Maria Edgeworth: Commentary (2)

Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar, ‘[...] even while Thady pretends to be of use by telling not his own story but his providers’, his words are damaging, for he reveals the depravity of the very masters he seems to praise so loyally, and this steward who appears to serve his lords with such docility actually benefits from their decline, sets in motion the machinery that finishes them off, and even contributes to the demise of their last representative.’ (The Mad Woman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination, New Haven: Yale UP 1997, pp.150-51). [Note extended commentary on Belinda, Castle Rackrent and other works in connection with novels of Jane Austen.]

[ top ]

J. C. Beckett: ‘Maria Edgeworth belonged by birth to a section of Irish society that was equally at home on either side of the Irish Sea.’ (‘The Irish Writer and his Public in the Nineteenth Century’, in Yearbook of English Studies, 11, 1981, p.106.)

Hubert Butler, ‘Maria Edgeworth’ [1954], in Roy Foster, ed., The Sub-Prefect Should Have Held His Tongue (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press; Dublin: Lilliput 1990), pp.137-45: There are some writers who are so precariously balanced between England and Ireland that an Irishman often has to do a bit of special pleading in order to claim them for Ireland at all. If I had felt that Maria Edgeworth was one of these borderline cases, I might have been tempted to concentrate on her Irish stories [...] But in fact from the time she was fifteen and returned to Edgeworthstown with her father, Ireland became her home and Irish life her major preoccupation. Yet though she lived in Ireland, she was far less provincial than many of her great English contemporaries; she was accepted on the continent as a European in a way that Jane Austen, a much greater novelists, never was. The Edgeworth Way of Life, expounded by her father and herself, had found them disciples far and wide.’ Quotes her remark on Jane Austen: ‘one gets tired of milk and water, even when the milk is of the sweetest and the water of the purest.’ (p.137.) [Cont.]

Hubert Butler (‘Maria Edgeworth’ [1954], in Foster, ed., The Sub-Prefect [... &c.], 1990) - cont.: ‘In her old age Maria recognised very clearly what had happened. She admitted that her best conceived characters were those, like Sir Condy of Castle Rackrent and Thady Quirk, which she had created with a minimum of what she called “philosophical construction”. “Where I least aimed at drawing character”, she wrote, “I succeeded best.” She would like to have gone on writing about Ireland but she said that passions were to high and there was no place for a writer who wished to hold the mirror up to nature. The people would smash the mirror and that would be the end.’ (p.138.) [Cont.]

Hubert Butler (‘Maria Edgeworth’ [1954], in Foster, ed., The Sub-Prefect [... &c.], 1990) - cont. Butler refers to the Edgeworthstown chapter of Mr and Mrs Hall’s Travels in Ireland: ‘you will find those two quite hard-boiled pilgrims almost inarticulate with emotion [...]: From this mansion [they wrote] has issued so much practical good to Ireland and not alone to Ireland but to the whole civilised world. It has been for long the residence of high intellect, well-directed genius, industry and virtue. it is a place that perhaps possesses larger moral interest than any other in the kingdom.’ (n.p.; here p.139.) Mrs. Halls further writes of Edgeworth: ‘[H]er books are the most irreligious I have ever read. She does not attack religion but makes it appear unnecessary by exhibiting perfect virtue without it. No works ever produced so bad an effect on my mind than hers’ (here p.140.) [Cont.]

Hubert Butler (‘Maria Edgeworth’ [1954], in Foster, ed., The Sub-Prefect [... &c.], 1990) - cont.: iscusses “Rosamund and the Purple Jar” in which a child is permitted by her mama to chose a purple jar - that is, filled with coloured water - in preference to a pair shoes needed to replace her one worn ones, and must live with the consequences of her decision. (pp.140-42.) ‘The book of hers which I prefer, The Absentee, is more propagandist even than Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It is like the most entertaining sermon that was ever written. All the characters are tilted slightly from the plane of reality towards the central argument of the book: “An Irish landlord must live among the people from whom he draws his subsistence.”’ (p.143); ‘Maria’s plots are complicated and ingenious as befits an inventor’s daughter.’ (p.144.) [Cont.]

Hubert Butler (‘Maria Edgeworth’ [1954], in Foster, ed., The Sub-Prefect [... &c.], 1990) -cont.: ‘The last novels seem very archaic in construction’; ‘Maria was a brilliant and sociable person who gave only half her genius to her art. ‘As with her father, her ambition was as much to change society as to observe it.’ (p.144.) Maria’s sister Harriet was married to Richard Butler, dean of Clonmacnois [sic], and presum. a kinsman of the author, affording him a journal entry from the Dean to end this fairly informal article.

[ top ]

George Watson, ed., Castle Rackrent (Everyman Edn. 1964), Introduction: ‘Castle Rackrent is the first regional novel in English, and perhaps in all Europe’ [vii]; ‘It is difficult for us now, without knowledge of the Famine and the growth of nationalism, to conceive of the confidence [ix] with which the Anglo-Irish governed Ireland in the last years of the eighteenth century. Castle Rackrent is a novel of optimism: it is about the bad old day that is dead and gone, however much may remain to be done. Maria’s literary career belongs to this world of confident Protestant leadership.’ (ix-x; quoted in John Cronin, ‘Maria Edgeworth: Castle Rackrent’, in The Anglo-Irish Novel: The Nineteenth Century [Vol. I], Belfast: Appletree Press 1980, pp.83-98; p.28.); ‘This [her letter to Mrs. Stark of 1834] if Maria’s memory is to be trusted, must refer to [xi] the first third of the novel, and it pushes this sudden creative burst back in time into the middle of the 1790s, well before the Wolfe Tone rising of 1798, for in the same letter she tells us how the longer “Continuation”, or the history of Sir Condy Rackrent, ‘was added two years afterwards: it was not drawn from life, but the good natured and indolent extravagance were suggested by a relation of mine long since dead’; Watson conjectures that the relation might be Maria’s maternal grandfather Paul Elers of Black Bourton, Oxfordshire, whom R. E. Edgeworth in his unfinished Memoirs (1820) relates was indifferent in all money matters and had ‘a very old steward’ who ‘managed all the business of the estate’ (Mem., 1820 i, p.84); but this late letter of 1834, in separating the work into two distinct periods of composition, usefully destroys the myth that Rackrent is a novel occasioned by the rebellion of I798, when French revolutionary troops, landing in County Mayo in support of the Irish rebels, frightened the Edgeworths and other county families into taking refuge in Longford. We know that the novel appeared as early as January 1800 - perhaps even in December I799 - and if the manuscript was delivered to the publisher Johnson late in I799, then the ‘Continuation’ cannot have been written later than 1799, or the first part of the novel later than 1797. Rackrent, in fact, in its first conception, is a novel of the last, confident days of the Irish Independency, though the Preface and Glossary, written late in 1799 when the Union of 1800 already seemed a bitter and inevitable necessity, darken the novelist’s own view of her novel and perhaps the tone of the later narrative as well. Beyond this, dating, we cannot go. The novel may have been written at any time between 1797 and 1799, or even earlier [...]’. [Cont.]

George Watson (Introduction to Castle Rackrent, 1964 Edn.) - cont.: Watson adds a ftn. citing a dinner-table conversation of Capt. Francis Beaufort in March 1819 recording that CR was written with no intention of publication 8 years before publication, and only printed when ‘an Aunt, a Sister of Her Father, showed delight in it (bibl, James Greig, ed., The Farington Diary, vol. viii, London 1928, p.217) nearly twenty years after publication would put the date of composition at 1792.]; remarks on manuscript notes in Maria’s hand in the endpapers of R. L. Edgeworth’s copy of Castle Rackrent, poss. written at his dictation but not included into subsequent editions excepting one on Irish land-disputes (p.124 OUP edn.), and further cites a letter to Mrs. Stark concerning a note on fairies for the 4th edn. (Watson, p.xv.) Further, ‘The rest of her novels, such as the brilliant, melodramatic society-novel Belinda (1801), or The Absentee (1812), the finest of her later Irish novels, are all (like Jane Austen’s six) pure fiction and in the third person. Rackrent remains unique, a kind of memoir-novel in which the narrator is not, like Crusoe, the central actor in the drama, but an observer merely - a technique impossible to parallel in English before 1800, and rare even in French. Even the fashionable Paul et Virginie (1787) of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, which employs it, hardly provides a convincing source - the narrator where is merely a colourless bystander. Thady, on the contrary, though an observer, is the life of Rackrent, and all the blood of the book flows through the figure of this absurdly loyal family retainer - a full, affectionately ironic vision of a dying system, and an enriching device which, for some odd reason, Maria never again essayed. It adds both flavour and authenticity, the novel is not only the livelier in detail because it is recounted in the Irish dialect, it is the more informative as well.’ (Castle Rackrent, 1964, edn., Introduction, p. xvi.) [Cont.]

