I

The economic and social welfare of a country is often directly related to its literary output. The periodical, the Dublin Magazine, captured this well in its issue of February of 1820, when it stated that:

Although this outcry may appear sympathetic, it refers to a publishing industry which before 1800 was built on the piracy of books published in England and on the continent, and only had a narrow base of producing original productions by Irish authors. The London-based Minerva Press, although derided here, was the most successful publishing house of fiction in England during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

     Among all forces that affected the decline of the Irish publishing and printing industry at the beginning of the nineteenth century, two pivotal events stand out: the 1798 rebellion, and the Act of the Union between England and Ireland three years later. The rebellion directly or indirectly involved Dublin printers and publishers, and resulted in the banishment of many individuals working in these professions. One of the consequences of the Union was the extension of English copyright law to Ireland, thereby curtailing Irish printers’ and publishers’ profitable pirating of English books. The impact of these events, although considered in some literary and bibliographical sources, remains understudied largely because of the unavailability of comprehensive, printed lists of publications of the period. The main goal of this essay is to examine the production of original novels during the period 1750 to 1829 in order to compare the impact of the 1798 rebellion and the Union on the publication of original fiction in Ireland. [2] Use will be made of our guide to Irish fiction compiled over the past twelve years to document the development of original Irish novels between 1650 and 1900. [3] This essay challenges prior notions offered by scholars that these events crushed the Dublin publishing industry. Also, this essay focuses on a neglected area in Irish literary studies, [4] the publication of novelettes (a form of short fiction), [5] mostly published during the first decades of the nineteenth century. Another objective of this paper is to examine Irish novelettes of that time as a hitherto unrecognised transitional phase between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Irish Gothic novels. [6] Novelettes were produced by a handful of the new generation of Dublin publishers, who set out upon a new course in the sale of low-cost fiction, catering to a wider reading public than those who had been able to purchase fiction before the Union. [7]

NOVELETTES
The study of novelettes is neglected partly because they usually can not to be found in most major libraries, and partly because their soft covers contributed to their low survival rate. [8] Also, novelettes were usually not held in the major circulating libraries in Dublin [9] and were typically not reviewed in the periodical literature. As a consequence, novelettes tended to remain obscure even at their time of publication.

Novelettes differed from chapbooks in size, price, number of pages, originality, and often in contents. Typically, novelettes were larger in size than chapbooks (novelettes measured about 9 x 14cm, compared to approximately 10–10.5 x 16–17cm for chapbooks) and were closer to the size of eighteenth century novels published In Ireland. [10] Novelettes, in contrast to novels however, were much shorter and usually came in one of two types of lengths: thirty-six or seventy-two stitched pages. The shorter version of novelettes usually cost 6d, while the long version cost one shilling. The price of a long novelette was about one fourth the cost of a novel, but twelve times more expensive than the price of an average chapbook. Novelettes typically consisted of short single tales (although sometimes more than one tale was included), and were published independently rather than as part of a bundle of stories or a triple-decker. Many novelettes were potboilers of novels published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or were based on plays; [11] in contrast, almost all non-religious chapbooks consisted of reprints of tales and romances often dating back to medieval times. Unlike novels, which were usually illustrated only when reprinted, novelettes at their first printing were illustrated with a frontispiece representing a terrifying or crucial scene from the narrative. [12]

THE PUBLICATION OF ORIGINAL NOVELS IN IRELAND PRIOR TO THE UNION
The emergence of novelettes can be understood best in the context of the publication of novels. Figure 1 (below) shows the publication of original fiction in Dublin between 1750 and 1829. [13] The 1750s and 1760s combined saw the publication of twenty-eight original Irish novels, but this was followed by a decrease during the 1770s. This decrease probably was caused by economic factors, which also affected the publishing industry in London during the period 1775 to 1783. [14] The number of new novels published in Dublin increased to twenty for the decade of 1780–89, but dropped during the 1790s. In total, sixty-five titles of original Irish fiction were published between 1750 and 1799 (excluding a small number of works published in Cork). The numbers are small compared to all fiction published in London, where 1,846 original novels were published during that period. [15] Following the Union, the number of new novels published during the first decade of the nineteenth century remained low, but increased subsequently. In total, fifty original fiction titles were published in Dublin between 1800 and 1829. This number is a very modest number, especially when compared to Irish fiction appearing in London. Richard Cole correctly concludes that Irish authors already in the eighteenth century ‘took their works to London to be published, a choice to be continued by Irish writers throughout the nineteenth century’. [16] During the second half of the eighteenth century, the publication of original works of fiction was only a small part of the Dublin publishers’ work, which was dominated by the unauthorised republication English and French works. For example, between 1770 and 1799, 459 mostly English novels were reprinted in Dublin, compared to thirty-seven works of original fiction (that is, only 7.5%). [17]

