COTTAGE DIALOGUES AMONG THE IRISH PEASANTRY WITH NOTES AND A PREFACE BY MARIA EDGEWORTH

Author: Leadbeater, Mary
Title: COTTAGE DIALOGUES AMONG THE IRISH PEASANTRY WITH NOTES AND A PREFACE BY MARIA EDGEWORTH
Publication: Philadelphia, PA: Johnson & Warner, 1811
Edition: First U.S. Printing

Description: Quarter bound calf. MISSING LAST TWO LEAVES (pp. 267-270). 12mo, 4.25" x 7", pp. v + 4 (contents) + 343. Printed by A. Fagan (A Philadelphia printer active between the years 1811 and 1819). Contemporary dark quarter calf with marble boards. Gilt title and seven double-bands to spine. Significant rubbing to boards -- corners and edges; Spine and hinges are tight. Front and rear free endpapers missing; surface tears on rear pastedown. Owner's inscription, dated 1829, and oval red stamp from "Framingham Historical and Natural History Society" to half title page. Light foxing throughout. Pages 1/2 and 43/44 have open tears, eliminating some text. Two inch closed tears on pp. 1-2, 3-4, and 59-60. OCLC 184777622.
Shaw and Shoemaker 23198. Good only.

A rare and unique book written by a woman comprised of remarkably readable vignettes of fictionalized conversations between a courteous and endlessly patient female Quaker teacher (the author) and the "poor people of Ireland" who need gentle guidance to proper, polite, Godly mannerisms. Topics include temperence, manure, anger, Sunday, small pox, dress, squabbling, and 47 other topics.

"Mary Leadbeater (née Shackleton) (1758-1826), author, poet, and memoirist, was born at Ballitore (‘Ballintore'), in Kildare County, Ireland, the second child of Richard Shackleton (1726-1792) and his second wife, Elizabeth Carleton (1726-1766). Her branch of the Shackletons, originally from Harden in Yorkshire, England, were ardent members of The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). Mary's parents relocated to Ireland as tutors, and with their kin and neighbors they eventually established Ballitore as the only planned and permanent Quaker settlement in eighteenth-century Ireland. Ballitore was then a unique, self-sufficient stronghold, complete with its own boarding-school, post-office, religious Meeting House, farms, and cemetery. The Quakers' strong work ethic and high regard for education made them an upwardly mobile presence.

Reportedly literate by the age of four, Mary was educated in the classical curriculum at the famous (non-denominational) Ballitore boarding school, which had been founded in 1727 by her grandfather, Abraham Shackleton. Mary's skills in writing, as well as in painting, were demonstrated in early youth, and she swiftly revealed herself to be a versatile and indefatigable writer. From the age of eleven, she maintained a personal diary (55 extant volumes, NLI), in which she wrote almost daily over several decades.

She also was skilled in herbal medicine, owing to the instruction of an aunt, the herbal healer of Ballitore. In the 1780s, Leadbeater herself assumed this role, in addition to directing a modest bonnet-making enterprise. Like most Quakers, she was entrepreneurial and industrious. At the age of twenty-six, her development as a writer was greatly accelerated owing to an extended visit to England in 1784 with her father, where she observed the "Primitive Quakers" at Selby in Yorkshire, a community whose membership, beliefs, and activities she recorded in her journals.

She also visited London, where those she met included Sir Joshua Reynolds, George Crabbe, the London publisher Joseph Johnson, the Edgeworths, and Edmund Burke, a friend of the family. Burke would correspond with Mary for many years, even penning a sad farewell to her from his deathbed in 1797. Irish women writers in her circle included Maria Edgeworth and Melesina Chenevix Trench (the ‘Mrs R. Trench' in Leadbeater's correspondence).

At the age of 32, she married William Leadbeater (1763-1827), a landowner, farmer, businessman, and Quaker convert. The newlyweds settled in Ballitore and had six children. In addition to her activities as village healer, bonnet-maker, and homemaker.

Mary Leadbeater was a vigorous writer; her career as a public author, whose writings sold well on the Dublin, London, and Philadelphia book markets, spanned thirty-four years (1794-1824). She published for the first time in 1794, albeit anonymously, Extracts and original anecdotes for the improvement of youth (Dublin: R. M. Jackson), which consisted of poems on secular and religious subjects...

In 1811 she published in Dublin and London 'Cottage dialogues among the Irish peasantry.' The London edition brought her £50 from its publisher Joseph Johnson, a supporter of women writers, and included a preface and notes written by Maria Edgeworth, which assisted in its favourable reception and sales. Didactic and educative, the Dialogues continued Leadbeater's commitment to Irish improvement discourse; her ideas were accessibly presented in dialogue (or conversation) form, which had been suggested to her by the Irish writer William Le Fanu (1774-1817), whom Leadbeater acknowledges in her Dialogues. This 1811 text tendered practical advice to the rural Irish on household management and family organization; its engaging contrast of the wastrel housewife and the thrifty housewife promoted fundamental quaker values. Recipes for nourishing meals and information on the medicinal qualities of herbs are set out in easy chats between friends.

The Dialogues saw a second series in 1813, this time directed at working men and intended to ‘perform the same service to the Men of the Cottage that was in the first Part designed for their consorts'; a further sequel was published as The landlord's friend (Dublin: John Cummings, 1813), and directed at the gentry.

In 1814, she published Tales for cottagers ... the present condition of the Irish peasantry (Dublin: John Cumming), which Leadbeater wrote with Elizabeth Shackleton. Consisting of tales illustrating the virtues of perseverance, frugality, and temperance, the volume also contains a play, Honesty is the best policy. In 1822, she concluded this series with Cottage biography, being a collection of lives of the Irish peasantry (Dublin: C. Bentham), being stories inspired by actual local cases....

It was Leadbeater's posthumous publications which secured her fame. In 1862, her ambitious Ballitore journals (1766-1824) were collected and edited by her niece, Elizabeth Shackleton, and published in two volumes by the Dublin quaker, Richard Davis Webb, as The Leadbeater papers, The Annals of Ballitore, with a memoir of the author (London: Bell & Daldy). Recording the cultural life and history of Ballitore from 1766 to 1823, Leadbeater's journals provide an early and complete social history of a particular Irish village."
(from Dictionary of Irish Biography).

Seller ID: 85506

Subject: Irish & Ireland: The Land and People