History of Reading News. Vol.XXIII No.2 (2000:Spring)
by David H. Greene

The Experience of Reading: Irish Historical Perspectives. Edited by Bernadette Cunningham and Maire Kennedy. Dublin: Rare Books Group of the Library Association of Ireland and Economic and Social History Society of Ireland, 1999. Pp 212. Illustrations.

The Experience of Reading is a collection of essays based upon papers read at a seminar held in Dublin in 1997 to discuss the subject of reading in Ireland over three centuries. One of the most interesting of the essays, and one of the longest, Ralph Loeber and Magda Stouthamer-Loeber's "Fiction Available to and Written For Cottagers and Their Children," is the only one of the nine essays to deal with the subject of what is called popular literature, that is, literature written for and read by the common people. The latter are presumed to have simpler tastes, more modest means and less education than the privileged, better educated class, which to the extent that it represents society represents only a small part of it.

The Loebers describe the kind of books the masses read and the way the books were manufactured and sold in the eighteenth century. They give us many of the titles listed in printers' advertisements. They also explain why so very few of the books have survived until today, not only because of the circumstances of ownership and use, but also because of the inferior paper on which they were printed.

Some of the books advertised by one printer were Ben Johnson's [sic] Jests, or, the Wit's Companion; The Life and Adventures of Captain Freny [sic]; Irish Rogues: A Genuine History of the Lives and Actions of the Most Notorious Irish Highwayman, Tories and Rapparees.¹ Also on the list are a few classics of English literature - Gulliver's Travels, Pilgrim's Progress, Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe - although one wonders what liberties, if any, had been taken with the original texts.

The Loebers, however, do not discuss or indeed have much of anything to say about the contents of the books, that is, the literature itself, nor in fact do any of the other papers - the authors are historians, psychologists and librarians. Perhaps if a specialist in literature had been a member of the panel, he or she might have been able to explain why the literature was popular. Also, one would have liked to know who Don Bellianus of Greece, the Seven Champions of Christendom, the Seven Champions of Greece were and have been given something more than the title of The Life and Adventures of James Freney, Commonly Called Captain Freney: From the Time of His Entering on the Highway in Ireland. And while we are about it, more on the booklets published by the "Kildare Place Society," which were described as being written in the "Anglo-Hibernian diction, phraseology and pronunciation." Forerunners of Sean O'Casey?

The Loebers explain that the popular literature of Ireland in the eighteenth century and later was embodied in what were known as chapbooks and chapman books, the chief distinction between the two being the size. Chapbooks, write the Loebers, were "printed in a single sheet folded in

eight to produce sixteen pages, folded in twelve to produce twenty-four pages, or folded in sixteen to produce thirty-two pages, in a size of about 5-1/2 by 3-1/2 inches." The chapbook cost a few farthings or a penny. Versions of the chapbook with larger dimensions and more pages, usually from 140 to 180, cost about 6 pence and were chapman books, the chapman being the peddler who sold the books.

The chief focus of the other papers in The Experience of Reading is, of course, not so much about books as about reading in general, about how children were taught to read in school, how lending libraries were established, and how various societies founded to encourage reading and self-betterment contributed to the growth of literacy, so that by 1841, it is believed to have reached nearly half of the entire population. Raymond Gillespie's "Reading the Bible in Seventeenth-century Ireland" and Elizabeth Boran's "Reading Theology Within the Community of Believers" discuss the reading of one book in particular by the ordinary people, something neither the Catholic nor Protestant churches were happy about unless there were "safeguards." Gillespie writes that in 1642 Frian Malone on discovering a number of Bibles at Skerries in County Dublin had them burnt, explaining to a settler that "it was fitting for every man to have the Bible by rote and not to misinstruct them which should have it by rote" (p. 22 ).

Toby Barnard's "Reading in Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Public and Private Pleasures" examines the effect upon the growth of literacy and the increased availability of schooling in the towns, little of which was free, and the increase in the number of newspapers. Lending libraries, he points out, despite the "craze" for them, were established in Ireland mostly by clerics "for the edification of their fellow clerics and were not available on the whole to the laity" (p. 65). Maire Kennedy examines "Women and Reading in Eighteenth-century Ireland." She cites a recent study based on the census of 1841, which indicates that by the 1770s about half of the women in Ireland could read. Women, oddly enough, were active in the business of printing and publishing books, many of them taking over and operating printing houses founded by their husbands.

John Killen's "The Reading Habits of a Georgian Gentleman: John Templeton, and the Book Collections of the Belfast Society for Promoting Knowledge" shows how the Reading Society in Belfast developed into a public library under the inspiration and influence of the first public library, founded by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia in 1731. The Belfast library drew the line at purchasing or admitting to the collection in any other way, "any common novel, or farce or other book of trivial amusement" (p. 102). So much for Captain Freney and Moll Flanders! Marie-Louise Legg writes about "The Kilkenny Circulating Library Society" and takes us into the nineteenth century when the number of public reading rooms, which survive today in the county libraries, increased rapidly.

John Logan's "Book Learning: the Experience of Reading in the National School, 1831-1900" discusses the problem of the replacement of Irish by English in the schoolrooms in many parts of Ireland where Irish was still the home language of the pupils. Some parents held out for Irish as a means of conserving traditional forms of communication and custom, while others, probably a majority, preferred to have their children made literate in a language so necessary "within an increasingly Anglophone world" (p. 173). But surely one force, more powerful and more effective than the desires and influence of the parents, was the British government with its policy of eliminating Irish altogether because it believed Irish was identified with revolutionary nationalism. In this the British government may have been right about the identification. It was well known that in nineteenth-century Europe attempts to retrieve or preserve a native language were an important factor in a subordinated people's efforts to re-establish its nationality.

Note

1. Tory and Rapparee, terms used interchangeably, derived from the Irish torai (raider) and ropairi (a kind of pike or weapon), to describe highwaymen made famous in song and story and popularly believed to have been dispossessed Irish Catholic gentry.