Fig 1. Original Novels and Reprints of Novelettes Published in Dublin, 1750–1829

     Literary historians have commented on Dublin publishers’ over-reliance on pirated work without sufficient cultivation, encouragement, and payment for Irish authors to publish in Ireland. [18] The poet William Preston wrote in 1793 that ‘[a] striking proof of the little esteem in which letters are held in this country, is that the legislation has never condescended to bestow a thought or care on them; and that we are, to this hour, without any statute for the protection of literary property in Ireland’. [19] Although accurate, the danger of works by Irish authors published in Ireland being pirated there appears to have been minimal. Mary Pollard, after extensively studying Dublin publishing practices, concludes that the copyright of Irish authors publishing in Ireland was ‘respected as to make the piracy of original Dublin copy a rarity’. [20] Also, one of the hallmarks of piracy, the competing publications of different publishers of the same work in the same year, did not apply to works by resident Irish authors. The issue of copyright infringement probably was much more a problem for Irish authors resident in England, whose work was primarily published in London. Judging from the many, probably unauthorised reprints in Dublin by such authors as Oliver Goldsmith and Frances Sheridan, it is likely that copyright infringements particularly applied to those Irish authors, who were resident in England and published in that country. [21] In contrast, the copyright of the works of mostly resident Irish authors such as Maria Edgeworth, even though almost all published in London, was respected in Dublin. (This does not appear to have been the case, however, for reprints of their works published in France and the US.)

     Nowadays, most of the titles of original novels published in Dublin in the second half of the eighteenth century are little known. An example is the anonymous The History of Charlotte Villars, attributed to Isaac Mukins, a graduate of Trinity College, and published in 1756. It consists of a picaresque, historical story set in Ireland, London, and France, during the time of William III. Long before Maria Edgeworth wrote Castle Rackrent (London, 1800), another Irish regional novel appeared anonymously (but ascribed to a Daniel Marlay or Marley): The History of Mr Charles Fitzgerald and Miss Sarah Stapleton (Dublin, 1770), set in Co. Westmeath. Remarkably, almost one in five (18%) of the titles of original novels published in Dublin between 1750 and 1799 are known only from advertisements or reviews and, despite extensive searches, are not known to have survived.

     Most of these eighteenth-century Irish novels were published anonymously. In the case where the sex of the author can be identified, about equal numbers were men and women authors, but many more males than females are identified by name. Many of the female authors are identified by the term ‘a lady’. [22] The genre of novels varied much during the second half of the eighteenth century. Initially, many consisted of adventure stories involving military men or criminals—for instance, George Wollaston’s The Life and History of a Pilgrim (Dublin, 1753). Subsequently, novels dealing with love and the social lives of women prevailed—twenty-two novels, such as The Dénouement: Or, History of Lady Louisa Wingrove, by ‘a Lady’ (Dublin, 1781). Several new sub-genres emerged such as historical fiction—for instance, Thomas Leland’s Longsword, Earl of Salisbury. An Historical Romance (Dublin, 1762; London, 1762)—and Gothic novels, discussed below. The publication of novels in Dublin in this period often did not bring financial rewards: about one in five of original Dublin novels was published at the expense of the author rather than the publisher (with the exception of the 1760s, when none were published for the author). Moreover, none of the identified authors appears to have published a second novel in Dublin; instead, for several authors a Dublin publication served as a stepping-stone toward a literary career in London.