George Watson (Introduction to Castle Rackrent, 1964 Edn.) - cont.: See ftn.: ‘[...] so expertly used as to make us wonder why Maria Edgeworth never used it again’ (ibid, p. xix); ‘[...] Her real sources for Castle Rackrent are not literary, but hearsay. Hence her engagingly naive footnotes such as ‘Fact’, or ‘Verbatim’. The story of Castle Rackrent is an invention, but many of the details are offered as real (ibid, p. xix) ... We are shown good reason why Thady should love his masters, none at all why he should respect them as he does.... [A]larmed at her experiment, Maria fitted it out first with explanatory footnotes and then, as a afterthought, with a ‘Glossary’ (in fact a commentary) as well.... we are inclined to find her over-solicitous.’ (ibid, p.xx); [Each of the Rackrents] destroyed by a demon within himself: Sir Patrick by drink, Sir Murtagh by the law, Sir Kit by gambling, and Sir Condy, in the amplest portrait of all, by the spendthrift life of politics’ (p.xx); ‘It is true that the late eighteenth-century stage comedy such as Charles Macklin’s True-Born Irishman (1793), had increasingly exploited regional types [xxvii.] [Cont.]

George Watson (Introduction to Castle Rackrent, 1964 Edn.) - cont.: ‘[Thady’s] simplicity makes him a butt, but it also makes him a reporter, an accurate lens through which the life of the Castle in which he serves is see.... The preface partakes in the fiction; but it is also a fiction of a different kind, emulating the discourse of the 18th century critics, and striking, in that mode, a peculiarly modern note, instanced by the use of the words ‘a new consciousness’ in the conclusion.... Thady is represented as the author of the texts who was with difficulty persuaded to write it down. The fact that this implies literacy - and the questions of how literate and how necessarily subject to correction his manuscript might have been - is not, of course entered into. The Editor functions as Swift or Defoe have done in Gulliver and Robinson Crusoe, or perhaps as Carlyle later did in Sartor Resartus [ ...]. Maria Edgeworth’s theory of Characterisation and History is a persuasive and graceful argument made to the effect that formal history and public memoirs are an ill measure of the inner truth of a man’s life [here quotes extensively from the Preface] ... Now, this reveals a keen preoccupation with the necessity for a kind of disclosure which runs counter to the conventional form of literature. In reality, the story told by Thady doesn’t square with the excuse advanced for its informality here in as much as it is not his own life that is primarily revealed. Yet the argument advances in the direction of asserting that a valet’s confidences are more germane to the real contents of their masters’ lives than anything the master might say about himself, except in those unguarded, private moments. No man is a hero to his valet.’ (Introduction to Watson, ed., Castle Rackrent, 1964). [Cont.]

George Watson (Introduction to Castle Rackrent, 1964 Edn.) - cont.: ‘The nature of the Anglo-Irish dialect had never been so much as mentioned by any grammarian until Thomas Sheridan’s Rhetorical Grammar of the English Language (1781). [xxi]. Watson prints an appendix containing an anonymous obituary of Turgenev ‘By One Who Knew Him’ (Daily News, 7 Sept. 1883; prev. cited by Anne Ritchie [dg. of Thackeray] in A Book of Sibyls (1883) as a ftn. added to the proofs; ‘[...] When he grew up he made wide incursions into English literature, and came to the conclusion that Maria Edgeworth had struck on a vein which most of the great novelists of the future would work exclusively. She took the world as she found it and selected from it the materials that she thought would be interesting to write about, in a clear and natural style. It was Ivan Turguéneff himself who told me this, and he modestly said he was an unconscious disciple of Miss Edgeworth in setting out on his literary career. [...’; quotes remark of Turgenev:] “It is possible, nay probable, that if Maria Edgeworth had not written about the poor Irish of co. Longford and the squires and squiree[n]s, that it would not have occurred to me to give a literary form to my impressions about the classes parallel to him [?them] in Russia” (Watson, op. cit., p.116; Watson’s correction of ‘him’]. [Note, Patrick Murray, in ‘Irish Novels of Maria Edgeworth, in Studies, Autumn 1970, p.267, takes obit. notice on Turgenev from Watson. (See extracts in a separate window - as attached.)

Christina Edgeworth Colvin, ‘Two Unpublished MSS by Maria Edgeworth’, in Review of English Literature, ed., A. N. Jeffares, 8, 4 (October 1967), pp.53-61: 1] A text taken from correspondence of Maria to Walter Scott [MS 3899 f.3/6 July 1824], is the Hiberno-English monologue of a woman berating Langan for losing a boxing match on which she has wagered ‘a little estate’ (i.e., one she projected to buy with the winnings); includes autograph references to Lord Castlereagh, like whom Langan ‘ought to cut his throat of himself sooner than ever come to Paddy’s Land’ [53-55]. 2] ‘An Irish Wedding, 5 August, 1829’, from Cottage Dialogues among the Irish Peasantry, [by Mary Leadbeater] with notes and preface by Maria Edgeworth (1881), pp.286-90, includes reference to the ‘brutally ordering tone in which the Catholic priests give directions to their flocks as the labourers speak to their cow or a horse they are drawing them through a gate way and cry, ‘Get out o’ that!’ Down! On your knees!’ Down popped the bride and bridegroom ... During the time the priest was performing the ceremony the groupes [sic] of spectators, especially all the women and young girls were so intent that they completely forgot all of our presences or existence as might be seen by their recovering the national attitudes and national expression of countenances - open mouths - distended eyes - frowning brows with anxiety.’ [Colvin, 1967, p.59.]

[ top ]

Michael Hurst, Maria Edgeworth and the Public Scene (London: Macmillan 1969): ‘She was cast for the part of an enlightened member of a ruling class who wished it to deserve its power and privileges through devotion to what she considered its obvious duties towards the rest of the community. Great [15] though its shortcomings undoubtedly were, she never wavered from the conviction that any alternative was unthinkable.’ (p.15-16.) ‘It was all very well to support the Catholic Emancipation campaign of the 1820s ... Repeal, however, was a vastly different kettle of fish.’ (ibid.) ‘[T]he Catholic peasantry had become the sole repository of the profound sense of national distinctness felt in Celtic Ireland’ (p.17.) ‘Maria Edgeworth and her like represented the conquest whether they liked it or not’ (p.18.) ‘To the Catholic peasantry, hardship on top of “foreign” rule was adding untold injury to an unforgivable insult’ (p.20.) ‘Maria was undoubtedly right in one thing - that the initial changes of attitude would have to come directly from the ruling class’ (p.21.) ‘Catholicism was to her something that [the] intelligent person just had to look down upon.’ (p.23.) ‘[She] saw herself as something between a colonial civil servant and a missionary rescuing the masses from inferior material and spiritual practices. Priestly witch-doctors and the mumbo-jumbo of the old Irish language she regarded with the same scorn as Macaulay did the customs of the “Hindoos”.’ (p.23.) ‘[S]he made the very best of being an “intelligent outsider”, and dreamed of what today would be called racial [23] integration with all the essential features of the old order essentially unchanged’ (p.24.) [Cont.]

