Brought to Book: Print in Ireland, 1680–1784 by Toby Barnard (review)

Brought to Book is an account of what was written, printed, published, possessed, and read beginning in Restoration Ireland and ending in 1784, when a new law curtailed the presses. It magisterially achieves its ambition to retrieve the social, financial, and human contexts of print in Ireland in this period. The book does not have an overt overreaching argument, being more an anatomy of the print culture, but it draws out implications from the vast collection of materials surveyed. The arrangement of the book is partly chronological, geographical, and thematic. Chapters address the book trade, writers, and readers in the 1680s, in Dublin from 1690 to 1784, and in the North and South. There are chapters on education, and on how print reflected on the Irish past, the present, and the future. A chapter focuses on print and on various religious confessions. The chapters on the literary print culture, "Entertainments" and "Writers and Readers," will be of particular interest to readers of The Scriblerian. Each chapter is densely packed with information and the range of subjects covered is vast. Brought to Book is a work of extraordinary archival excavation and erudition. It draws on the quantitative possibilities enabled by the ESTC, but its detailed descriptions and rich assemblage of references derive from a scholarly lifetime in the archives and display its author's astonishing command and recall of primary sources in print and manuscript and of the extant scholarly literature.

This is a study of Ireland's Anglophone print culture, not of the indigenous, predominantly oral, Irish-language culture of the native Catholic and Jacobite majority. For that culture, and for the small corpus of Irish-language printed works, the reader must turn to the work of other scholars referred to in the footnotes. Mr. Barnard observes that "alongside lively literary cultures in English, the vitality and variety of those in Irish flourished." One of the many paradoxes pointed to in this book is that while printing in the period was in the language of the victors, older nonprinted modes of communication remained salient and reached where print did not. The familiar arguments—commercial, technical, and political—are offered to explain why there was little printing in Irish. The oral culture of the monoglot Irish Catholic majority was not linked with literacy in Irish. The Irish population was mostly poor, so a commercial market for Irish books was deemed unlikely. It was also believed that standard Roman type was not appropriate for Irish characters, which required a special Gaelic type, so Irish presented printers with technical difficulties. The Irish language was associated by the state with disaffection, rebellion, and barbarism. Mr. Barnard does report efforts to bring the vernacular into print in bilingual texts and considers such publishing events as The Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789) by Charlotte Brooke. But English was the language of print in this period, and print "consolidated and deepened the advance of English, completing what government, law, bureaucracy, trade, the Churches and education encouraged or decreed." The "permeation of the English language did not, however, make Ireland English." Authors who sought publication in print wrote in English, and those who wanted payment for their work and wider notice sought publication in England (since between 1710 and 1800 copyright existed for writers published in England but not in Ireland).

Mr. Barnard's account of English print culture in Ireland generally eschews exaggeration and encourages caution, proportion, and accuracy. The assumed importance of print is qualified, questioned, or queried in his often skeptical account of its impact. After all, print failed to make the Irish English or to convert the Catholic majority to Protestantism. Mr. Barnard reminds us of "the continuing power of talk, recitation, song, spectacle, ritual and seeing to reach where print could not." The account of the notable Dublin bookseller John Smith, active in the early and middle eighteenth century, is illustrative of Mr. Barnard's cautious consideration. Smith had radical associations and sold Whiggish material, but...