     A minority of the eighteenth-century works of fiction published in Dublin consisted of collections of brief stories, each about the size of a novelette. As far as is known, however, these stories were not sold separately, but are only known from collected works. A representative example is Love in Several Shapes: Being Eight Polite Novels, in a New and Elegant Taste, written by a ‘Lady’ and published by James Hoey Junior in Dublin in 1760, which consisted of eight short stories. Occasionally, the stories in these collections were explicitly called novelettes, as was the case in the volume edited and partly written by the Irish author, Elizabeth Griffith, entitled Novellettes, Selected for the Use of Young Ladies and Gentlemen; Written by Dr Goldsmith, and Mrs Griffith, &c. and Illustrated by Elegant Illustrations (London, 1780), which contains sixteen stories. [23] None of the eighteenth-century Irish productions included stories based on Irish folk tales, and anthologies containing such stories only began appearing in the 1820s. [24] See, for instance, London: House of Commons (London, 1825).

THE IMPACT OF THE 1798 REBELLION AND THE 1801 UNION ON THE DUBLIN PUBLISHING INDUSTRY OF NOVELS
The 1798 rebellion and the Union of 1801 undermined the Dublin publishing industry in two ways: the departure of publishers and new legislation. [25] The Union had an even more dramatic effect on the publishing industry, as—for the first time—English copyright laws applied to Ireland. The perception of disastrous change in the publishing industry was clearly already present in the year of the Union, when an article in the Dublin Walker’s Hibernian Magazine referred to the ‘abolition’ of printing in Ireland. In an overly dramatic mood, it stated that after the Union, ‘[n]o new works will ever be printed in Ireland’. [26]

     R. C. Cole, in reviewing all types of books published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, concludes that the Union ‘gave the coupe de grace to the dying Irish reprint industry and with it the Irish book trade in general. He stressed that ‘the periodicals for the most part ended too [resulting] in an absence of intellectual fermentation. The reprint industry, the periodicals, and intellectual exchange all flourished together’. [27] This statement can be challenged and qualified on several grounds, however: he does not question whether the publishers of novels experienced the same fate; also, Cole does not explore the possibility that as the publishing market changed, room might be created for innovations in publishing, such as the sale of short and cheaper fiction. Moreover, at least twenty-two new literary periodicals were founded in Dublin between 1801 and 1829, albeit many of them were short-lived. [28]

     Several studies by Phillips, Pollard, and Raven—although confirming the decay of the publishing trade following the Union—also show that the decay already had started during the 1790s and well before the 1798 rebellion. [29] For example, Pollard identifies the large increase in duty on paper imported from England to Ireland that took place in 1795, and which deprived Irish reprints of their price advantage. Phillips documents that, owing to many financial failures, the number of booksellers in Dublin decreased in the 1790s. Similarly, there was a substantial decrease in the number of printers working in Dublin during that decade. [30] However, bibliographical evidence shows that a large portion of the publishing trade survived in the 1790s. Pollard demonstrates that the recovery in the Dublin book trade was slow and that the total number of booksellers, printers, stationers, and binders known to have operated in 1793 dipped in the late 1790s and early 1800s.

     Figure 1 illustrates that the production of original novels in Dublin during the 1790s and 1800s reached a record low, a decrease of 50% compared to the level in the preceding decade. Part of this decrease resulted from transitions in publishing houses. Biographical details of those publishers who were most involved in the publication of original Irish fiction in the period 1750–99 show that some of the publishers of novels died prior to the change of century. For example, Dillon Chamberlaine, who had been ‘remarkable for his publication of first or early editions of well-received novels’, died in 1780. Another such publisher, Stephen Colbert, died in 1786, while seven years later the bookseller and auctioneer Christopher Jackson closed his business. Another publisher and lender of novels was Thomas Jackson, who claimed in 1786 to have the largest circulating library in Dublin. He co-published Owenson’s St Clair in 1803, but is not listed in Dublin after 1807 and may have left Ireland for England. [31]

     Several of the Dublin publishers and printers at the end of the eighteenth century were United Irishmen. When the 1798 rebellion failed many of them were apprehended, banished, or fled to the United States. Cole estimates that at least sixty-two Irish bookmen left Ireland at the time of the Union. [32] For example, John Chambers was banished to Scotland and afterwards to Hamburg; subsequently, he left for France, then set off to the United States in 1805, dying in New York in 1837. Patrick Byrne, the publisher of Wolfe Tone and his friends’ short novel, Belmont Castle (Dublin, 1790), was a United Irishman; he was apprehended in 1798, imprisoned and accused of high treason, before gaining his freedom in 1800 and leaving for Philadelphia, where he died in 1814 at the age of seventy-three. [33] In summary, political exile and deaths reduced the number of Dublin publishers of fiction around the time of the Union. This would have not meant a great deal were it not for the fact that these publishers were not replaced soon by a new generation of publishers of fiction.

