Tadhg Gaelach Ó Súilleabháin's Pious Miscellany: editions of the Munster bestseller of the early nineteenth century

Abstract:AbstractA selection of 25 Irish poems, first printed at Clonmel in 1802, became a bestseller with several different booksellers in Cork issuing competing editions, especially during the 1820s and 1830s. Usually known as Tadhg Gaelach's Pious Miscellany, it sold more copies than any other literary work in Irish, so that the bookseller Seán Ó Dálaigh could call it in 1848 ‘work at the present day in the hands of almost every peasant in Munster’. Its success faded out along with much of Irish provincial printing in the 1840s. Copies are rare, and this article for the first time seeks not merely to list the editions and to record where copies are preserved but also to classify them and to assess what this printing phenomenon has to say about literacy in Irish in early nineteenth-century Munster. Apart from catechisms no other work in Irish made so successful an entry into print, and the textual history of the poems ought in this case to take into account not only manuscript evidence but also these printed editions which appear to have been corrected by editorial hands, more likely from aural knowledge of the poetry than from collation against manuscripts. The only known editor was Patrick Denn, of Cappoquin, who, it is argued, worked with the Cork bookseller Charles Dillon between 1821 and 1828. So few copies now survive that their distribution cannot be traced from material evidence, but the list of subscribers in the first printing from Clonmel 1802 provides information that has allowed its initial distribution to be mapped. Further work to record books printed in Irish in the first half of the nineteenth century would provide a valuable witness to the circulation of vernacular texts, even as the manuscript tradition was fading out.