In the midst of dire poverty, the people of Ireland in the mid-1830s were drinking more than 12 million gallons a year of legal spirits alone. It was an appalling problem. Avoiding the usual chilling rhetoric, Theobald Mathew, the Capuchin friar who became known as the Apostle of Temperance, began exhorting people to give up intoxicating liquors, re-assert their dignity and use that money to better their condition. He preached to vast crowds and persuaded thousands at a time to take the pledge.
frontispiece
Matthew Scally, a Carmelite friar from Knocktopher, produced a short twopenny tract in 1846 to encourage the faint-hearted. It is written in the form of a dialogue between a father and his son, with a graphic frontispiece of Theobald Matthew preaching, and the words of the pledge beneath. To clinch matters, there is a personal letter of approbation from Theobald Mathew himself.
title-page
Such tracts are rare for they are too flimsy to survive in normal circumstances. This one has been given an exceptionally fine binding of red goatskin and a gold-tooled centrepiece; even the edges of the boards are decorated in gold.
binding
As indicated on the title-page above, the publisher was William Joseph Battersby, an energetic and innovative Dublin publisher who flourished from the 1830s to the 1850s. He was also an author in his own right and his entire working life was motivated by a passionate interest in the promotion of the Catholic faith. His most enduring contribution has been the Irish Catholic Directory, begun in 1836 as Battersby’s Registry for the Catholic World. He was also the driving force behind the Catholic Book Society which sought to produce cheaper but informative books and make them widely available. As is appropriate for this publication, he was also a teetotaller!
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