This study examines the life and pre-famine writings of Catholic-born nineteenth century Irish novelist William Carleton (1794-1869). Carleton chronicled the lives of the Catholic Irish peasantry, bearers of an oral tradition that went into terminal decline after the Great Famine (1845-50). Through his fiction Carleton offered an authentic, insider, eye-witness perspective on the lives of the rural poor unrivalled by his contemporaries; John Banim and Gerald Griffin. Carleton, however, converted to the Protestant religion before beginning his career in Irish literature and this renders a study of his writings more complex. He wrote from different political perspectives, for patrons of opposing views, at different junctures in his career and this led to accusations of his being a jobbing writer. Carleton struggled financially throughout his career and pecuniary necessity emerges as the primary motivating factor in the author’s shifts from one political position to another. Consequently, Carleton can never be considered the most reliable of witnesses as his writings were often tainted with bias and prejudice against one group or another. What Carleton guarantees the historian, however, is a variety of perspectives on the pre-famine period that reveal as much about those who read his novels as of the people described within. This study will apply the concept of self-fashioning, pioneered by Stephen Greenblatt in his examinations of the Renaissance period, to Carleton and chart the evolution of the author’s public identity and the shifting nature of his literary perspective through his pre-famine career. Initially a weapon of the evangelical New Reformation Movement Carleton would write for Young Ireland and the cause of Repeal during the 1840s. This study will examine the author’s career, during what was a transitional period in Irish history, and consider the incremental phases of his writing that explain the wholly opposing perspectives offered in his writings at either end of the period 1828-1850.