By 1825, Carleton, who had left the Roman Catholic Church for the (Anglican) Church of Ireland, and took the opportunity given him by an evangelical clergyman of that church, Caesar Otway, to use his journalistic talents for such proselytising purposes as satirising Catholic pilgrimages to 'St Patrick's Purgatory' at Lough Derg. Further writings in the Christian Examiner & Church of Ireland Magazine led, in 1829 and 1833, to the publication of what is probably Carleton's best known work: Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry - a tableau of the life of the country people of the north of Ireland before the famines of the 1840s altered their pattern of existence forever. There then followed such novels as Fardorougha the Miser (1839), Valentine McClutchy (1845), The Black Prophet (1847), The Emigrants of Ahadarra (1848), The Tithe Proctor (1849), The Squanders of Castle Squander (1852) in which he addresses many of the issues affecting the Ireland of his day such as the influence of the Established Church and landlordism, poverty, famine and emigration.