The Pue in Pue’s Occurrences

Contributed by Turlough O’Riordan

I’m sure some of you, even the eighteenth-century experts among you and those who have read our ‘about’ page, will have asked the question at some stage: just who was this Pue character anyway? We asked Turlough O’Riordan of the Dictionary of Irish Biography to explain…

Richard Pue, the publisher of the noted eponymous eighteenth-century Dublin newsletter, founded ‘Dick’s Coffee House’ in Skinner Row in Dublin, sometime before July 1698. He was certainly active in book auctions by this time; John Dunton described him thus: “he is a witty and ingenious man, makes the best coffee in Dublin … and has a peculiar knack at bantering, and will make rhymes to any thing” [Dublin Scuffle (2000), 429]. Nothing is known for certain about his life before then.

Commencing publication of Impartial Occurences on 25 December 1703, in partnership with Edward Lloyd, Pue edited the newspaper, sometimes with Lloyd, for the next three years. It then went into abeyance before being re-titled as Pue’s Occurences (sic) in February 1712, by which time it was in Pue’s sole ownership.

Pue was as much a printer, publisher and editor as a coffee-house proprietor.