Books and Religious Devotion - Allan F. Westphall Penn State Series in the History of the Book

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      The first English translation of the Spanish Catholic priest Jaume Llucià Balmes’s (1810–1848) Filosofia Fundamental was that published by D. & J. Sadlier from their offices in William Street on lower Manhattan in New York. First offered for sale in 1856, Balmes’s comprehensive systematic philosophy was regularly reprinted by the family-owned publishing house through the latter half of the nineteenth century, with approximately one new print appearing each decade.

      When the brothers Denis and James Sadlier moved from Ireland to New York in 1832 (one year before Connary made the journey) to publish works addressing the spiritual and educational needs of an exponentially growing Irish community, they founded what by the early 1850s would be the largest publishing house in America.8 Among its earliest publishing endeavors were a Catholic Bible (the Douai-Rheims version), a German-language New Testament, and Alban Butler’s Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Other Principal Saints. The Sadliers also eventually acquired the New York Tablet, an important Catholic weekly newspaper in which a large proportion of the stories and novels of the prolific Mary Anne Sadlier, James Sadlier’s wife, appeared in serial form. Romantic in expression, her writings were inspirational and edifying to many Irish American Catholics.9

      With Balmes’s Fundamental Philosophy we are at the more intellectually challenging end of the Sadlier range. In this comprehensive exposition of the scholastic system of thought, Balmes adopted and adapted the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas to the intellectual debates of his day. Devoting his early university years to the exclusive study of St. Thomas’s Summa Theologica and commentaries thereon (only occasionally allowing himself to indulge in Chateaubriand’s Genius of Christianity), Balmes produced an elaborate rationalist system of epistemology, ontology, and metaphysics designed to put logic back on track after what was seen as a dominant and damaging strand of Cartesian skepticism in European thinking.10 Other notable writings by Balmes include a translation, with an introduction, of the maxims of St. Francis of Sales (1840) and the important Protestantism and Catholicity Compared in Their Effects on the Civilization of Europe (1844; also in Connary’s library). The latter was his intellectual and restrained, even tolerant, critique of Protestantism, which quickly saw translation into French, Italian, German, and English.11

      That Thomas Connary was interested in Balmes’s biography is evident from a newspaper clipping dated, in Connary’s hand, March 18, 1882, and pasted to the final contents pages of the first volume. Written by an anonymous “veritas” from Ellsworth, Wisconsin, it lists in encyclopedic style the main achievements of the “learned theologian, profound philosopher, and enlightened publicist.” This is one of numerous paste-ins in the volume from different papers and magazines on subjects as varied as the death of Captain Nelson, who accompanied Henry M. Stanley on one of his African expeditions; the disposition of the ideal farmer’s wife (“ever presenting the bright side, and concealing nothing but her own sorrow”); and the unprecedented crisis between the Egyptian Khedive and the British government following the British dismissal of the newly established Fakhri cabinet in January 1893.

      Connary’s copy of Balmes is in two large, compact octavo volumes totaling 1,081 pages, bound in blue cloth with blind-stamped pattern on the boards and gilt title on the spine. The volumes contain much of Connary’s own writing in the form of religious reflections, transcribed poetry and letters to and from local postmasters, as well as several addresses to his children that instruct them to preserve his books and annotations. The annotations and inserted pages date from March 1871 to March 1897, with a particular concentration in the summer of 1881. The earliest marking is in the form of an ownership note on the first page of the introduction: “Thomas Connary’s Property, Stratford, Coös County, New Hampshire—March 28th 1871.” Some marginal notations serve to direct Connary’s reading, as we see for instance on page 1: “see and read pages 31 and 32, Chapter IV, Section 51 of this Book.” But, such directives aside, very few of the annotations or inserted pages pertain directly to content in the text. The fact that the two volumes show little wear, apart from moderate shelf wear, suggests that Connary may have done little regular reading of Balmes’s Fundamental Philosophy. However, when Balmes formulates the epistemic certainties of his commonsense philosophy (offered as an antidote to the Cartesian project of universal doubt), they resonate very strongly with the assured proclamatory tone in which Connary’s writings assert belief and moral conviction. Especially appealing to Connary is Balmes’s firmly declared adherence to the Catholic faith throughout his Fundamental Philosophy, not least when the Spanish author concludes that “[a] careful study of the objections brought against Christianity, lays bare a truth confirmed by the history of eighteen centuries; the most weighty objections against Catholicity, instead of proving any thing against it, involve a proof which confirms it.”12 Later I will suggest that the tolerance of intellectual and religious difference that characterizes Balmes’s writing finds a parallel in the reflections of Connary.

      If the family-owned Sadlier publishing house was one of the key providers of spiritual and educational material to a rapidly growing Irish American Catholic community, that founded by Patrick Donahoe, who emigrated from Ireland to Boston in 1821 at ten years of age, was surely another. This indefatigable entrepreneur and deft salesman established his flourishing Boston business by producing a vast range of affordable Catholic publications and a very popular news magazine (and, additionally, offering a wide range of Catholic devotional paraphernalia). One of his characteristic publishing initiatives was his series of Catholic Books for the Poor, consisting of a selection of thirty-two-page pamphlets in the small thirty-twomo format (14 × 9 cm), each with the life of a saint, “embellished with a splendid engraving,” and priced at three cents. It was Donahoe’s declared ambition to remain dedicated “in the endeavor to reproduce, in a cheap form, many of the very valuable works issued from time to time in Europe, which, from the high price when imported, or otherwise, are out of the reach of the majority of Catholics of America, and also . . . to extend and bring out, at a small price, the copyright works of American writers.”13

      One example of Donahoe’s European Catholic material is Louis Gaston de Ségur’s polemical Plain Talk about the Protestantism of To-Day, published in 1868, which bears the imprimatur of the bishop of the diocese of Boston and the testimony of the archbishop of Baltimore: “Plain Talk I regard as an excellent Book for circulation. It will do an immense good.” Appearing with the characteristic ten pages of the publisher’s advertisements at the rear of the volume, the preliminary title page also becomes a place of advertisement, carrying a price of 25 cents, and the further reduced prices of “twenty-five copies, $5; fifty copies, $10; one hundred copies, $15.” One of the advertisement pages states triumphantly about Ségur’s Plain Talk,

      The Cheapest Book Ever Published!!!

      MR. DONAHOE has endeavored for years to furnish books at as cheap rates as the Protestant booksellers, and much lower than the publications of the Catholic publishers. This he has been enabled to do, from the fact that his publications are manufactured in his own buildings, and receive his personal superintendence. It is a mistake, therefore, to say that “Catholics have not cheap books.” It may be that other publishers do not issue cheap books, but the charge against our establishment is not correct. And if the “gropers after truth” will give us a call, or send by letter, they will find our books are cheaper than any in the country. We challenge comparison. Remember, we allude to OUR OWN PUBLICATIONS.

      This is the confident voice of one of North America’s most successful and enterprising nineteenth-century publishers catering to the rising Catholic population, and it shows how the highest significance is attached to the availability and affordability of books within the divided religious scene of New England. For an ambitious publisher like Donahoe,

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