     Another significant factor may have played a role: it is well-known that after the Union part of the reading public wealthy enough to purchase novels left Dublin for London. [34] Against this gloomy picture, however, should be considered the fact that several publishers survived the transitions of the rebellion and the Union. One of them is the United Irishman and Catholic, Richard Cross, who continued to publish chapbooks well into the early decades of the nineteenth century. [35] Another publisher, Bennett Dugdale, who co-published novels with other Dublin publishers during the late eighteenth century, also published religious chapbooks for Protestant organisations. [36] As will be shown, he continued to publish well into the first decades of the nineteenth century.

     Factors that impeded publishing in Dublin, however, appear not to have operated in Cork. During the 1790s and 1800s, while the Dublin publishing industry of fiction experienced a substantial decrease, Cork experienced a modest increase in the publication of novels. [37] Thirteen works of original fiction were published in Cork between 1788 and 1810. The most productive publisher during this period was John Connor, who had commercial contacts with the Minerva Press in London. Connor differed from most Dublin publishers in his patronage of several beginning authors (such as Mrs Creech, Edward Holland, and Joseph Hillary); and the present authors have not been able to document any Dublin publisher in the three decades following 1790 who sponsored as many authors as Connor did. Not surprisingly, several of Connor’s authors came from Munster: this can be deduced from known biographical details (Anna Milliken, Regina Maria Roche), addresses (Edward Holland was from Kanturk, Co. Cork), or from subscription lists (Mrs Creech and Sophia Briscoe). All of these authors’ works were full novels, and novelettes do not appear to have been published in Cork or elsewhere in Ireland during this period.

IRISH NOVELETTES PUBLISHED IN DUBLIN AND LONDON
Novelettes came in two broad categories: sensational adventure stories and Gothic fiction. The first category consists of adventure stories in foreign countries, while the second comprises Gothic stories, often derived and summarised from mainstream Gothic novels. In either format, the setting of the stories in novelettes was rarely Ireland, but more often Southern Europe or exotic places and countries. The Gothic novelettes are important in that they represent a little-known development of Gothic themes. Frederick S. Frank characterises them as ‘down the corridor of an unrestrained supernatural and towards the absolute horror of horrors’, more often the mode of M. G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796) rather than in the tradition of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). [38]

     The period between 1800 and 1815 saw nine novelettes of original Irish fiction published in London and another two in Dublin by Holmes and Charles, and Martin, respectively (Table 1, in Section II). An example is The Castle of Savina; or, the Irishman in Italy. A Tale (London, [c.1807]), which was subsequently serialised in an Irish provincial periodical, the Weekly Selector, or Sligo Miscellaneous Magazine in 1812. [39]

     Whereas the authorship of most Irish novelettes is not known, one Irish author, John Corry, much developed this genre in London. [40] Starting in 1782, he published at least twenty novelettes. A typical example is his Arthur and Mary; or, the Fortunate Fugitives (London, [1803]): it counts a mere thirty-six pages and is set in Ulster after the 1798 rebellion. Some of the titles of Corry’s tales hide their Irish contents: for instance, The Vale of Clywd; or, the Pleasures of Retirement. A Welch Tale (London, [c.1825]) has as its main character Thomas Conolly, whose father was a farmer in the vicinity of Limerick. Another author of an ‘Irish’ novelette is Henry Vincent, whose The Irish Assassin; or, the Misfortunes of the Family of O’Donnell (London, [1800?]) consists of twenty-eight pages illustrated by two murderous scenes (Figure 2).

Fig. 2. Henry Vincent, The Irish Assassin; or, the Misfortunes of the Family of O’Donnell (London: Thomas Tegg, [1800?])

