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Life
?-1798; Printer of pamphlets for writers including Edmund Burke; published Universal Magazine; republican in sympathies; addvertised himself as a law bookseller; reprinted Blackstone and others cheaply; introduced John and Henry Sheares to Capt. John Armstrong whom he thought willing to lead a rebellion, and who betrayed him to the authorities; sentenced and hanged, Newgate, 21 May; a son, Patrick Byrne, established a shop with Mathew Carey in Philadelphia, and later with his br. William established
another in Baltimore. [No ODNB].
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Works
(Selection of works published:) Letters to the Volunteers in the Province of Ulster [q.d.]; William Wenman Seward, The Rights of the People Asserted and Necessity of a more equal representation in parliament stated and proved, Wherein the resolutions of the Volunteer Delegates at Dungannon Sept 8 1783 are particularly considered [1783]; also a work by Sir Capel Molyneux; Mr Pitt’s reply to Mr Orde; the Speech of Rt. Hon. Thomas Orde [Lord Bolton] for a commercial adjustment between GB and Ireland 12 Aug. 1785; Mr Burke’s Speech on the Motion made for Papers Relative to the direction for charging the Nabob of Arcot’s private debts to Europeans on the revenues of the Carnatic, 28 Feb. 1785, 8o; Fox’s Reply to Pitt [on] laws for reg. of trade and navigation, 31 May 1785; John Hely Hutchinson, Sec. of State, Letter to Mayor of Cork; James Laffan, Political Arithmatic of the Population, Commerce, and Manufactures of Ireland, with Observations on the Relative Situation of GB and Ireland MDCCLXXV [1785] &c. (See Catalogue of Henry Bradshaw Collection of Irish Books in University Library, Cambridge (1916), Vol. 1.)
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References
Richard Cargill Cole, Irish Booksellers and English Writers, 1740-1800 (Atlantic Heights, London: Mansell Pub.; NJ: Atlantic Heights 1986), 266pp.: ‘As Roman Catholics suffering from British penal laws in Ireland, Byrne and [Patrick] Wogan undoubtedly saw copyright as another example of British Oppression. Like scores of their fellows in the Irish book trade, Byrne, his two sons, and his son-in-law, after the collapse of the Irish reprint industry at the Union of 1800 would emigrate to the United States to continue reprinting the English writers. Byrne’s career in the Dublin book trade 17791801 and the Philadelphia book trade 1801-14 will be discussed in chapter nine as one of the more successful among the 101 persons who left the Irish book trade to work in the American book trade.’ (p.7); not that the collapse of the Dublin trade, so heavily dependent on piracy, arose from the extension of the Copyright Act of 1709 to Ireland at the Union, though resisted in the form of the 17 resolution formulated by Pitt in 1782, and resisted with the others by Edmund Pery, Speaker of the Irish House of Commons (27 May 1785), who said, ‘The seventeenth resolution, relative to books, would put an end to the printing business in this country, without serving Great Britain. It would transfer that business from Ireland to Holland or some other foreign country.’ (ibid., p.5); Appendix 3 in Cole is dedicated to the Dublin reprints of Patrick Byrne, 77 of which are listed in Bradshaw (Cambridge UP 1916), Vol. I, pp.388-404; 25 more are listed in the Catalogue of Sir John Gilbert’s Library (Pearse St.); 13 more are found int heLIbrary of Thomas Jeferson; while two more are listed in Sidney L. Gulick, ‘A chesterfield Bibliography to 1800, PBSA, 29 (1935), 2-114 [titles 137 & 145]; the remaining 98 by Byrne are all listed in the National Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints [and reproduced in this Appendix, items 1-216].
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