THE PICKERING MASTERS

THE NOVELS AND SELECTED WORKS OF MARIA EDGEWORTH

Volume 6. Patronage volumes I & II THE PICKERING MASTERS THE NOVELS AND SELECTED WORKS OF MARIA EDGEWORTH

GENERAL EDITORS: MARILYN BUTLER MITZI MYERS

CONSULTING EDITOR: W. J. McCORMACK THE PICKERING MASTERS THE NOVELS AND SELECTED WORKS OF MARIA EDGEWORTH

VOLUME 6

EDITED BY Connor Carville and Marilyn Butler

PATRONAGE volumes I & II

1999 First published 1999 by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited

Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 ThirdAvenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright© Taylor & Francis 1999 Copyright© Introductory notes and endnotes Susan Manly and Clfona 6Gallchoir 1999

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any informations torage or retrieval system, without permission in writing fromthe publishers.

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ISBN 13: 978-1-85196-186-3 (set hbk) ISBN 13: 9781138764354 (vol. 6 hbk)

Typeset by Waveney Typesetters, Wymondham, Norfolk VOLUME 6

CONTENTS

Introductory Note vii

Patronage volume I 1

Patronage volume II 137

Endnotes 272 Textual Variants 287

v

INTR ODUCTORY NOTE

PATRONAGE Edgeworth began to work on what would eventually become Patronage in May 1809, and the last page of the first edition bears the date March 26 1813. The present text is based on the first edition, originally published in December 1813, although so late in the year that the publishers, Johnson & Co., London, preferred to date it 1814. Edgeworth received the considerable sum of £2,100 from Rowland Hunter, the late Joseph Johnson’s nephew, and the novel began by selling extremely well; according to Maria herself 8,000 copies were sold on the first day of publication, while ‘1500 of a second edition were bespoke and fifteen hundred more ... printed’ (ME to Etienne Dumont, 19 Feb. 1814). A second edition appeared in February 1814, with one minor cut (Godfrey Percy’s embarkation letter, Chapter IX), but proved less popular than the first, due perhaps to the damaging reviews which the book had already attracted in The Quarterly Review, The Edin­ burgh Review , and The British Critic. The review in The British Critic, appearing in the February 1814 edition (Vol. I, pp. 159-73) typifies the general critical reaction. The reviewer cen­ sures the novel for didacticism and length, while criticising Edgeworth for departing from one intimately known milieu (Ireland) and straying into another of which she has little experience (diplomatic circles in London). More specific objections centre around the scene where Buckhurst saves the Bishop from choking - described in the review as ‘disgusting’ and ‘physically impossible’ - and in particular the representation of the professions in the novel: ‘Very few of our readers can observe without a smile the palpable absurdities to which our authoress is involved when she attempts to describe the process of legal investigation ... We fear also that she will be convicted of having passed the bounds of all probability in her view of the medical pro­ fession.’ Several critics assumed they could identify public figures, because of the coin of George III hidden under the seal of a forged document: this too led to criticisms of Edgeworth’s taste, in allegedly casting aspersions on roy­ alty or one or other prime minister of recent times. Sidney Smith in the Edin­ burgh Review called Edgeworth’s approach ‘manly’ (vol. 22, January 1814, p. 417), representing the widespread view that she was trespassing in a mas­ culine public world. The third edition of Patronage, published in April of 1814, went some

Vll WORKS OF MARIA EDGEWORTH: VOLUME 6 way towards addressing the objections of the professions. Erasmus Percy’s criticisms of London’s medical establishment in Chapter VI were replaced by more approving sentiments, and certain legal infelicities in the account of Alfred’s victory in Chapter XL were remedied. Yet one major error remained outstanding; the impossibility of Mr Percy’s being committed to prison on account of an unproven debt, which was the sub­ ject of severe criticism in the reviews. Given the crucial dramatic function of Mr Percy’s imprisonment, however, it was obvious that the rectifica­ tion of this problem would involve considerable rewriting, and on reflec­ tion Edgeworth decided to retain the original episode. She would eventually redress the mistake (and so substantially change the novel’s ending) for the first collected edition of her novels in 1825, which also included major cuts carried out by her half-sisters Honora and Harriet. A two-volume edition, with Comic Dramas, was published in Paris in 1841. Partly because of its length, partly no doubt because the original reception had been so negative, the novel has not generally been reissued except in Collected Editions.

