LEADBEATER, Mary. Memoirs and Letters of Richard and Elizabeth Shackleton, Late of Ballitore, Ireland; Compiled by their daughter Mary Leadbeater, including a concise biographical sketch, and some letters of her grandfather, Abraham Shackleton.

London: Printed for Harvey and Darton, 1822. First edition. Octavo. pp. vi, 221. Original half calf on marbled boards, title in gilt on red morocco label on professionally rebacked spine. A very good copy. Rare.
JISC locates 8 copies only.
Mary Leadbeater (1758-1826), was among the most important Irish Quaker writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, compiled this memorial volume to preserve the lives and correspondence of her parents, Richard and Elizabeth Shackleton, and her grandfather, Abraham Shackleton. The latter founded the celebrated boarding school at Ballitore, County Kildare, in 1726, an institution whose most famous pupil was Edmund Burke, who maintained a lifelong friendship with Richard Shackleton. Burke later described Richard as “the friend of my heart”, and their surviving correspondence constitutes an important source for Burke’s intellectual and personal development.
The work provides a detailed account of the Ballitore Quaker community, one of the most significant centres of the Society of Friends in Ireland. Through memoirs, letters and family recollections, Leadbeater offers valuable insights into Quaker education, religious practice, social ideals and provincial intellectual life during the eighteenth century. The volume is particularly notable for preserving original letters by Abraham Shackleton, whose influence on Irish Quaker education was profound, and for documenting the close connections between the Shackleton family and many leading figures of Irish cultural and political life.²
Her first publication, Extracts and Original Anecdotes for the Improvement of Youth (1794), was followed by poetry and the popular Cottage Dialogues of the Irish Peasantry, a work notable for its sympathetic portrayal of rural Irish life, recalling the humane outlook of Maria Edgeworth.

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