I recently bought a copy of this old dictionary in a second-hand shop, not a specialist bookshop. It has English into Irish only, and was published by Trinity College, Dublin in 1855 for students who intended to minister to Irish-speaking communities at that time. I find that The Rev. Daniel Foley was a Kerryman and a Protestant minister who was also a lecturer at Trinity. Oddly enough there is an on-line version of the book and wondered how rare it might be?

It doesn't seem as though anyone recognizes it so you might have found something rare. How old do you think your specific copy of the manuscript is?

Beir bua agus beannacht

Riona, mine is definitely an original edition, published in 1855, its not a facsimile or anything like that. The oddest thing is that i found it in a shop in Australia, lumped in with a lot of old German and French school textbooks. But, as I said, there is a copy on-line which can be accessed page by page so there is obviously at least one other copy in existence. Google it and you'll see.

Thanks for your interest.

Seanfhear

Nice find! I'm familiar with Foley's dictionary - there's a copy in the Notre Dame library and I used to consult it semi-regularly - but I don't really know how rare or valuable it would be.

I just checked on WorldCat though and they list 65 libraries holding copies of it (not counting microform, of course).

At AbeBooks.com there are currently 15 offers of that book (prices from US$ 24 to US$76)
But it's a paperback and hard back reprint edition of 2007 (Kessinger Publishing, print on demand).

Lars

Hmm, not especially rare then, but as I got the book for a couple of dollars I'm not complaining. The great thing for me is imagining the possible course of events that the book has seen and that finally left it in my care.

Back in the mid-Nineteenth Century the Irish language was seen by some elite groups in Britain and in Ireland as a likely key to the advancement of protestantism. Had it been successful the movement might also have promoted literacy in Irish among the people at a much earlier time when there were still millions of native speakers left from the devastation of the Famine years. Just what might that have meant for the subsequent history of the Athbheochain and Gaelic nationalism?

Seanfhear