only because Richardson had had to publish advertisements against a spurious London imitation. He therefore ought to look first to his own "hellish, wicked, and CORRUPTED servants," before seeking to cast out motes in Irish eyes. Faulkner even implied that Richardson himselfwas to blame. Only a negligent patriarch kept "rogues" in his house. It was apparently "constant practice" across Europe for a master printer not only to police his own household but to warn others of delinquent journeymen. Even journeymen rebuffed "Villains," Faulkner added, to the extent of refusing them burial. They would "kick their dead carcases from place to place, as they would dead cats or dogs, rats or mice." That was perhaps overegging the pudding, but the point was clear enough. Where in Richardson's London was moral probity of anything like such strictness to be found?

Richardson complained that the "Invaders of his property" had "done their utmost to make a NATIONAL CAUSE" of the dispute. They claimed illegitimately to stand for "the Irish nation." This articulation of an association between piracy and nationalism warrants notice, partly because Richardson was, in a sense, right. To the Dubliners, he was a standing enemy. He represented