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circumstances.

      Thomas Connary.

      Several other volumes indicate similar patterns of shared reading in the Connary household, and these will be the subject of further discussion in chapter 3. Some of the volumes evidently shared between family members relate the lives of saints and have been thoroughly annotated by Connary, often with handwritten addresses and appeals to his children. Two such titles are The Lives of Eminent Saints, published by Donahoe in 1853, and The Lives of the Fathers of the Desert, from Fielding Lucas Jr. in Baltimore (undated).

      One final important group of Connary’s works of religious guidance reminds us that this was a time of pervasive religious and social controversy: it consists of titles from the rich array of Catholic apologetics and religious polemic readily available to Catholic audiences in America. Not all of the religious polemic that we find in Connary’s library is as restrained as Gaston de Ségur’s Plain Talk, which opens thus: “My plain talk on Protestantism is with Catholics, rather than with Protestants. It is not an attack, nor a controversy either; it is intended as a work of preservation and self-defence.”³⁵ Unambiguous controversy and real asperity of language are found in The End of Religious Controversy by the English Catholic bishop and polemicist John Milner (1752–1826), a work that Connary refers to frequently (mostly by title only) in his notes. Published in 1818, but written about twenty years before, this tract spurred a flood of embittered answers in the form of pamphlets and counter-polemics in the decades that followed. We can also include in the category of Christian polemic Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations, by John Newman (who was appointed cardinal in 1879) which Connary has in the edition printed by Donahoe in 1853, as well as Haskins’s Travels, so rich in defense and Protestant criticism. An American polemic in Connary’s library is the 472-page Controversy between Rev. Messrs. Hughes and Breckenridge, on the Subject “Is the Protestant Religion the Religion of Christ?,” a lengthy exchange as tedious as it is puerile between the Catholic clergyman who was to become the archbishop of New York and a distinguished Presbyterian minister who had served as chaplain of the House of Representatives. Originally a debate carried out in various Catholic and Presbyterian newspapers, this was published in book form in 1833 by various publishers in Philadelphia and reprinted numerous times in the United States.³⁶ In the early part of the correspondence, Hughes indicates the centrality of the publishing media to the dissemination of the debate: “’The Presbyterian’ will continue to publish until one or the other of us, think proper to decline the contest. I, on my part, shall have the whole re-published in one of our papers, so that the Catholics may receive the enlightenment of your arguments.”³⁷ Connary’s copy of this voluminous controversy is that published by Eugene Cummiskey of Philadelphia in 1864 (sixth edition); on the front flyleaf, he notes, “February 4, 1865 bought of Patrick Donahoe Boston. Price $1.50.”³⁸ As I shall discuss in chapters 4 and 5, Connary, who acquired a rich selection of polemic and defense writing, shows little direct concern with schism and reciprocated animosity. He appears instead to be interested in shared teaching between Protestants and Catholics. Perhaps as a result of settling as the first Catholic resident in a small New Hampshire town, his predominant interest is in the nature of the different creeds and in the common ground for the devotional life.

      Connary’s activity of “Book keeping” is largely guided by the practical requirements for religious instruction and a desired integration of temporal and spiritual governance. If Connary’s library is designed to resolve any potential crisis or dilemma, it is how to be truly and deeply spiritual while being devoted to the effective management of a household and agriculture—in other words, how to reconcile an inward spiritual ambition with care for the physical, spiritual, and moral lives of one’s dependents. A process of book collecting that is preoccupied with such questions generates its own logic, one in which the “farmer’s treasure” can allude both to Falkner’s agricultural manual and to Kinane’s Dove of the Tabernacle, the small-sized devotional book that was one of Connary’s most precious possessions and has survived filled to the brim with inserted pages of prayers, religious reflections, and exhortations.

      Another feature of such “Book keeping,” as noted above, is the relative lack of recreational reading. The genres of poetry, novel, and short story are largely absent. Rather surprising, perhaps, is the fact that we find none of the moral and didactic stories of Mary Anne Sadlier, whom Charles Fanning has characterized as “the fictional advisor to the Famine immigrants.”³⁹ Perhaps Connary found the depressing urban setting of many of her novels, which often have the disillusioned protagonist return to live in Ireland, to be at odds with his own, largely positive, American experience.⁴⁰ More likely, however, is that Connary simply was not drawn to the fictional mode of writing, preferring instead to be informed and instructed through the more unambiguous means of reference works, history books, and devotional and didactic tracts.

      We find in his library a copy of Aesop’s Fables—a genre didactic by definition, intended to instruct and delight—and it is clear that at least parts of this text were read carefully as a source of moral edification. Edward W. Martin’s Secrets of the Great City: A Work Descriptive of the Virtues and the Vices, the Mysteries, Miseries and Crimes of New York City, steeped in heavy-handed didacticism and not without sensationalism, suggests that reading for entertainment and moral strengthening could go hand in hand. Another title referred to by Connary, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, Made under Direction of the Navy Department, appears to appeal to a curiosity about strange and exotic places and suggests occasional priorities other than a strictly didactic one. The same can probably be said about the rich selection of reference works—dictionaries, historical overviews, topographical guides, and the like—that we know was also in Connary’s possession.

      I have characterized the contents of Connary’s library as a literature of guidance, comprising diverse modes of instruction and a variety of textual forms. The overwhelming majority of texts can be classified broadly as devotional, catechetic, or didactic religious literature, a literature that could help produce configurations of religious and moral discipline and ensure a workable balance between an inner spiritual life and practical worldly management. Towards the end of his Irish Emigrant’s Guide, O’Hanlon emphasizes the importance for the Irish immigrant of securing private property and the essential “requisites of life”: “[O]nce his homestead has been secured in the country, he will live contented and respected, and have the satisfaction of seeing his family grow up around him prosperous and industrious, and removed from the pestilential examples and practices of city life.”⁴¹ Secure in his New Hampshire homestead and surrounded by family, Thomas Connary dedicated the last decades of his life to the precious and laborious process of “Book keeping,” in which books were collected, arranged, decorated, and annotated. As we shall now explore in detail, this Irish immigrant farmer’s library serves as a guide to, and is an elaborate product of, lived religious experience.

EPIPHANY

       “Seeing Very Plainly”

      Thomas Connary witnessed something remarkable in Stratford on Tuesday, January 17, 1888.

      Read my words of description of the Blessed and Holy Virgin Mother and her Blessed and Holy Company as I saw them very plainly, in this, my own house, on the 17th, of January in the year 1888. . . . I will now give in this a few of my thoughts in viewing the Blessed and Holy Virgin Mother of Jesus Christ, with a few of her Blessed and Holy companions then and there I was much more than very happy thank God. I felt very sure then, that God and His whole heavenly creatures were fully with me for endless Eternity.

      These reminiscences, which are recorded, signed, and inserted between pages 54 and 55 of St. Francis of Sales’s Spiritual Conferences, demonstrate remarkable concreteness. In what must be understood as a corporeal vision, Connary sees the blessed company “in this, my own house,”

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