Patrick Ryan takes a look at Dubliners’ love of cheap entertainment, legal or not.
The increasing popularity of decoders which allow TV be accessed at a fraction of the subscriptions charged by companies like Sky and Virgin Media through “dodgy boxes” and Firesticks have made headlines in recent months, with threats of prosecution to suppliers and consumer from the legal service providers.
It might come as a surprise to hear that similar arguments existed three centuries ago when Ireland – particularly Dublin – was the focus of vociferous complaints from powerful figures within the UK media. Yes, for 100 years our capital was the happy headquarters of piracy, with producers brazenly delivering the same content to buyers at a significantly cheaper price. In the 18th century it wasn’t dodgy boxes though – it was dodgy books, and it took the threat of the dreaded “Boney the Bogeyman” to eventually solve the issue.
“London booksellers had two causes of grievances against the Irish book trade,” Mary Pollard, the first keeper of early books in TCD told an audience in Oxford University in 1986. “The official complaint was of the importation into Britain of cheap Irish reprints which threatened the market at home. Quite as important, though never formally expressed, was the damage done to the market in Ireland.”
In 1710 the British parliament passed the Copyright Act, or Statute of Anne, groundbreaking legislation establishing copyright linked to the author, rather than just the printer or publisher but the problem – at least for London – was that although they tried to paint Irish traders as Del Boys in powdered wigs British law didn’t actually apply here. Booksellers continued to reprint tomes already on sale across the Irish Sea, which sailed them back overseas, from novels to scholarly works in French and Italian, without fretting over fees. London fumed, Dublin boomed.
Authorised reprints did take place, subscriptions were taken for British publications and advertising of books from London did appear in the Irish press, but our unofficial editions were still hurting their trade.
“Ireland was the second largest export market for books after America,” explains Dr Máire Kennedy, a former divisional librarian with Dublin City Public Libraries and an expert in18th century publishing. “But when Irish reprints were sold into Britain, undercutting local publications, steps were taken to reduce the impact.”
In response Westminster passed the British Importation Act in 1739. Dublin smiled.
Pirates need ports. Today it’s for cables, then it was for cutters. Many Irish cities and towns, particularly those with harbours, catered to clients anxious to catch up on news and views from abroad or nab a slightly dodgy versions of a rollicking read like Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, Les Liaisons Dangereuses from the pen of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, and of course Jonathan Swift’s masterpiece Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, or as it was soon renamed Gulliver’s Travels.
Swift’s original publisher Benjamin Motte had the manuscript secretly delivered to London and used five printing houses to speed up production and thwart publishing privateers in Dublin and elsewhere.
The result?
“By the end of the year, there were also two pirated editions in use!” notes Armagh’s Robinson Library, founded by the local Archbishop in 1771 from his private collection of books and fine art. Among them is a first edition of Gulliver’s Travels dated October 28,1726, with amendments in Swift’s own handwriting. Ulysses Rare Books just off Grafton Street in Dublin 2 currently has a similar first edition for €9,500.00.
Sellers based in ports had other distinct advantages, as transport costs were far lower when you could import paper, ink, leather and other materials and bypass wholesalers’ markups. The same applied to newspapers, which like the sale of coffee, were often linked to bookselling as we can see with George Faulkner, alderman and Swift’s Irish publisher, known as “the prince of Dublin printers” who traded from The Pamphlet Shop and was an important bookseller from the 1720s until his death in 1775. His newspaper Faulkner’s Dublin Journal ran for 100 years.
Ireland’s cheaper knock-offs were certainly still popular 20 years after the British Importation Act. John Ferrar, a printer and bookseller based in Limerick (who also produced the Limerick Chronicle newspaper) was then offering tomes at discounted bulk rates to ships’ masters, and it’s likely that some of these were being sold to what would soon be the United States of America, as well as Scotland, another area not known for their love of Westminster’s pomposity and taxes.
Skinner’s (or Skinner) Row, close to Christchurch Cathedral, and now known as Christchurch Place, was originally home to leather workers but by the late 1690s bookseller Patrick Campbell, whose shop sign depicted a bible, was located there, close to Stationer’s Hall, along with printers and others in publishing.
“The area of Dublin from Skinner Row along Dame Street to the gate of Trinity College, with the alleys and courts off Dame Street included, contained a notable density of bookshops,” notes Máire Kennedy in a piece on Archer for the Dublin Historical Record in 1996. “The fashionable centre of the retail book trade…extended from its original centre.”