Michael Hurst (Maria Edgeworth and the Public Scene, 1969) - cont.: ‘the disapproval she feels for Thady Quirk’s son, Jason, in Castle Rackrent ... is an excellent example of how the principles of the later years were foreshadowed at an early stage.’ (p.28.) [in the letters and memoranda] and these alone one can see best the Canute-like quality of so many of her thoughts and actions.’ (p.28.) ‘To Maria, the ideal instrument for revolutionising Irish conditions was an enlightened governing class’ (p.29.) ‘The greatest irony of [RL] Edgeworth’s position was that in the last analysis his place was behind the Government. Whatever [32] his criticisms, he could not countenance rebellion, for his whole raison d’être in the country depended upon the Ascendancy remaining the Ascendancy [...]’ (pp.32-33.) Notes that the Edgeworth estate income stood ate £3,700 in 1817, against a debt of £26,000 incurred by Lovell Edgeworth, while in 1833 C. Sneyd Edgeworth bought out Lovell and closed his financially calamitous school which, however, ‘had managed to abolish the gulf between the Catholics and Protestants and had achieved at a local level what the Edgeworths [34] wished to see as a national phenomenon’ (p.35.) [Cont.]

Michael Hurst (Maria Edgeworth and the Public Scene, 1969) - cont.: ‘‘‘Like the Moores of Moore Hall in county Mayo, Edgeworth regarded the Union as ‘an indispensable step toward the civilisation of Ireland.’ It would “diffuse British customs and manners” (ftn., Hone, Moores of Moore Hall, p.48). Maria too accepted this as both valid and desirable. She had learned how to manage an Irish estate as early as 1791. Her novels were published either at the very end of the Grattanite period or under the Union. All but two appeared before her father’s death and, Castle Rackrent apart, owe an enormous amount to his influence. They combine an intimate knowledge of the Catholic Irish masses with a didactic optimism, the basic assumption of which is that the aristocracy had it within its power to save Ireland from the “horrible revolutionists” (Memoir, 1, 145; also cited at p.33, supra) and bring in a period of peaceful co-operation under Ascendancy guidance. When O’Connell’s movement for Repeal finally convinced her that the ends she sought were a chimera, she ceased to publish material about Irish society in her usual manner. Indeed, she wrote hardly anything at all for publication. By 1834 she was complaining: ‘It is impossible to draw Ireland as she now is in a book of fiction - realities are too strong, party passions too violent to bear to see, or care to look at, their faces in a looking glass. The people would only break the glass and curse the fool who held the mirror up to nature - distorted nature, in a fever. We are too perilous a case to laugh, humour would seem out of season, worse than bad taste.’ From 1817 until the Repeal movement got under way, Maria cherished her hopes, placing what often amounted to a naive faith in the efficacy of the completion of Catholic Emancipation as a panacea for Ireland’s social and political ills. She chose to forget the logic of her own convictions about estate-management and landlord-tenant relations with its inexorable conclusions on the needs for social changes. After this gigantic piece of self-deception the ultimate disappointment was all the more vexing. Bitter touches enter into her letters and conversation ...’ [35]. [Cont.]

Michael Hurst (Maria Edgeworth and the Public Scene, 1969) - cont.: ‘When O’Connell contrived to link the patriotic and nationalistic self-assertion of the new Catholic middle class to the agrarian and nationalist discontents of the rural masses though the medium of the Catholic priesthood, a weapon was forged giving independence to the movement for Catholic Emancipation and reducing the importance [35] of those like the Edgeworth’s who supported change from the angle of enlightened Protestantism.’ (pp.35-36.) Hurst repeatedly remarks on the contradiction in her position between her support of Catholic emancipation and her ‘desire an essentially static society’ and further remarks that this discrepancy ‘never seemed to have occurred to her’ (p.51.) ‘Lie the liberal “White” in an Asia or African colony in our own times, Maria saw her function more than swallowed up by a militant mass movement’ (p.52). He does not broach Castle Rackrent in any detail, confining himself to three occasional remarks (p.28, 33, 52.) He cites Maria’s long letter of advise to the landlord Sneyd who has been opposed by his own tenants at the instigation of the priests: “Because the priests have used force and intimidation such as their situation and means put in their power, are landlord to do likewise and are the poor tenants in this world and the next to be evicted and excommunicated between them? Are we to recriminate and revenge because the priests and the people have done so, beaten or beating as brutal force decides? [...] Landlord, if you begin the recriminatory system on or after elections with your tenants, where will it end in Ireland?” [82 ... &c.] [Cont.]

Michael Hurst (Maria Edgeworth and the Public Scene, 1969) - cont.: Discusses the ‘hanging gale’ and kindred matters citing Memoir of Maria Edgeworth with a Selection from her Letters , III, 168ff.] The same contains an expression of the case in the form of an example drawn on Michael Langan: ‘Now to go to particular instances and to cases and tenants in question. Michael Langan has paid his rent, but when May comes the question remains whether he is to be called upon and forced or not to pay May 1835 as soon as due. If he can and does without force - very well. happy for him. He may be saved from drinking by not having the money to drink. And if he does not pay, why (if the election were out of sight), I should say it is good to get rid of a drunken tenant.’ [She asks Sneyd to determinate the case of Dermot, but gives her advice:] ‘not to drive, to let the matter rest with him as it is.... but I must say, my dear Sneyd, that I cannot as a woman be the driver [meaning evictor]. I must surrender Dermod into the hands of Mr Hinds and you will be so kind as to desire me to do so that I may not have the appearance of so doing in what is called a pet.’ [ibid.]; ‘None of Paddy’s little ways, above all his weakness for the Life of Riley had escaped her eagle eye. She had long been vehemently opposed to the mere doling out of benefits as kindnesses to tenants without exacting a price, however small it might be.’ (p.104). Note, the greater part of this work is taken up with a detailed account of the political context of the Edgeworths’ lives and their dealing with contemporary forces and issues, tracing Maria Edgeworth’s mixed reactions to the different moments in the march of Catholic emancipation and the Repeal movement and to successive English administrations. The author has also written on Joseph Chamberlain, and ‘Parnell and Irish Nationalism’. Fellow in Mod. History and Pols., St John’s College, Oxford.

[ top ]

Patrick Murray, ‘The Irish Novels of Maria Edgeworth,’ in Studies, LIX (Autumn 1970), pp.267-78. ‘[...] Castle Rackrent is, by comment consent, Maria Edgeworth’s greatest single achievement in fiction. Here the novelists is clearly innocent of any palpable design upon her readers. Moral and social judgements are withheld as she goes about her business of telling a good story. ... there is no heroine, no romantic interest, no concern with [273] educational or social reform. Historically the most important of the novels, Castle Rackrent would still have survived had it exercised no influence whatever. Its appeal is largely independent of the time, place and circumstances of its composition. It traces the history of the declining fortunes of the Rackrent family through several generations. The narrator, an old retainer named Thady Quirk, who calls himself Honest Thady, adopts a standpoint of absolute loyalty to the pathetic series of landlords he has served so long. The narrative is a delightful amalgam of shrewd and penetrating comment, sly humour, naiveté, and lively anecdote. The vices and follies of the Rackrents are exposed with so sympathetic an indulgence that we are induced to regard them almost as virtues. They are drunken, slovenly and ignorant, excessively fond of ruinous litigation. Sir Murtagh, in particular, has a prodigious fondness for the processes of law. He had, Thady informs his readers, sixteen suits pending at one time: “roads, lanes, bogs, wells, ponds, eel-wires, orchards, trees, tithes, vagrants, gravel-pits, sandpits, dunghills and nuisances, everything upon the face of the earth furnished him good matter for a suit.” Unfortunately, learned as he was in the law, even the suits he carried lost him money. “Out of forty-nine suits which he had, he never lost one but seventeen; the rest he gained with costs, double costs, treble costs sometimes; but even that did not pay.” All the Rackrents are utterly careless of their own and their tenants’ welfare, good-natured to the point of stupidity, forever hoping that their shattered fortunes will somehow be repaired without their having to make any worthwhile effort. (p.273.)

