Mathew Carey

Mathew Carey
Mathew Carey by John Neagle (detail), 1825
Born	(1760-01-28)January 28, 1760 Dublin, Ireland
Died	September 16, 1839(1839-09-16) (aged 79)
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Mathew Carey (January 28, 1760 – September 16, 1839) was an Irish-born American publisher and economist who lived and worked in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Carey was born in Dublin into a middle-class family in 1760. He entered the bookselling and printing business in 1775, and when still only seventeen published a pamphlet criticizing dueling. This publication was quickly followed by another work criticizing the severity of the Irish penal code, and another criticizing Parliament. As a result, the British House of Commons threatened him with prosecution, and Carey fled to Paris in 1781. There he met Benjamin Franklin, the ambassador representing the American Revolutionary forces, who achieved independence that year. Franklin took Carey on to work in his printing office.

Carey worked for Franklin for a year before returning to Ireland, where he edited two Irish nationalist newspapers, The Freeman's Journal and The Volunteer's Journal. To avoid imprisonment and prosecution by the British, Carey dressed as a woman and snuck on a ship to emigrate to the newly independent United States in September 1784.

Upon Carey's arrival in Philadelphia, the Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette gave him $400 to establish himself, and he used this money to set up a new publishing business and a book shop, establishing:

None of these ventures proved very profitable, although the American Museum became the first American periodical to treat American culture as rich and original instead of a poor imitation of Great Britain's. Carey printed the first American version of the Douay–Rheims Bible, popularly known as the Carey Bible, in 48 weekly installments, which subscribers could then have bound. It was the first Roman Catholic version of the Bible printed in the United States. Carey also printed numerous editions of the King James Version. In 1794-1796, Carey published America's first atlases. His 1802 map of Washington, D.C., was the first to name the stretch of land west of the United States Capitol as the "Mall".