Although he was an extraordinarily prolific author, Mathew Carey is less important as a writer than as a publisher who helped to develop the literary taste of the early Republic.

He was born in Dublin, Ireland, the son of Mary and Christopher Carey, a baker who prospered as victualer to the Royal Army and Navy. Timid, solitary, lamed from infancy as a result of his nurse's having dropped him, Mathew Carey was a bookish youth. Against the wishes of his father, who disapproved of reading, Carey apprenticed himself to a Dublin bookseller. A duel between fellow apprentices prompted his first publication, a 1777 essay "On the Subject of Duelling" (published in the Hibernian Journal), which gave Carey's master some offense. Two years later the young man offended a party of far greater consequence when he published To the Roman Catholics , an anonymous pamphlet protesting against English anti-Catholic discrimination in...