Patrick Murray (‘The Irish Novels of Maria Edgeworth’, 1970) - cont.: ‘Thady Quirk is commonly taken at his own valuation as an honest, faithful, unselfishly loyal servant who feels deeply for his ruined masters and who is more than willing to excuse their worst failings. But one of the great triumphs of Castle Rackrent is the novelist’s subtly ambivalent presentation of the old steward. To regard him merely as an artless, simpleminded old man is to miss completely the wealth of irony which pervades the whole narrative. It is surely no coincidence that the gradual collapse of the Rackrents should be accompanied by the steady emergence of Thady’s calculating son Jason as a man of affluence. Jason, indeed, makes his fortune, not without some assistance from his father, at the expense of the very family whose ruin seems to cause Thady so much pain.’ (p.273.)

Patrick Murray (‘The Irish Novels of Maria Edgeworth’, 1970) - cont.: ‘The irony of Castle Rackrent is that Thady’s much-vaunted loyalty to the Rackrents should be the principal means of his son’s acquisition of their estates. Seen in this light, his constant praise of his ill-starred masters can appear deeply tinged with cynicism; faithful, loyal Thady is no better than honest Iago, and his subtle ingenuity seems to have deceived very many readers. But even without his help and the machinations of Jason, it is difficult not to feel that [274] the reckless proceedings of the Rackrents must ultimately issue in their own destruction. Careful re-reading will readily elicit enough clues upon which to erect a structure of adverse moral judgments on the character of Thady. But these are not the reflections likely to impose themselves on most readers of Castle Rackrent. What is more, they do not represent the essential spirit of the novel. Stern evaluations are out of place mainly because in the fantastic world of Castle Rackrent, serious values tend to dissolve sometimes into pathos but more often into laughter. [...].’ (For longer extracts, see attached.)

Patrick Murray, ‘Maria Edgeworth and Her Father: the Literary Partnership’, in Éire-Ireland, 6, 3 (Autumn 1971), pp.39-50: notes that ‘[a]s a punishment for some trivial offense, he ordered her to walk around a grass plot in the garden of Edgeworthstown House until he returned from a visit he was paying. He was away longer than he had anticipated, but the young Maria continued to walk, not even pausing for food, until she could walk no more.’ (p.39.)

[ top ]

Marilyn Butler Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1972), quotes Maria, ‘... we were neither born nor bred in Ireland ... &c [as above]’; in Essay on Irish Bulls (Butler, p.247). ‘Look for me in The Absentee’ (quoted in Butler, p.345, with comment: ‘The sense of responsibility which emanates from the Irish part of The Absentee is overwhelming.’ (ibid., p.380); further, Castle Rackrent was ‘written for mere amusement, without any ideas of publishing’ (ibid., p.40); ‘She [Maria] found it unpalatable that she had made the quaint archaic narrator more interesting than the Rackrents, who as landlords had in reality a more significant part to play in Irish life.’ (ibid., p.306). Butler makes an apology for Ennui, ‘the end ... is intended to show how a man’s personal salvation is bound up in his actions as a member of society.’ (p.373) Butler calls the Irish passages of Absentee ‘sentimental idylls out of key with Maria Edgeworth’s best manner [which was] based on observation from life.’ (p.375.) [Cont.]

Marilyn Butler (Maria Edgeworth, A Literary Biography, 1972) - cont. [on the Colambre-Grace Nugent plot:] ‘[I]t is flimsy and incidental to the novel’s larger accomplishments as a satire on the social and economic issues of a national culture’; ‘the concluding section of The Absentee is almost exclusively taken up with the disentangling of a sub-plot about the good name of the heroine’s mother. It is not relevant to the theme of absenteeism [...] As a whole, therefore, The Absentee is very uneven.’ [Butler holds that Edgeworth might be thought to believe that ] ‘the passage of thoroughly selfish and irresponsible landlords is to be regretted when they come from a native Irish family and can command a feudal type of loyally from some of their peasants.’ [q.p.] Further: ‘[Maria Edgeworth] wants to make sure that Lord Colambre is acceptable to the reader as a reliable witness of Irish life.’ (Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography, 1972, p.375.)

Patrick Sheeran, “The Novels of Liam O’Flaherty: A Study in Romantic Realism” [Ph.D. Diss.] (UCG 1972), p.173: ‘The material of the novel [Castle Rackrent] is the history of the Rackrent family - precisely the same material (seanchas) which was employed by the seanchaí in their tales of family sagas and genealogies. Further it is written entirely in oral style the rise and fall of four generations of the Rackrents is told by [172] their servant Thady Quirk. If we bring Castle Rackrent into relation with, say, the oral romances collected by Douglas Hyde in Sgealta Thomais Ui Chathasaig[h] (Dublin 1939) new aspects of the work, many of them flatly contradictory to received opinion, spring to the eye. To take but one example. It is a commonplace of criticism of Castle Rackrent, to focus on the tension between the narrator’s story and his own understanding of it, between the family “in fact” and as it appears in Thady’s imagination [here quotes Thomas Flanagan]: “The meaning and passion with which he instinctively invests the words “honor” and “loyalty” lead him to bring forth evidence which prompts the reader to a quite different judgment of the Rackrents.” (Flanagan, The Irish Novelists, 1959, p.91.) / That is, the reader accustomed to the novel of manners. Thady invests the words “honor” and “loyalty” with the same meanings and passions as the narrator of Thomas Casey’s stories where there is no ironic gap between story and teller. They refer us, not to a code of manners where Rackrent extravagances are extravagances but to an older, albeit decayed code, where there is an aura of the heroic, the wildly romantic. Thady, after all, tells his tale for “the honor of the family”. This, of course, is not the whole story - “... evidence which prompts the reader ...”, as readers, concerned with the complexities of the written word, we are forced to pay attention to such things as irony and ambiguity. But place Thady’s tale among the thousands of folktales of similar type and one can only agree with his final comment - which is itself a trope of Gaelic folktales: “[...] where’s the use of telling lies about the things everybody knows as well as I do?”’ (Castle Rackrent, Everyman’s Library Edn., 1968, pp.66.) [For full text version, see RICORSO Library, “Irish Critical Classics”, via index, or direct.)

[ top ]

Patrick Rafroidi, Irish Literature in English, The Romantic Period, 1789-1850, Vol. 1 (1980, ‘The Case of Miss Edgeworth’, in Rafroidi, pp.5-12. Maria Edgeworth’s works of fiction were ... the war-horses of anti-Romanticism, and since France was linked to revolution, they were also anti-French. [5]. ALSO, In Essay on Irish Bulls, the Edgeworths express surprise at the indignation of certain Irish historians, like O’Halloran, at the phrases by Voltaire in Le Siècle de Louis XIV, as follows, “Il y a des nations dont l’une semble faite pour d’être soumise a l’autre ... &c. [There are nations which seem to have been made to be subjected to the other nations. The English have always been superior to the Irish in matters of genius, riches, and arms. The superiority that the white have over the blacks].” The phrases had in fact been deleted from editions subsequent to the first. The Edgeworths, having some pages earlier ‘throw[n] off the mask ... unable any longer to support the tone of irony’, here comment, ‘As we were neither born nor bred in Ireland, we cannot be supposed to possess this amor patriae in its full force; we profess to be attached to the country, only for its merits; we acknowledge, that it is a matter of indifference to us whether the Irish derive their origin from the Spaniards or the Milesians, or the Welsh [...] and by this declaration we have no fear of giving offence to any but rusty antiquarians.’ Edgeworth’s fear of the sentimental cult of history arises from its tendency ‘to inculcate democracy, and a foolish hankering after some ill-defined liberty; this is peculiarly dangerous in Ireland.’ (Memoirs of R. L. Edgeworth, II, p.457.) [12] [Cont.]