Signage and names were carefully selected to draw in any bookworms. The Stationer’s Arms, the Golden Bible and the Bible and Crown were popular in Dublin, along with shops named after famous authors and thinkers, like Sir Isaac Newton’s Head, Shakespeare’s Head and Homer’s Head. In 1768 just as today readers headed to Hodges Figgis for literary fixes, which was located on Skinner’s Row for its first three decades before popping into Dick’s Coffee House. Run by entrepreneur Richard Pue, this centre of discussion and political debate was fuelled by caffeine and doubled as a publisher or printer of several newspapers, while Londoner John Dunton held book auctions there as early as 1698.
Dublin booksellers met regularly with their their English and Scottish counterparts here and in London in the Georgian era, leading to trade and cooperation with quality reprints which sold at lower prices than across the Irish Sea. Men like John Archer, Luke White and Richard Edward Mercier developed contacts with leading publishers in the Netherlands, France and Switzerland as well as the UK which allowed them to offer catalogues running to tens of thousands of titles.
Though fortunes were made trading in books, authorised or not, unforeseen events could wipe out a business too as Archer painfully discovered. His contemporary, Luke White, who some claimed had started at the bottom of the book trade as a street hawker conversely built upon his wealth, and by his death in 1824 had property worth £30,000 (£4.2m/€5m today) a year in real estate, and was worth more than three times that in money and securities.
Archer dealt mainly with Anglo Irish aristocrats, people like the Edgeworths (including Maria Edgeworth, who is today regarded as one of Ireland’s great female novelists) and was happy to buy entire libraries which became available, such as the collection of Denis Daly MP, a close friend of Henry Gratton, following his death in 1791.
John Archer and William Jones purchased the lot from the Daly family for £2,300, (£445,000/€522,000 today). It was double what the deceased had paid for it, and made them another £1,200 (£230,00/€270,000 today) when the collection was auctioned in May, 1792
Bibliophiles would often have their books bound in matching colours, sometimes containing the family crests or insignia, in ornate red leather, with gold trim both services offered by Archer and other high end sellers.
“For the successful businessmen and women who gauged the market well and who could persuade well-to-do customers to pay their bills, bookselling was a profitable career,“ Máire Kennedy observes.
Dubliners were by then officially obsessed with books, according to one informed observer and patron of the arts, and happy to give visiting Brits a metaphorical bloody nose on the Daly sale.
“During the week of the auction the Dublin world was book mad…and the prices were more than London would have afforded,” wrote the late MP’s friend James Caulfield (Lord Charlemont), adding that “four Scotch and two English booksellers were disappointed in their impudent expectation of finding Ireland a land of ignorance, where the best books might be purchased for a trifle.”
In that era books were the preserve of the elite. At most just over half the male population, and only a third of females, were literate. While Marsh’s Library, the first public facility of its kind in Ireland opened in 1707 even the middle classes had to wait nearly 150 years for the Libraries (Ireland) Act of 1855 which directed local authorities to open reading rooms and allow book borrowing.
Ironically the rise of Napoleon – Boney the Bogeyman as he was invoked to scare bold children – to change everything. The French Revolution of 1798 and United Irishmen rebellion in 1798 caused great alarm in London and the Act of Union in 1801 was driven by a desire to protect Britain from an alliance between the French and those seen by Westminster as their natural allies: the Papist – Catholic – population of this island.
From 1801 British laws were recognised here, and the dissolution of parliament in Dublin meant that ladies and gentlemen of the Anglo Irish ascendancy, many of whom held vast estates around the country, sold on their fine townhouses in the capital, which soon were repurposed as slum tenements, and moved to London en masse, cutting off the ready market for Archer and his contemporaries.
The French Revolutionary Wars ended just a year later with the Peace of Amiens and the Freeman’s Journal of September 7th, 1802 estimated that 16,000 visitors from Ireland and England had immediately flocked to the City of Light. When war broke out again many of these travellers were detained, only released after the first Peace of Paris in 1814. It was disastrous for John Archer with thousands of valuable books also impounded, leading him to admit that “during the whole of my life, I never was so much in want of money – my French Books lie very heavy on my hands”, and his fortunes further declined in the years which followed.
The Golden Age of Dublin publishing, and bookselling, was over. In the decades which followed the industry switched focus to the mass market while skilled printers and artisans, many of whom had been involved in the 1798 Rebellion, took their in-demand skills to Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City where in1856 the playwright and impresario Dion Boucicault, born in Dublin two decades after the Act of Union, would lead a movement of writers to push for the first copyright law for drama in the United States.
That’s a terrific article.