Christina Morin reports on her research carried out through the BARS Open Fellowship.
An 1802 catalogue of books to be had at Hocquet Caritat’s circulating library on 153 Broadway, in New York, called all ‘Patronizers of Polite and Entertaining Literature in America’ to take note: Caritat had been appointed a foreign agent of the London-based Minerva Press. American readers keen to borrow or purchase Minerva Press publications were thereby directed to Caritat, who had been empowered ‘[t]o deliver gratis a general Prospectus of [Minerva] Publications, and with whom may be left any Orders respecting the same’.[1] Thus was publicly launched a business relationship that has oft been noted in scholarship of the Romantic period but understood in little detail. As Dorothy Blakey wrote in her 1939 study of the Minerva Press, speculating on the process by which its proprietor, William Lane, came to reprint the works of American novelist Charles Brockden Brown:
Lane may or may not have appropriated these American books; but it is certain that in 1802 he had a legitimate connexion of some sort with the publisher of the first American edition of Wieland. H. Caritat, the émigré bookseller who secured the copyright of Brockden Brown’s novel in 1798, was one of the chief importers of foreign publications into New York.[2]
Exactly what did this ‘legitimate connexion’ entail, however, and what impact did it have on the circulation and dissemination of Minerva Press publications in New York and the early American republic more widely? These are the questions I set out to explore and – ideally – answer – with a BARS Open Fellowship, focusing specifically on Irish authors who published with the Minerva Press, c. 1780-1830. These writers, including Regina Maria Roche, Catharine Selden, Henrietta Rouvière Mosse, and Sarah Green, among others, are the subject of my monograph-in-progress, Irish Gothic in the Global Nineteenth Century. In it, I investigate the impact of Romantic-era Irish gothic fiction in the nineteenth-century global literary marketplace, using the Minerva Press as my main focal point because of its dominance in the production of popular fiction in this period. Indicatively, Minerva’s Irish authors number among the press’s most popular and prolific writers. Yet, despite numerous reprints, editions, and translations that attest to the widespread appeal of works such as Roche’s The Children of the Abbey (1796), Selden’s The English Nun (1797), and Charles Lucas’s The Infernal Quixote (1801), the vast majority of Irish-authored Minerva novels have been marginalised in the historiographies of both Irish and Romantic literature. What I hope to do with my book project is to recover these works and their authors to view, resituating them prominently in Irish literary history, and producing a new conceptual mapping of the bibliographic worlds that they helped to shape and in which they were circulated, re-packaged, translated, and intertextually evoked to an extent currently invisible in literary historiography.
Funding from BARS enabled vital research for the fourth chapter of Irish Gothic in the Global Nineteenth Century, in which I consider the circulation and dissemination of Irish Minerva works in the early American republic, beginning with an obvious starting point: the established relationship between Lane and Caritat. The BARS Open Fellowship supported two essential research trips, the first to New York in February 2025 to consult materials in the New York Public Library and NYU Library, and the second to Paris and the Archives Nationales in September 2025. My primary aim with both visits was to better understand the relationship between Lane and Caritat as well as the former’s exploitation of a transatlantic network of printers and booksellers to widen the circulation and dissemination of his publications in the final decade of the eighteenth century and first decade or so of the nineteenth. I also hoped to be able to analyse the availability and accessibility of Irish Minerva texts to American readers via reprints and circulating library copies from the late eighteenth century on. What I anticipated finding based on what I already knew about Lane and Caritat was evidence of a fairly straightforward arrangement, whereby Caritat stocked his library shelves with numerous Minerva Press publications for the reading pleasure of his American clientele.
While my efforts to learn more about the link between Caritat and Lane as well as the former’s encouragement of early American reading of popular fiction were not in vain, I found the story was slightly more complicated than I had originally envisioned. I already knew that Caritat had travelled to England in the spring and summer of 1800, at which point he first established a formal business connection with Lane. He then later solidified this link on a second visit in 1801 to 1802, resulting in Lane’s printing of the catalogue announcement I referenced at the beginning of this post. In New York, consulting Caritat’s library catalogues and publications – he not only published Brockden Brown’s first novels but also reprinted several Minerva works, including Roche’s novels The Children of the Abbey and Nocturnal Visit (1800) – I discovered that the relationship with Lane was not as central to Caritat’s business as I had assumed. In fact, while it may have suited both Caritat and Lane to aggrandize their connection, Caritat’s library was clearly prospering well before he and Lane shook hands. The actual number of Minerva Press titles in Caritat’s catalogues of 1799, 1800, 1802, and 1803 is accordingly low. However, paying attention to which Minerva Press titles are listed in Caritat’s catalogues, alongside which other popular novels, and quantifying them from year to year reveals much about Caritat’s practices as bookseller and circulating library owner as well as his ambitions for – and enduring impact on – the early American literary marketplace. And, though it’s in a slightly more roundabout way than I had initially hoped for, these materials also give us important insights into the role that Irish-authored texts – whether published by Minerva or not – played in the development of early American reading habits.