Patrick Rafroidi (Irish Literature in English, 1980) - cont. ‘Edgeworth’s involvement with Day in the adoption of two girls from the London Foundlings and the Shrewsbury orphanage for purposes of a Rousseauesque experiment in education recounted in Jacques Voisine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau en Angleterre, pp.45 seq. [13]; Maria Edgeworth recommended Lover as an illustrator for Garry Owen; professes ‘I know nothing in the world of him but these sketches and his writing [in Legends and Stories of Ireland, hence cited as Irish Stories and Legends] - both excellent - I never saw him.’ (Quoted in Slade, Maria Edgeworth 1767-1849 [1937], p.192; Rafroidi remarks it is amusing to note this mutual ignorance of two of the most popular Irish novelists [28]; cites Mrs. S. C. Hall, ‘I remember having a conversation with my friend, Maria Edgeworth. She did not see so clearly as I saw the value of imagination in literature ... and was almost angry when she discovered that a sketch I had written of a scene at Killarney was pure invention. She ... argued strongly for truth in fiction’ (quoted in C. J. Hamilton, Notable Irishwomen, p.36 [37]; Rafroidi quotes Lord Colambre, ‘The sobriety of English good sense mixed most advantageously with Irish vivacity; English prudence governed but did not extinguish his Irish enthusiasm.’ (The Absentee, Ch. I, 1893 Dent ed., p.8.); Maria’s policy for Ireland, ‘[to] diffuse happiness through the wide circle, which is peculiarly subject to the influence and example of a great resident Irish proprietor.’ (Absentee, Chap. XXVII, idem., p.327.) [104] [Cont.]

Patrick Rafroidi (Irish Literature in English, 1980) - cont. Rafroidi cites ‘realities & passions are too strong, &c.’, Letters, ed. A Hare, II, p.550; Note also comparison with Lady Morgan, in respective descriptions of Giant’s Causeway [Owenson, q.v.]. See also his summary of Ennui: the Count of Glenthorn is brought up in a peasant’s cabin and Christie O’Donoghoe is raised as a lord. The later renounces his property but is called back to resume the title, when the [new] Count says, ‘The castle’s burnt down all to the ground and my Johnny’s dead ... the occasion of his death was owing to drink, which he fell into from getting too much money, and nothing to do and a snuff of a candle. When going to bed last night, a little in liquor, what does he do but takes the candle and sticks it up against the head of his bed, as he used oftentimes to do, without detriment, in the cabin where he was reared, against the mud-wall. But this was close to an ould window curtain [....] There’s no use describing all - the short of it is, there’s nothing remaining of the castle but the stones ... I will go back to my forge, and by the help of God, forget my work what has passed.... come reign over us again.’ A note by Maria adds, ‘Glenthorn is now rebuilding.’ (Ennui, Chap. XXII, 1893 ed., pp.245-7.) [107].

[ top ]

Seamus Deane, A Short History of Irish Literature (London: Hutchinson 1982), on Castle Rackrent: ‘The tale is set in the eighteenth century, in the years before the achievement of parliamentary independence in 1782. After that, not much else is certain, except that Thady’s voice is a new one in fiction. He has more than a dialect, he has a style: insinuating, colourful and agreeable. But is it also ironic? Is Thady a pseudo-simpleton, taking a degree of pleasure in telling the tale of Ascendancy ruin and the rise of the Irish middle class, represented by his son Jason of whom he pretends to disapprove? If this reading is dismissed, it can quickly be replaced by the more sombre view of the tale as a requiem for the Ascendancy, to which Maria Edgeworth belonged and for which the Union was the final stroke of doom. It could even be a lament for the passing of that ramshackle but warm-hearted Ireland of the early century, replaced now by the more sober and duller society that was still in a state of shock after 1798 and the Union. Or, finally, and perhaps most persuasively, Rackrent is the aggressive prelude to Edgeworth’s later novels on Ireland, a demonstration of the ruin which an irresponsible aristocracy brings upon itself and upon its dependents. This is a moral judgement not accessible to Thady, who is, bluntly, too stupid and blinded by his pathetic loyalty, to see the significance of the tale he tells. Certainly, Edgeworth’s later work supports this last reading, although the other readings are important too in their readiness to see in this work a useful point of origin for the representation of modern Ireland in fiction. The meaning of the relationship between landlord and peasant may be a matter of dispute, but its centrality is not. In that respect, Rackrent does point towards the future, even though it is also concerned to dismiss an unfortunate past.’ (p.92.)

Further: ‘Maria Edgeworth, as part of her education enterprise to both the Irish and the English, wished to demonstate that the Irish need justice and responsible government so that they might be more recognisably “civil” inhabitants of the modern world of industrial Britain rather than the eccentric remains of an outmoded past.’ (p.93). Also: ‘[H]er will to educate may have been felt to turn potentially brilliant stories into treatises, which unreservedly recommend Irish landlords to return to their estates in Ireland and forgo the second rate life of absenteeism in English.’ (Literary History, 1986, cp.92). Bibl. cites Marilyn Bulter, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford 1972); J. M. S. Thomkins, The Popular Novel in England 1770-1800 (London 1932), p.187; Harrison R. Steeves, Before Jane Austen (London 1966), pp.315-31; Thomas Flanagan, The Irish Novelists, 1800-1850 (NY 1960), pp.54-106; John Cronin, The Anglo-Irish Novel, Vol. 1 (Belfast 1980); Cronin, ‘The Nineteenth Century: A Retrospect’, in A. Martin, ed., The Genius of Irish Prose (Dublin & Cork 1985), pp.10-21; James Cahalan, The Irish Historical Novel (NY 1984), pp.10-25; also George Watson, ed. and intro., Castle Rackrent (London 1964).

Seamus Deane, A Short History of Irish Literature (London: Notre Dame UP 1986); ‘[Maria Edgeworth portrayed] a whole community, hitherto ignored or the object of caricature and antipathy, in its historical reality as reflected through a relatively colourless central character. As a consequence, ancillary groups or characters are often more vividly represented, because they are the object of observation. The observer is always to some degree detached, a commentator as well as a participant.’ (p.96; quoted in Jacqueline Belanger, ‘Educating the Reading Public: British Critical Reception of Maria Edgeworth’s Early Irish Writing’, in Irish University Review, Autumn/Winter 1998, pp.240-55 [available at JSTOR online], p.240).

James Cahalan, Great Hatred, Little Room, The Irish Historical Novel (Syracuse UP/Gill & Macmillan 1983), In his ‘General Preface to the Waverley Novels’, Sir Walter Scott recalled that he had completed Waverley impelled by ‘the extended and well-merited fame of Miss Edgeworth, whose Irish characters have gone so far to make the English familiar with the character of their gay and kind-hearted neighbours of Ireland, that she may be truly said to have done more towards completing the Union than perhaps all the legislative enactments by which it has been followed up’ (General Preface to the Waverley Novels, 1., xxi): ‘[1 felt that] something might be attempted for my own country, of the same kind with that which Miss Edgeworth so fortunately achieved for Ireland - something which might introduce her natives to those of the sister kingdom in a more favourable light than they had been placed hitherto, and tend to procure sympathy for their virtues and indulgence for their foibles.’ (xxii; also cited in P. J. Kavanagh, Voices in Ireland, 1994, p.63).

[ top ]

John Devitt, ‘Thady, Jason and the Golden Fleece’, in Michael Bevan, ed., ATE: Journal of the Association of Teachers of English, No. 10 (Spring 1983), pp.21-25: ‘Thady’s syntax is remarkable. There is little or no subordination, little sense of things being apprehended simultaneously and judiciously placed. What the language does give is a sense of vivid succession, a sense of one thing after another seen and retailed in all innocence. Thady’s syntax does not enter judgements or traffic in qualifications. It is a torrential kind of speech, almost irresistible. There are some sentences of astonishing length which appear to be toppling to destruction with all the bonds of syntax broken. It is also an elliptical style, intensely enigmatic, which makes of the reader something of a collaborator.’ (p.21); cites Edgeworth’s Preface remarking that Thady’s idiom, is ‘incapable of translation’ into plain English; continues, ‘This disclaimer of literary ambition of [22] a conventional kind is hardly ironic. She is interested in exploring the labyrinthine recesses of Thady’s language and the whole process is free, for the most part of any suspicion of purely colonial curiosity. Thady and his wonderfully fluid syntax are one and Maria Edgeworth is refined out of existence. A contrast with Swift’s use of various personae may be useful here. We are meant to rumble the projector in A Modest Proposal and to enter into an ironic complicity with Swift, not with Lemuel Gulliver, as we read Gulliver’s Travels. The experience of reading Castle Rackrent is quite different.’ (pp.22-23.) [Cont.]