NEW DUBLIN PUBLISHERS AFTER THE UNION: ARTHUR NEIL AND THE PUBLICATION OF NOVELETTES
It is only during the 1820s that the publication of original Irish fiction rises, when compared to the preceding twenty years, increasing by a factor of two-and-a-half (Figure 1). The increase in publication of fiction was largely the result of the influx of new publishers in Dublin, following a hiatus of about twelve years after the 1801 Union. The first four individuals who started publishing fiction in the 1810s were: Arthur O’Neil (possibly from 1810 onward, and certainly by 1815), John Cumming (1811 onward), Christopher M. Warren (1815 onward), and Richard Moore Tims (1818 onward). [41] They were followed in the 1820s by William Curry Jr. (1826 onward) and Philip Dixon Hardy (1826 onward). Two more publishers appeared on the Dublin scene in the 1830s and1840s: James Duffy (1835 onward), and James McGlashan (1846 onward). [42]

     Of particular interest for this essay is Arthur Neil, who initially operated at Sommerstown near London, and later in London itself from 1799 onward. [43] Neil was a printer who published at least twenty-seven novelettes during that period (Table 2). [44] Two thirds of the works (66.7%) were original productions or pot boilers of existing works. Examples of titles are: the anonymous Adventure of Jemima Russell, Orphan (1799), William Burdett’s The Life and Exploits of Masong, commonly Called Three-Finger’d Jack, the Terror Jamaica (1800), and several adventure stories, including The Perilous Cavern; or, Banditti of the Pyrenees (1803), and C. F. Barrett’s Douglas Castle; or, the Cell of Mystery. A Scottish Tale (1803). Neil’s novelettes published in London mostly consisted of thirty-six to seventy-two pages (see Table 2).

     Neil may have been of Irish origin, and probably had an Irish interest before establishing himself as a publisher and printer in Dublin. While still in London, he published the anonymous Adelaide. An Original East Indian Story around 1807; this story was originally issued as a sixteen-part serial in the Dublin Sentimental and Masonic Magazine in 1794–95. [45] Sometime between 1810 and 1814, Neil moved to Dublin, where, under the name O’Neil, he established the ‘Minerva Printing Office’ at 19 Chancery Lane, an allusion to the largest London publisher of novels, the Minerva Press in Leadenhall Street. However, he operated on a much smaller scale and does not appear to have had a commercial relationship with the Minerva Press. In Dublin he published at least ten novelettes between 1814 and 1820 (Table 3). [46] Compared to the novelettes which he published in London, his Dublin editions were only of the shorter kind, comprising thirty-five to forty pages. A representative example is the anonymous Mystery of the Black Convent. An Interesting Spanish Tale, which appeared in Dublin in 1814 (Figure 3). [47] Neil appears to have discontinued publishing novelettes after 1820, because no record of such activity has been found. He ventured into the publishing of the Dublin Weekly Independent in 1822, however, and at least until 1825 he printed chapbooks for the Kildare Place Society [48] which, because of their large print-runs, must have been very lucrative.

Fig. 3. Anon., The Mystery of the Black Convent. An Interesting Spanish Tale (Dublin: A. O’Neil, 1814)

     Initially, it was thought that Neil’s novelettes published in Dublin were largely original works, but almost all of them turned out to be reprints. Whether Neil adhered to the tenets of the copyright law is not clear, but this may have been easy for him, because several of the titles were reprints of works he had printed in London before, or may have been reissues of works printed in London. Even after the Union, he was not alone in Dublin reprinting volumes that had been published in London at an earlier date. For example, J. Charles printed Lewis’ The Monk in Dublin in 1808 in two volumes ‘for the Proprietor’, who remains unidentified. The same title appeared under an imprint by J. Saunders in Waterford in 1796 in three volumes, but it carries the watermark 1818, showing its illegal origin. [49] These are only some of the instances by which Irish publishers broke the rules of the new copyright law. In summary, Neil did little to advance the re-emergence of original works of Irish fiction and, between 1814 and 1820, concentrated on the publication of reprints. Nevertheless, he made novelettes available in Ireland at a relatively low cost for, presumably, a broad reading public.

     Arthur Neil was the only the Dublin publisher who independently published novelettes. Only one other Dublin publisher, Bennett Dugdale, was also involved in the production of novelettes, but published these in London as a co-production with the London-based concern Tegg and Castleman. Between 1802 and 1805, Tegg and Castleman co-published at least nineteen novelettes in collaboration with Dugdale (Table 4). These little volumes are likely to have been exported to Dublin for distribution by Dugdale, but this remains to be documented.

