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By Root 1945 0

Militaryweakness and political disarray on the British side encouraged them. When France allied itself with the Americans, so-called Volunteer militias sprang up across Ireland to defend the country from a possible French invasion. These bands soon metastasized into an extraparliamentary political movement that highlighted by contrast the atrophied and unrepresentative character of the parliament. By 1782 it was evident that the British, pressed by defeat at Yorktown, would have to concede either autonomy, union, or separation. London chose autonomy. A deal was pushed through. Suddenly the Dublin assembly could create its own laws. And Dublin's manufacturers could freely export to the empire. Scarcely had the principle of free trade to the empire been conceded, however, when Irish manufacturers began to call for protection against British competitors. A movement for tariffs grew up. Its rationale was not just economic survival, but, at street level, the preservation of a moral order reckoned to be inherent in domestic crafts. The campaign was also associated with attempts-sometimes violent ones-to uphold that moral order, for example, against employers who tried to hire apprentices in place of trained journeymen. Meanwhile a prominent section of the press, including the Dublin EveningPost and the Hibernian Journal, supported the call for tariffs. So, notoriously, did Mathew Carey's Volunteers Journal, until it went too far and was forcibly shut down.20

This new political situation intensified the moral claims at stake in reprinting. Here was a way to uphold local manufactures and strike back at the cultural heart of England. The most prominent case in point became that of Patrick Wogan and Patrick Byrne, two well-known Catholic printers and booksellers. Wogan and Byrne decided to reprint Thomas Sheridan's Genera/Dictionary ofthe English Language. Their reprint appeared in 1784, dedicated to the Volunteer movement. Advertisements appeared in the press alongside fervent declarations for political reform, freedom of the press, and protective duties. The reprint was a roaring success, selling over three thousand copies. A special impression was made for export to Paris. The London edition had been financed by Sheridan himself, however, at a cost of some £700 to him-and had numbered only two thousand.21 So Sheridan issued a furious attack on the reprinters in the pages of the Dublin Journal. In response, Byrne and Wogan advanced a systematic defense not only of their own conduct, but of reprinting in general. They sought, they said, "to vindicate the Practice of their Brother Booksellers and the Cause of Literature in this Kingdom."

Byrne and Wogan's first point was that they were doing nothing unusual. Ireland was simply cleaving to the norms established by all nations. In the context, however, this was no mere observation, but an argument. They were tacitly insisting that Ireland was an "Independent Kingdom," as they called it. They thus embedded the national cause in their case from the start. They then proceeded to declare Sheridan "an Absenter." This was a very insulting title indeed in the context of patriot politics: an absenter was a landowner who decamped to England and left his Irish estate to be exploited by overseers. Byrne and Wogan were charging that the author damaged Irish culture by his absenteeism just as an Irish peer resident in England did the economy in general. On this account it was the height of gall for Sheridan to presume to argue "in Favour of a Work to be printed in and imported hither from England, to the Injury of one published by Natives and in their own Country."They noted that Gibbon, Robertson, Hume, and Johnson had all accepted Irish reprinting with more or less good grace. Moreover, the effective operation of"an Idea of Literary Property" such as Sheridan advocated would in effect mean the imposition of "aprotecting Duty" by Britain against the publication of any work originally appearing there. It would revive the despised prohibitions that Dublin's parliament had just terminated after