John Devitt (‘Thady, Jason and the Golden Fleece’, 1983) - cont.: ‘Jason’s very name suggests a single-minded pursuit of success but Thady is happily ambivalent. He prompts and seconds Jason’s move but when his son reaches his goal, the old man prefers to gesture nostalgically and romantically towards a part which never was. (p.23.); The suggestion that Maria Edgeworth’s imagination is not able to cope with her material has gained a certain currency. Some critics would classify her as a colonial writer who simply exhibits what she is unable to penetrate ... The business of the coat which the old retainer insists on wearing as if it were a cloak is probably an example of Maria yielding to the temptation to provide an easy laugh. ... But ... [t] role of the narrator in Castle Rackrent is generally more interesting than the provision of cheap laughs and his language is far too subtle and interesting to be patronised as a kind of deviation from standard speech. That wonderfully abundant speech and fluid syntax enables Thady to escape detection while bringing his ambitions to fulfilment.’ Note sthat Devitt underscores the phrase ‘[...] nobody need bid against us’ as indicative of a collusion between Thady and his son (here p.23); also emphasises the admiration of Jason’s ruthlessness implied in the phrases, ‘The balance has been running on too long (says Jason, sticking to him [Condy] as I could not have done at the time if you’d given both the Indies and Cork to boot); the balance has been running on too long, and I’m distressing myself on your account, Sir Condy, for money, and the thing must be settled now on the spot, and the balance cleared off.’ (here p.24.)

[ top ]

Tom Dunne, Maria Edgeworth and the Colonial Mind [O’Donnell Lecture, UCC; 27 June 1984] (Cork UP 1984), 23pp.; pays homage to Oliver MacDonagh; discusses the use of literature for history; cites Patrick Sheeran’s application of Memmi’s division of the colonist into those who ‘accept’ and those who ‘refuse’: ‘Among the colonisers who accept, there is Maria Edgeworth’ (P. F. Sheeran, ‘Some Aspects of Anglo-Irish Literature from Swift to Joyce’, in Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 13, 1983, pp.102-04.) Notes that Maria Edgeworth read Spenser on Ireland (View) within months of her arrival; ‘like him, Edgeworth argued that the civilisation of Irish life involved Anglicisation in every facet’ (p.6); notes that recent literary criticism is unwilling to accept’ Watson’s view of Thady as ‘this absurdly loyal family retainer’ (Watson, xxi; here p.6.) ‘She was at pains to emphasise that her fictional family was a native Irish one, which in the recent past had been forced into the double apostasy of changing both its name and religion in order to gain the estate [...] Thus [...] the descendants of a stereotypical native Irish aristocratic family [...] are displaced by the sons of a native Irish servant, who exhibits other aspects of the Irish stereotype - deviousness, flattery, and dishonesty,’ (p.7.) Remarks on the ‘absence of her own class from Edgeworth’s novel’ (ibid.); ‘by omitting the Ascendancy ... while insinuating its perspective as dominant through the commentary, Edgeworth was able to distance it from the patent evils of the system’ (p.8.); quotes Marilyn Butler’s view of Castle Rackrent as ‘a limited and eccentric’ early squib, a novel at odds, not only with itself, but with the intentions of the author’ (Maria Edgeworth, 1972, q.p.) [Cont.]

Tom Dunne (Maria Edgeworth and the Colonial Mind, 1984) - cont.: ‘A ... feature of Castle Rackrent is the way in which the mentality of peasant servility and subversion combined is captured so successfully by the narration of Thady Quirk’ (p.8); P. F. Sheeran, [calls Thady] ‘a superb portrait of a colonised man ... a man who does not exist for himself’ and is defined by his relation to his masters ‘to the extent of believing it much more than they do themselves’ (Sheeran, op. cit., p.104); in contradistinction to this view, Dunne believes that Thady ‘threaten[s] the system’, and that he is a ‘Caliban in the guide of a quaint stage-Irish Ariel, his devious and false servility a direct product of the colonial system, and destined, through his crucial aid to his son, to be its nemesis. The opening paragraphs of the novel establish him in this role with brilliant economy of works’ (p.80) [goes on to cite the allusion to Spenser in regard to Thady’s great coat considered as a badge of subversion, and ‘apt cloak for a thief’ (Dunne, p.9.) ‘Thady is, in fact, a subversive’ (p.9); ‘feigns disapproval of his son’s activities’ (p.9); ‘Thady’s final mock-battle with Jason’ (p.9); ‘By manipulating servility, therefore, the Quirks achieve the common peasant dream, noted in any contemporary accounts, of repossessing the land which they believed was historically theirs.’ (p.10.) [Cont.]

Tom Dunne (Maria Edgeworth and the Colonial Mind, 1984) - cont.: ‘A detailed analysis of the text ... would, I believe, yield abundant evidence for the reading indicated here. The problem lies less with the text than in the inherent probability of [Edgeworth]. With her English upbringing and her rationalist utilitarian philosophy ... [having] such remarkable insight into the minds of those she called the “lower Irish”’ (p.10); [her] letters of are little use, and their psychological roots in the need for family approval ... have been explained by Butler’ (p.10); quotes familiar passage on John Langan, ‘he seemed to stand beside me and dictate ... &c.’ ([Letter of 6 Sept. 1834] cited in Butler, Maria Edgeworth, pp.240-41, here pp.10-11); ‘The half dozen other brief references to him, scattered throughout her correspondence, show him in the roles of trusted servant, court jester, and interpreter of native customs and superstitions’ ... One can speculate that her remarkable insights into peasant attitudes were in part an unconscious reflection of Langan’s: or, if not his own attitudes, then perhaps of his interpretation of those of the “rubbles”, as he called them (Hare, Life and Letters, Vol. I, p.240) who threatened Edgeworthstown during the period of the novel’s composition’ (p.11); ‘next to her Father, Langan was her principal guide to this new world’ (p.11.)[Cont.]

Tom Dunne (Maria Edgeworth and the Colonial Mind, 1984) - cont.: Dunne quotes Maria on the injustice of tithes, ‘because in former times injustice was done in which we had neither act nor part, but took our property as it came to us’ (quoted in Hurst, p.91); discusses Edgeworths sentiments towards there own Catholic relations, including Jean Tuite and the Abbé Edgeworth, whose life Dunne considers that Maria probably wrote, though attributed to her brother’ (p.12); ‘tensions about their colonial identity’ (p.12); quotes R L Edgeworth, ‘I had always thought that if it were in the power of any man to serve the country which gave him bread, he ought to sacrifice every consideration and reside where he could be most useful’ (Memoir, 1, p.360); regards Marcus O’Shane, Hardcastle, and McCrule as types of her father’s assailants’ (p.13); ‘Glenthorns, like Rackrents, are apostate native Irish gentry’ (p.13); regards the name Killpatrick as a ‘comic evocation of apostasy’, and implies that the Clonbronys have the same background (p.13); discusses the apparent preference for Irish gentry who remain Catholic to those who turn their coats, instanced by the cases of Sir Ulick and ‘King’ Corny who was ‘the true thing and never changed’ (Ormond; here p.13); disputes Flanagan’s view that O’Halloran’s antiquarian museum is a ‘repository of Gaelic nationalism’ (p.14.) [Cont.]

