The Dispossessed State Maurer, Sara L. Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Maurer, Sara L. The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Project MUSE. doi:10.1353/book.12864. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/12864 [ Access provided at 2 Oct 2021 22:51 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The Dispossessed State This page intentionally left blank The Dispossessed State Narratives of Own ership in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland Sara L. Maurer The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore © 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2012 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Mary land 21218- 4363 www .press .jhu .edu Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Maurer, Sara L. The dispossessed state : narratives of ownership in nineteenth- century Britain and Ireland / Sara L. Maurer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN- 13: 978- 1- 4214- 0327- 4 (hardcover : acid- free paper) ISBN- 10: 1- 4214-0327- 7 (hardcover : acid- free paper) 1. En glish fi ction—19th century— History and criticism. 2. En glish fi ction—Irish authors—History and criticism. 3. Property in literature. 4. Land tenure— Government policy— Great Britain— History—19th century. 5. Land tenure— Government policy— Ireland—History—19th century. I. Title. PR878.P728D57 2012 823′.809—dc23 2011021305 A cata log record for this book is available from the British Library. 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For Don, inalienably This page intentionally left blank Contents Ac know ledg ments ix Introduction 1 1 Disowning to Own: Maria Edgeworth’s Irish Fiction and the Illegitimacy of National Own ership 19 2 The Forbearance of the State: John Stuart Mill and the Promise of Irish Property 55 3 Native Property: Young Ireland and the Irish Land Acts in the Victorian Proprietary Landscape 89 4 The Wife of State: Ireland and En gland’s Vicarious Enjoyment in Anthony Trollope’s Palliser Novels 133 5 At Home in the Public Domain: George Moore’s Drama in Muslin, George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways, and the Intellectual Property of Union 167 Afterword 206 Notes 211 Works Cited 223 Index 237 This page intentionally left blank Ac know ledg ments The ideas in this book were fostered at Indiana University, under the intelli- gent and generous guidance of Andrew H. Miller, Patrick Brantlinger, Deidre Lynch, and Janet Sorenson. There too, Purnima Bose and Eva Cherniavsky fi rst sparked my interest in colonial and postcolonial issues in literature. And in teaching me to teach writing, Christine Farris and Kathy O. Smith taught me much I needed to know in order to write this book. At Notre Dame I have been particularly indebted to the assistance and col- legiality of Graham Hammill, Susan Harris, Susannah Monta, and John Sitter. Whether they realize it or not, David Wayne Thomas and Katherine Zieman made crucial interventions into this research. While she was chair, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe’s advocacy created the conditions under which it was possi- ble for me to complete my manuscript. Chris Vanden Bossche’s contributions to this project, both administrative and intellectual, are unmatched by any col- league. I am grateful to Chris Fox, Maud Ellmann, Luke Gibbons, and the Keough- Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, whose faculty and visiting fellows have enriched my understanding of Ireland far beyond the nineteenth century. At the same time, the scholarship of graduate students Brook Cameron, Heather Edwards, Nathan Elliott, Benjamin Fischer, Jessica Hughes, Lara Karpenko, Maggie Nerio, and Teresa Huffman Traver made the nineteenth century a rich and enjoyable place to be. During the writing of this book Sarah McKibben and Naunihal Singh pro- vided daily support and encouragement. I benefi ted from the writing advice and box wine of Wendy Arons, Robert Goulding, Margaret Meserve, Emily Osborne, and Sophie White. I am grateful too for the long-distance encour- agement of Kathy Psomiades. Jeanne Barker- Nunn, Ivan Kreilkamp, Todd Kuchta, Richard Higgins, Maureen Martin, and Nick Williams all provided me with useful advice during the fi nal stages of the project. Mary Jean Cor- bett’s careful and knowledgeable review of this manuscript on behalf of the Johns Hopkins University Press proved indispensible. Matt McAdam has been x Ac know ledg ments the model of an effi cient and responsive editor. I am grateful, too, for Glenn Perkins’s attention to this manuscript during copyediting. All errors remain my own. Research for this book was funded in part by the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame and the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Parts of chapter 1 have been reprinted from “Disowning to Own: Maria Edgeworth and the Illegitimacy of National Ownership” in Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 44, no 4, © 2002 Wayne State University Press, with the kind permis- sion of Wayne State University Press. An earlier version of chapter 4 appeared as “The Nation’s Wife: En gland’s Vicarious Enjoyment in Anthony Trollope’s Palliser Novels,” in Troubled Legacies: Narrative and Inheritance, edited by Allan Hepburn, © 2007 University of Toronto Press, and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the University of Toronto Press. I would not be the sort of person who wrote academic books were it not for the high quality of my very fi rst interlocutors— my parents, Larry and Sharon Maurer, who modeled for me an ethic of hard work and intellectual curiosity, and my siblings, Micheline Maurer, Laren Botello, Kierstin Maurer, and Travis Maurer, who kept me on my toes and kept me laughing. During the composition of this book I remained human due to the abundant friendship of Dana Baker, Aparna Balaji, Gail Bederman, Cara De la Cruz, Tina DeVries, Doug Dillaman, Amy Eldridge, Devasena Gnanashanmugam, Alexandra Guisinger, Michelle Harm, Julie Hiipakka, Suzanne Link Freeman, Joy Lewis, David Nickerson, and Irene Kim Park. Don Fessenden provided, and continues to provide, unpre cedented support both relevant to and far afi eld from book writing. I thank him for all the ways he contributed to making this book possible, but I know I owe him for so much more. Finally, all thanks to the Creator, who broke the chains so I could lift my hands. The Dispossessed State This page intentionally left blank Introduction The nineteenth century witnessed a revolution in thinking about property that was also a revolution in thinking about the state. The commonsense under- standing of property at the opening of the century might be read in Thomas Macaulay’s 1833 argument for a coercive enforcement of order in Ireland: “[Mr. Macaulay] thought there was no situation in the life of a public man more painful than that in which he found himself, under the necessity of supporting the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, and the even temporary abolition of trial by jury. These were sacred portions of our Constitution, older than Parliament itself— their origin was lost in the darkness of ancient times. [But] what were the Habeas Corpus and Trial by Jury intended for? Why, to be the means, not the ends, of protecting life and property.”1 Macaulay’s reluctance to impose coercive mea sures on Ireland gives way to his conclusion that all laws exist to protect life and property and thus are simply means to that end. For Macaulay, no law is sacred that does not protect prop- erty, which, like life itself, exists prior to any state institution. That this position was one of consensus, not partisanship, is evident from the argument of his opponent on the matter of Irish coercion. John Romilly, while condemning the 2 The Dispossessed State coercion that Macaulay reluctantly advocated, argued from precisely the same basis as Macaulay, contending that proposed searches of Irish house holds could never lawful: “Was it not clear that the authorized breaking open of houses was nearly as great a breach of order as unauthorized murder?”2 In both views, the preservation of property was equated with the preservation of life. Property, like life, is assumed to pre- exist the law, not to be constituted by it. Law itself can only be legitimate if it respects that fact. Yet by the late 1870s a new way of thinking about property and its relation to the institutions of the state had started to take hold, as Matthew Arnold’s claim made clear: “If it is the sound English doctrine that all rights are created by law and are based on expediency, and are alterable as the public advantage may require, certainly that orthodox doctrine is mine. Property is created and maintained by law. Legal society creates, for the common good, the right of property and for the common good that right is by legal society limitable” (“Equality” 46). Arnold’s assertion that property exists for the sake of the social order, rather than the social order existing to preserve property, represents a complete re- versal of Macaulay’s and Romilly’s assumptions.