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The Hibernian Patriot: being a Collection of the Drapier’s Letters to the People of Ireland, concerning Mr. Wood’s Brass Half-Pence. Together with Considerations on the Attempts made to pass that Coin. And Reasons for the People of Ireland’s refusing it. To which are added, Poems and Songs relating to the same Subject ...

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First London collected edition of the Drapier’s Letters, preceded by the Dublin edition of 1725 (entitled Fraud Detected).

When the Englishman William Wood acquired the notorious patent for supplying Ireland with a copper coinage, Swift voiced his protest in five pseudonymous Letters, signed ‘M. B., Drapier’, which appeared between March 1724 and January 1725, and helped to defeat the odious project. Swift found himself suddenly lionized in Dublin as the ‘Hibernian Patriot’, and while still unidentified, ‘in great Repute, the Darling of the populace ...’ (Bishop Nicholson to Archbishop Wake, 12 October 1725). The original separate pamphlets are all very scarce. The collected editions add some related papers, Swift’s ‘Prometheus’, and songs celebrating the Drapier by Thomas Sheridan, Charles Shadwell, and others.

Teerink-Scouten 22.

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