Tom Dunne (Maria Edgeworth and the Colonial Mind, 1984) - cont.: ‘Edgeworth’s fascination with the native Irish world was traditionally colonial in that she portrayed it as both barbarous and seductive. While clearly in need of civilisation, it offers certain [14] temptations to those who might undertake the task’ (p.15); ‘There were, therefore, some elements of sympathy in Edgeworth’s portrayal of tradition social relationships, if only because of their potential in creating class harmony. With all its faults, traditional society seemed preferable to a particular native Irish rejection of its values, which she despised - the crass materialism that characterised Jason Quirk, Ulick O’Shane, Nicholas Geraghty [recte Garraghty] and White Connell.’ (p.15.)‘Edgeworth made overt in Kelly [the retainer who becomes a UI man] what was covert in Thady, and finally wrote directly of the reality of the peasant threat from within, in 1798 (p.16); Dunne holds that the Brady’s servile love for his master echoes ‘though without irony’ Thady’s gratitude to Sir Kit (p.17.)‘A central aspect of Edgeworth’s analysis of the mentality of the Irish peasantry was the language she had them speak and her explanation of some of its key characteristics. ... In her Irish works there are two distinct kinds of this Hiberno-English The first was a richly varied and eloquent “foreign” language which she sought to explain to her English readers in rational, comparative terms. She did this to combat a pervasive and damaging anti-Irish prejudice and to underline the potential for loyalty and improvement inherent in the Irish character. The other was servile, cajoling, flattering, deceiving; the language of survival as developed by a vulnerable people. This she explained as an understandable if regrettable response to the arrogant and abrasive language and attitudes of many members of the Irish colonial ascendancy.’ (p.17.) [Cont.]

Tom Dunne (Maria Edgeworth and the Colonial Mind, 1984) - cont.: Dunne discusses Essay on Irish Bulls and quotes: ‘Impute a peculiar mental disease to a given people, show them that it incapacitates them from speaking or acting with common sense, expose their infirmities continually to public ridicule, and in time probably, this people may be subjugated to that sense of inferiority and to that acquiescence in a state of dependence, which is the necessary consequence of the conviction of imbecility. (Essay, Garland. Edn., 1978, p.20); cites a serious of like comments from the novels: ‘the rhetoric of my tenants succeeded in some instances’ (Ennui, in Tales of Fash. Life, Garland edn., p.103); ‘this ‘equivocating, exculpatory or supplicatory’ language (Castle Rackrent, Garland edn., pp.28-29), this ‘perplexing and provoking mixture of truth and fiction’ (Ennui, p.85); notes several comparisons with linguistic cunning of West Indian negro; quotes Edgeworth on middlemen: ‘The poor detest this race of beings. In speaking to them, however, they always use the most abject language and the most humble tone and posture. “Please your honour - and please your honour’s honour’ they knew must be repeated as a charm at the beginning and the ending.’ (Castle Rackrent, Garland edn., 28-29); ‘I defy him to get the truth out of them, if they don’t wish to tell it’; and for some reason or other, they will, nine times out of ten not wish to tell it to an Englishman. There is not a man, woman or child in any cabin in Ireland, who would not have wit and cuteness enough to make my lard believe just what they please.’ (Ennui, p.149); ‘if she is a colonist who “accepts”, her acceptance of the system involved remarkable understanding of the mentality of its victims, and a passionate desire to make the colonial power and the colonial ruling class reappraise their attitudes and policies.’ (END; p.21.)

Tom Dunne, ‘Edgeworthstown in Fact and Fiction, 1760-1840’, in Longford: Essays in County History, ed., Raymond Gillespie and Gerard Moran (Dublin: Lilliput 1991), pp.95-121, an extended version of the foregoing, this includes a good deal more historical and social detail, largely drawn from ‘The Black Book’ of the Edgeworths, including comments and quotations ‘This repeated pattern [King Corny, &c.] suggests Edgeworth may have regretted that some way had not been found of combining modernisation with the traditional loyalty given by the people to the old native families, even when they changed religion.’ (p.99); regards the Glossary as an ‘authoritative subtext [and] the key to the ironic “loyalty” of Thady and to the novel’s warning about the gragility of the colonial settlement’ (p.100); reads Castle Rackrent as ‘what might have happened’ to the Edgeworth estate (p.100); in Ennui, a peasant takeover is ‘masked’ by having the heir brought up as a member of the Donoghue peasant family (p.100); cites a document forged by ‘an antient servant of the Edgeworth family’ as a correlate of Jason’s actions (p.102); recounts R. L. Edgeworth’s discomforts in English and in Irish schools (p.102); RLE’s later claim that he never supportes those ‘led further away from the influence of aristocracy than was prudent’ (p.104); his sympathy for ‘the lowest order of the people’ (p.104); Maria’s fear of ‘having her throat cut’ (p.104); her account of 1798: ‘We were obliged to fly from Edgeworthstown. The pike men, three hundred in number, actually were within a mile of the town. My mother, aunt Charlottt and I rode; passed the trunk of the dead man, bloody limbs of horses’ (p.105); ‘The scenes we have gone through for some days past have succeeded one another like the pictures in a magic lantern and have scarcely left an impression of reality upon the mind. It all seems like a dream, a mixture of the ridiculous and the horrid. (Memoirs, II, pp.213-32 [sic]; Hare, I, 56; here p.106); ‘to see the old Castle of Cranalagh from which Lady Edgeworth was in the time of the last rebellion (but one) turned out naked. I should say without clothes to a lady of your delicacy - God save that we may never be turned out in the same way - especially as this is very raw weather of Lady Godiva’s and peeping Toms of Coventry’ (Memoirs, ii, 234-35; here p.106.) [Cont.]

Tom Dunne (‘Edgeworthstown in Fact and Fiction, 1760-1840’, 1991), cont. - quotes Edgeworth: ‘I am a unionist, but I vote and speak against the union now proposed to us ... It is intended to force this measure down the throats of the Irish, though five-sixths of the nation are against it. Now I think such a union as would edentitfy the nations so that Irteland should be as Yorkshire to Great Britain, would be an excellent thing; yet I also think that the good people of Ireland ought to be persuaded of this of this truth, and not to be dragooned into submission.’ (p.107); considers Edgeworthstown Hse as the family found in in 1782 the true model for Castle Rackrent (p.109); cites Hardcastle’ attack on the proposal that the poor should be educated (p.110); quotes ‘.. bad hands and bad hearts ...’ (pp.110-11); discusses the loyalty of the pearsants to King Corney and Prince Harry in Ormond (p.112); cites Marilyn Butler’s view that RLE was ‘a typical anglo-Irish landlord in everything except book-keeping’ (Butler, Maria Edgeworth, p.73; here p.114); ME writes of RLE, ‘against his own good nature and generosity ... he ... took especial care that they [the tenants] should be convinced of his strictness in punishing, as well as of his desire to reward’ (Memoirs, p.114); ME: ‘democracy, ... the monstrous, the digusting absurdity of letting the many-headed, the greasy manyheaded monster rule. The French Revolution gave us enough of the majority of the people’ (p.82). NOTE, Dunne ends with a footnote noting the remarkable fact that the leading Emancipation historian of today [Fergus O’Ferrall] is a Longford O’Ferrall being the family displaced by the Edgeworths [ftn.82.]

[ top ]

Benedict Kiely, A Raid into Dark Corners and Other Essays (Cork UP 1999), ‘Ned McKeown’s Two Doors: An Approach to the Novel in Ireland’ [formerly in Ireland and the Arts, ed. Tim Pat Coogan], p.5: ‘As for Maria Edgeworth: she became an Irish novelist, a great novelist, almost, you might say, by a curious sort of accident. Those improving tales she wrote under the guidance of her great and most admirable father are perfect of their European kind and period. They have entitled her to be forgotten in the company of other impeccable female authors. The happy accident that made her forever memorable was that down there at Edgeworthstown she listened a lot to her father’s land-steward, John Langan; she borrowed his turn of phrase, transmogrified him into Thady McQuirke, or Quirk, and set him to work to tell the story of Castle Rackrent, discovering, thus, a diction, an idiom, and revealing a society. Otherwise she might never have met the Irish people, even if, in The Absentee, she did send the young Lord Colambre to visit Mrs Rafferty, the merchant’s wife (Lilith to all Castle Catholics for evermore) in her seaside villa called Tusculum, near Bray, where the drawing-room was ‘fine with bad pictures and gaudy gildings’, and the windows all shut, and the company, like their betters, playing cards. As she travelled the Irish roads, Maria Edgeworth looked out of the window of her coach and saw their looped and windowed raggednesses begging on the roadside, and was genuinely concerned about their welfare, their lack of education and of the thrifty virtues. But that was not really to know them, certainly not as a novelist should know his or her subject.’

