What's this about?

[George Thompson]

Mordecai Noah -- you've met him before -- responding to a rival editor who has claimed that the paragraphs in Noah's Star praising the goods and services from local merchants were paid for:
***  . . . we are not so lucky as to be paid for our puffs.  We do these things con amore.  We have to scramble on as well as we can -- not requiring, not asking aid.  We never had a "Mother Carey and her chickens" at our back from whom a few thousand could be borrowed for special purposes. . . .  ***
Evening Star, June 8, 1839, p. 2, col. 2.

I've looked for "Mother Carey's chickens" in the OED, and in Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms, Thornton's American Glossary, the Dictionary of Amerian English, the Dictionary of Americanisms, DARE, the Oxford Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, 2nd ed. (E. Knowles) and several recent editions of Brewer's dictionary, incl. the 2005 ed. by John Ayto.  When the term has shown up, it has been given the sense I know, the sea-birds called storm petrels, which can't be what Noah had in mind.

I don't know of a person named Carey who might have been known to Noah as a bribe-giver, or sponsor of newspapers, or a merchant.
Mathew Carey was a printer active in Philadelphia in the late 18th/early 19th C.  The American National Biography says of him: "Carey landed in Philadelphia with only a dozen guineas in his pocket. Lafayette heard of his predicament, sought him out, and loaned him $400 with which to start a newspaper. (When the marquis returned impoverished to America in 1824, Carey publicly repaid the loan.)"  The loan was evidently made in 1784 or 1785; however ostentatious Carey was in repaying the loan 40 years later, that was 13 years before Noah wrote this passage; Carey died in 1839, but in September, so his death couldn't have put this story into Noah's thoughts.  And he was the recipient, not the lender.  But still. . . .

By the way -- is anyone among you all able to read Arabic?  I've just read at a story in which Noah represents a couple of Arabs who have been performing in an NYC theatre coming into his office to complain in Arabic that the theatre manager has stiffed them of their money.  Noah replies, in Arabic, that they are lucky that worse hasn't happened.  The purported Arabic is in our western alphabet, and doubtless was not transliterated according to any standard system.  Noah was a diplomat in his younger years, and involved in the suppression of the pirates operating out of Tunisia, but I don't know that this would have required that he learn Arabic.

GAT (the guy who still looks stuff up in books)

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.  Working on a new edition, though.

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