NOVELS, NOVELETTES, AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF IRISH GOTHIC FICTION
The Irish Gothic tradition has been studied mostly starting with the works by the Revd Charles Maturin and Sheridan Le Fanu. [50] However, studies by Siobhan Kilfeather and I. C. Ross have highlighted Gothic novels by eighteenth-century Irish authors. [51] Table 5 places the Irish authors of Gothic fiction in the context of the most well-known English Gothic novels published between 1750 and 1829, such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and M. G. Lewis’ The Monk (1796). Almost all of these key novels, with the exception of Vathek, were soon republished in Dublin: The Castle of Otranto in 1765, The Mysteries of Udolpho in 1794, and The Monk in 1796, 1797, and 1808.

     It is not widely known that prior to the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, two Irish Gothic novels were published in Dublin. The first, The Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley, by ‘a young lady’ (1760), is an epistolary novel set in England, which includes an abduction and other ‘Gothic’ events of horror. The second, the historian Thomas Leland’s Longsword, Earl of Salisbury (Dublin, 1762; London, 1762), is a historical novel featuring the odious monk, Reginald, the sire of an unholy brood of monastic fiends and baronial tyrants, who appear in scenes of suspense and terror. [52]

     The publication of Gothic fiction by Irish authors accelerated between 1786 and 1805 when thirteen such works were published, mostly in London, but a few in the Irish provinces, including Limerick, Cork, and Belfast (Table 5). During this period, the key Irish authors of Gothic fiction were mainly women, and include Anne Fuller, Regina Maria Roche, Anne Burke, Mrs F. C. Patrick, Anna Millikin, Catharine Selden, Marianne Kenley, and Sydney Owenson (later Lady Morgan). Among the small number of male authors in this sub-genre were James White, Stephen Cullen, and Revd Luke Aylmer Conolly. Most of these authors—whether male or female—appear to have published only a single Gothic work. One of the exceptions was Regina Maria Roche, who published numerous Gothic novels, including The Children of the Abbey (1796), Clermont (1798), Nocturnal Visit (1800), and The Houses of Osma and Almeria; or, Convent of St Ildefonso (1810). (Clermont was one of the seven ‘horrid’ titles mentioned by Jane Austen in her Northanger Abbey (1818).)

     Very few novel-length Gothic works were produced by Irish authors between 1800 and 1820, but several publishers in London and Dublin introduced Gothic novelettes. Many of these Gothic novelettes published during this period were potboilers of original works. Frank comments:

The period 1800 through the 1820s represents the heyday of novelettes in England, but also in Ireland, where twelve novelettes were published (see Figure 1). A count of ‘chapbooks’ (read novelettes) in the Sadleir–Black collection of Gothic fiction published in the England and Ireland ‘validates that the national list for the macabre in literature reached its apogee between 1810 and 1815 and extended well into the Romantic movement’. [54] From the works issued by novelette publishers, Neil’s Gothic fiction is of special interest here, with representative works being C. F. Barrett’s The Round Tower; or, the Mysterious Witness: An Irish Legendary Tale of the Sixth Century (London, 1803) and Allanrod; or, the Mysterious Freebooter. An Interesting Gothic Tale (Dublin, 1820). Novelettes seem to fallen out of fashion in the 1820s. During that decade, only a few ‘full-fledged’ Irish Gothic novels written by Revd Charles Maturin and Revd George Croly, and then, like in England, almost disappeared from the scene. [55] The genre slumbered until Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu started publishing supernatural fiction from 1845 onwards, and found its apogee with the horror of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which was published in London in 1897.

     Although uncertainty exists about the religious orientation of some of the authors of Irish Gothic fiction, most appear to have been Protestant. Many of the Gothic novels are set in Southern European, Catholic countries such as Italy or Spain—see, for instance, Catherine Selden’s Villa Nova (1805). Frank states that Italian villainy is a common theme and that ‘no tale of terror dared to offer itself to the public without one Venetian poisoner, Neapolitan seducer, or Sicilian revenger’. For example, William Henry Ireland set his Gothic stories in Catholic environments, and used his perception of ‘the sinister historical legacy of Catholicism to heighten the melodramatic sentimentality of the Gothic and thereby arouse intense feelings of horror’. [56] Similar to Gothic fiction written by English authors, several Irish works features nuns and monks of debatable trustworthiness and appear decidedly anti-Catholic. For instance, The Mystery of the Black Convent. An Interesting Spanish Tale, published by Neil (under the name O’Neil) in Dublin in 1814, and set in the Castilian monastery of St Lawrence at the time of the Feast of Epiphany in 1140, is highly anti-Catholic and is heavily plagiarised from Lewis’ The Monk. These anti-Catholic productions can be best seen in the context of novels of Protestant propaganda. [57]