What might have happened if Caritat’s relationship with Lane was longer lasting we’ll never know. By 1804, only two years after Lane’s publication of the catalogue announcing their transatlantic partnership, Caritat had sold his library and travelled back to France. His motivation for doing so is unclear but is probably linked to his personal affairs: with Napoleon now Emperor, Caritat spotted his opportunity to re-establish his French citizenship, after it had been rescinded in 1795. The peculiar circumstances of Caritat’s declaration as an émigré of the French Revolution – as well as his protracted battle to have this decision overturned – formed the focus of my research at the Archives Nationales. Here, I looked at correspondence between Caritat and various government officials documenting Caritat’s stated motivations for first travelling to New York in 1792, his discovery upon his return in 1795 that his wife had denounced him as an émigré and divorced him, and his vociferous attempts to prove that he was, in fact, loyal to France. For someone who generally works with authors who have left little to no archival imprint, having such an extensive body of records – over 80 hand-written sheets – was both extremely exciting and a little overwhelming, not least because of my weak French paleographic skills, and I will be poring over and translating my notes, scans, and the digitized documents made available by the Archives Nationales for some time. For the most part, though, these letters do not touch upon Caritat’s activities as a printer, bookseller, and circulating library owner. In fact, he didn’t establish the circulating library that would later become a Minerva retailer until 1797, although he and John Fellows had opened a circulating library associated with radical republican politics as early as 1792, the year Caritat arrived in New York. Nevertheless, they paint a picture of an entrepreneurial and enterprising individual, not unlike Lane himself, incidentally, who overcame multiple challenges to establish himself – however accidentally and however briefly – as one of the leading figures of the early American literary marketplace.
In sum, my trips to New York and Paris have been enormously helpful in better understanding the relationship between Caritat and Lane as well as the attendant place of Irish Minerva novels in the early American republic. I’ve had the opportunity to present on this research twice now, first at an ‘Irish and Scottish Gothic’ symposium hosted by the Scottish Writing in the Nineteenth Century (SWINC) project at the University of Edinburgh in April and then at the Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society annual conference in Trinity College Dublin in June. On both occasions, I’ve received really helpful feedback that has helped further to progress my research, and I look forward now to finalising this chapter of my book project, with sincere thanks to BARS for their generous sponsorship, to the librarians and archivists at the Archives Nationales as well as the NYU and New York public libraries, and to colleagues at NYU who helped with issues of library access, particularly Kelly Sullivan, Caroline Heafey, and Maureen McLane.
A final concluding note, unrelated to Caritat or Minerva: while in Paris I took the opportunity of visiting the Marché du Livres Anciens and discovered a fabulous 1948 French translation of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), which I purchased for a mere €2. Although not an Irish Minerva, and not an archival find, per se, it was an unexpected bonus of the trip. Moreover, it was just too good not to share!
Christina Morin is Professor of English and Assistant Dean of Research in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Limerick. Her publications include Irish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (2023; co-edited with Jarlath Killeen), The Gothic Novel in Ireland, c. 1760-1829 (2018), Traveling Irishness in the Long Nineteenth Century (2017; co-edited with Marguèrite Corporaal), Irish Gothics: Genres, Forms, Modes, and Traditions (2014; co-edited with Niall Gillespie), and Charles Robert Maturin and the Haunting of Irish Romantic Fiction (2011). She is the chair of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures (IASIL), literature editor of the journal Eighteenth-Century Ireland, and founding co-editor of Bloomsbury’s Global Perspectives in Irish Literary Studies series.
[1] A Catalogue of Approved Books in English, French, Spanish, Greek, Latin, &c. in all Arts and Sciences, just imported for the New York Literary Assembly, and for Sale and Circulation by H. Caritat, Bookseller and Librarian, No. 153, Broadway, New York (London: Minerva Press, 1802), unpaginated advertisement.
[2] Dorothy Blakey, The Minerva Press 1790-1820 (London: The Bibliographical Society at the University Press, Oxford, 1939) 43.