[ top ]

Robert Tracy, ‘Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan: Legality Verses Legitimacy’, in Nineteenth Century Fiction, 40, 1 (June 1985), pp.1-22: Point of departure, ‘puzzling ambivalence about the treatment of these weddings’ [in Castle Rackrent, Ennui, and Absentee]; Quotes Earl of Clare: ‘Confiscation is their common title, and form their first settlement they have been hemmed in on every side by the old inhabitants of the island, brooding over their discontents in sullen indignation.’ Further, Clare sought to persuade the House that they ‘never had been, and ... never could be, blended or reconciled with the native race.’ [Lecky, A History of Ireland in the 18th Century, abridged by L. P. Curtis, Chicago UP 1972, p.463; also quoted by Terry Eagleton in Heathcliff; and taken up in another context by Edmund Burke - viz, ‘the old violence’.) ‘Thady controls the story by choosing what he will tell us and how he will tell it. He had conventionally been taken as a naive narrator whose awe at the Rackrents’ wasteful and reckless behavior is a comic device used to heighten our sense of [their] self-induced tragedy. But Thady is not naive. He is well aware that the more foolishly the Rackrents behave, the more he and his family will prosper. He is resentful of Lady Murtagh because she keeps track of supplies and expenses ... [His] praise of extravagance and scorn of prudence hints at his own prosperity as that of the Rackrents declines, and he deliberately shapes the behaviour of the last Rackrent, Sir Condy, by instilling in him the desire to live up to the family tradition of waste. [...]’ [Cont.]

Robert Tracy (‘Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan: Legality Verses Legitimacy’, 1985) - cont.: ‘Jason had become manager of the estate, partly at Thady’s suggestion and partly as a result of his own calculated toadying to Sir Condy. Though Thady disaproves when Jason takes over the estate, their dispute seems to be about tactics: Thady would rather live off the estate and its owners; Jason would rather be owner. In any case, the Rackrents are surrounded by the predatory Quirks, eager to rob them in one way or another. Along with Thady and Jason, there is Judy M’Quirk, “daughter of a sister’s son of mine”, Thady tells us (CR, Watson, ed., p.43), who is Sir Condy’s mistress and who almost becomes Lady Rackrent. One way or another, the Irish peasants will take back the land from its Anglo-Irish owners - the mightmare of Anglo-Ireland.’ [4]; Tracy continues, ‘Maria Edgeworth seems to be grooming Lady Geraldine to be a less flamboyant version of Glorvina before she exiles her from Ennui. If this is so, Edgeworth is not just toying with Lady Morgan’s plot device of intermariage. She is close to addmitting that legal title and fair dealing are not enough to justify an Anglo-Irish landlord’s possession of his estates. He must also make some emotional appeal to the deper traditional loyalties of his peasants [i.e., legitimacy], must become in some way a part of the older tradition. An irrational element must be added to Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s rational recipe. But to the Edgeworths, as Marilyn Butler points out, ‘Irish traditions meant ... thesurvival of irrational and ineffcient habits: though they thought that extensive education among all classes was the best remedy for tradition.’ (ME, pp.394-95). To endorse Lady Geraldine’s Irishness by marrying her to the hero would be to accept and endorse Irish tradition and Irish identity. Clearly Maria Edgeworth’s instinct as a novelists, as well as her own awareness of the Ascendancy’s failure to put down roots in Ireland and failure to evoke loyalty from the Irish, impels her toward such an endorsement of Irish tradtion and Irish identity. But at the same time, her acceptance of Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s principles makes her draw back from such an endorsement and, ultimately, deny it. As a novelist, Maria Edgeworth values Irish tradition and Irish strangeness; as an economist she deplores these things and justifies her hero’s success by his hard [9] work, seriousness, his marriage to the legal heir to the Glenthorn estates. But there is a perfunctory air about this resolution.’ (Tracy, pp.9-10.) [Cont.]

Robert Tracy (‘Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan: Legality Verses Legitimacy’, 1985) - cont.: ‘Tracy goes on to discuss the case of Count O’Halloran, a Catholic aristocrat, in The Absentee, and at greater length, Grace Nugent; Tracy reads the documents of legitimation as establishing that Grace is actually an Englishwoman, dg. Of an English capt Reynolds in the Austrian service; however, the shadow of a wild goose and a Catholic hangs about him (or rather, Tracy misreads the situation in so far as no documents have suggested that he was otherwise.) [13]; He is arguing that she skews the plot that Morgan follows by not permitting a mixed marriage, but that in this novel she plays with such a transgression. Cites Thomas Reynolds, the United Irishmen’s betrayer, castigated by Curran as ‘a vile informer, the perjurer of a hundred oaths, a wretch whom pride, honour and religion cannot bind.’ (Pakenham, Year of Liberty, p. 328; and W. J. Fitzpatrick, The Sham Squire, Gill 1895, pp.149, 123.) He further associates the juxtaposition of the names Nugent and Reynolds with George Nugent Reynolds, 1770-1802, author of ‘The Catholic’s Lamentation’ (”Green were the Fields where my Forefathers dwelt, O”) [14] and draws the obvious conclusions about Maria’s sensitivities and sympathies; ‘By advancing and then denying Grace Nugent’s Irish identity, Maria Edgeworth seems at cross purposes with her own intentions ...’ [14.] [Cont.]

Robert Tracy (‘Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan: Legality Verses Legitimacy’, 1985) - cont.: ‘The Absentee represents Maria Edgeworth’s most elaborate development of the Lady Morgan plot, with its potential endorsement of the legitimate rights of the old Irish to their lands despite the legal ownership of the Anglo-Irish; and it also represents her most tortuous refusal to le that plot and its implications fully work themselves out.’ [16]; ‘retreats from the Lady Morgan solution of intermarriage and the consequent acheivement of legitimacy by uniting a legal owner of land with the heires of older and more sentimental rights’ [17]; cites history from Curtis (1936), in which ‘the chiefly names and all survivals of Irish law and customs were to be abolished .. the intention was to establish English landlordism and its dependent tenures.’ (rept. Edn. Methuen 1950, p.233; here 19); Tracy particularly applies this colonial principle to Francis Edgeworth, whoh received 600 acres at Mostrim, in according with James’s policy of setting Protestants ... &c. [quoting Butler, p.13]; ‘Maria Edgeworth’s flirtation with the theme of intermarriage indicates her awareness of Lady Morgan’s themes. They seem to have attracted her strongly, yet she could not bring herself to yield to that attraction, deterred perhaps by the implicit reservations about the position of the Anglo-Irish’ [19]; ‘her bleak sense that this estrangement could be made to vanish by an appeal to mutual interest and mutual fair dealing ... &c.’ [19.] [Cont.]

Robert Tracy (‘Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan: Legality Verses Legitimacy’, 1985) - cont.: Tracy cites Cathleen Ni Houlihan, Jacobite aislings, and Myles Dillon on banais rígi/royal wedding, and concludes: ‘Both writers seemed to grasp intuitively [that f]or the Anglo-Irish to rule [sic], it is not enough to have legal right or British protectionl It is necessary to connect in some way with Irish tradition, to recognise and respect that tradition and the attitudes it embodies, to become part of it. [22] Quotes William Trevor character, ‘history is not finished in this island’. [End.] Not the use of take back to describe the Quirks’ relation to the land. See also Tracy’s review of sundry works, in Nineteenth Century Fiction, 36, 2 (Sept. 1981): ‘With Castle Rackrent (1800) she invented the Big House novel, with its focus on an Ascendancy family and its frequent theme of defining the good landlord by urging the gentry to recognise their duties towards their estates and towards their tenants. Irish writers have been writing that novel ever since, gradually abandoning its didacticism for elegy, eventually to surround the Ascendancy in its decline with something of that twilight aura that earlier writers gave to Ossian and Cuchulain. / The Big House novel admitted the “meere Irish” as servants, agitators, or downtrodden tenantry, as objects of amusement, terror, exploitation, or compassion. Even Thady Quirk, in Castle Rackrent, is presented to us with the slyly ingratiating manner he adopted [sic] towards his employers - Maria Edgeworth never tries to show him with his mask off, though she hints her awareness of this other self.’ (pp.214-18.)