     Not all Gothic fiction set in Catholic settings, however, was anti-Catholic, as is evident from, for example, Regina Maria Roche’s novels. Mary Tarr in her study on Catholicism in Gothic fiction, pointed out that Catholic churches, monasteries, and convents provide a mise-en-scène for Gothic fiction with characters acting in a spirit of ‘medievalism’:

Additionally, the description of Catholic rites provided suitable settings for Gothic scenes to induce ‘melodramatic sentimentality’ in readers. For instance, according to Tarr: ‘The Sacrament of Extreme Unction seems to have a three-fold purpose in Gothic fiction: to afford an occasion for candle carrying and hymn singing, to elicit sobs from those attending the sick person, and to hasten the latter’s death!’ [59]

CONCLUSION
Although the 1798 rebellion and the Union of 1801 contributed to the decline of the Dublin publishing and printing industry, its diminution had already set in earlier, during the 1790s. The industry—judging at least from the publication of novels and novelettes—was not wiped out, and new publishers replaced old publishing houses from the 1810s, a process which accelerated subsequently. The reprinting of English books after the Union, although formally prohibited by newly installed copyright laws, was still practiced on a small scale, but it is not clear to what extent English authors or Irish authors living in England were paid for this privilege.

     This essay shows that novelettes, often with a Gothic content, were published mainly in Dublin during the 1810s, which represents a low period of novel publishing in Ireland and England. [60] Novelettes may have filled an economic niche by providing cheap and more affordable alternatives to novels, at a time when the Irish and the English economies were in a downturn, following the financial and commercial crises caused by the war with France. Thus, novelettes because of their lower expense than novels, are likely to have appealed to a poorer segment of the population than the novel-reading public. These hypotheses, however, have several pitfalls. Firstly, Irish novels were published in Dublin alongside the publication of novelettes, even though the number of novels remained small during the first decades of the nineteenth century. Secondly, few novelettes of original fiction were published in Dublin, which undermines the notion of a transition between novelettes and novels in that city. Finally, there was a noticeable regional difference in the impact of the 1798 rebellion and the Union on the fiction markets of Dublin and Cork.

     Many of these novelettes may have been forerunners of the ‘penny dreadfuls’, those very cheap and short illustrated stories which became increasingly more popular in mid-nineteenth-century England. [61] Nevertheless, penny dreadfuls do not appear to have been published in Ireland during the first half of the nineteenth century. [62] Novelettes also appear to have been outside of the mainstream of the tradition of Irish short stories, either in the oral or in the written form. Novelettes rarely dealt with Irish situations, and if they did, their contents were far removed from the Gaelic-inspired stories made popular from the late 1820s onward by such authors as William Carleton, Michael James Whitty, and Samuel Lover. [63] Gothic novelettes, like some of the novels on which they often were based, were generally anti-Catholic in tone, describing monastic and conventual abuses. At the same time, while many Gothic novels were well-represented in Dublin circulating libraries, the Gothic novelettes were not. [64] Practically nothing is known about the reaction of officials of the Irish Catholic Church to this type of fiction. When convents started assembling circulating libraries for Roman Catholic lay people, they appear to have excluded anti-Catholic Gothic fiction, in either the novelette or novel format.

     Novelettes were pioneering because they routinely were published with one engraved illustration (in contrast, chapbooks were illustrated with woodcuts). In Ireland, their development should be seen against the backdrop of other innovations. For instance, the first triple-decker appeared in Dublin in 1820 (Mrs McNally’s Eccentricity, published in Dublin by John Cumming in 1820), as did the first book to be illustrated in its first, as opposed to a later, edition (William Carleton’s Father Butler, published in Dublin by William Curry, Jr. & Co. in 1829). Mass production of books was greatly enhanced by the introduction of stereotype printing in 1813. [65] Only from the 1820s onwards were novels published in Ireland on a more commercial basis, without authors having to cover the printing costs of their own works. [66] Eventually, this transition heralded a new kind of Irish fiction, independent of the Gothic and adventure stories published in earlier days, and increasingly concerned with national topics, such as Irish farmers’ lives and ancient folklore, and with recent contemporary events, among them the failed 1798 rebellion.