Composition The first appearance of what became Patronage was an oral bedtime story related in 1787 by RLE to the entire household of adults, adolescents and small children, which assembled in the evenings round the bedside of Mrs Elizabeth Edgeworth after one of her confinements. It was called The Free­ man Family’, but framed from the outset as the adventures of two con­ trasted families; the Freemans lived happy and independent, withdrawn from the world, while the other family, perhaps cousins, had worldly ambi­ tions. Maria Edgeworth took notes on this occasion, and between 1789, when she reports to her favourite aunt, Mrs Ruxton, that it is ‘going on, but very slowly’, and 1799 she evidently thought of publishing what was apparently a lively, adventurous soap opera, in ordinary life rather than high life, and aimed for family consumption down to a fairly young age. News of it comes in bulletins over time to the Ruxtons, such as ‘a rough draft is finished, which will need to be polished and burnished’ (early 1791). In an exemplary letter for illustrating how Edgeworth used her family circles when compos­ ing, she argues with her aunt over proposed changes -

The Prince of Wales is turned into the Prince of B - a foreign prince who comes from nobody knows where - I am sorry you do not admire Harriet’s speech to his Highness ... it is settled she must refuse ... she is convinced it would make her unhappy to be a Princess - Sophy is this romantic? ... Do consent my dear Aunt. Consider, I shall not know what to do with Mrs Ogilvie ... what piece of treachery to invent - ... Cesar has been bit by a mad dog! (18 Nov 1793)

vm INTRODUCTORY NOTE

She was still proceeding in this vein the following spring - ‘I am of your opinion and my Uncle’s about Harriet’s Rescue and shall with my father’s assistance make a Battle of it - The leaden pipe shall be melted down ... the Heroines Mouth shall not be in danger of being stuffed with dead leaves ... nor shall the motto to the frontispiece be ‘Sorrah! take it!’ The Ruxtons made up the key family circle listening to the first oral ver­ sion of Castle Rackrent at this time; and both stories were equally indebted to the family yarns out of the chronicle known as ‘the Black Book’. (See Castle Rackrent Introductory Note, Vol. 1). A written manuscript of the ‘Freeman family’ may have been left at Black Castle with the Ruxtons, for when Mrs Frances Edgeworth on 10 October 1 7 9 9thanks them for return­ ing it she describes it as old. In an undated letter by Maria Edgeworth to her half-brother Sneyd, also 1 7 9 9 ,Edgeworth mentions a recent letter from their publisher Joseph Johnson, in prison for treasonous libel - ‘like Mr Freeman in Newgate’. But none of this implies that the first ‘Freeman family’ was by now a publishable project. It had been overtaken by the second ver­ sion, ‘The Contrast’, which Maria Edgeworth mentions as already written and about to be corrected, in an undated letter to Sophy Ruxton in 1 8 0 0 . Set in middle-class life, and no doubt containing much incident from the first version, it appears in Popular Tales (1 8 0 4 ).

This prehistory helps to explain the episodic nature and the preoccupation with family history in each project based on this domestic amusement of a family contrast. A new plan, intended to be included in Tales o f Fashionable Life, is touched on by Maria Edgeworth in a letter to her half-brother Sneyd (CSE) of 1 Jan 1 8 0 8 and developed to Sophy Ruxton on 10 May 1 8 0 9 : ‘My other plan was to write a story in which young men of all the different pro­ fessions should act a part - like the Contrast in higher life or like the Free­ man family only without Princes and without any possible allusions to our own family.’ For over two years Edgeworth had been writing, largely at her father’s behest, a labour-intensive volume on boys’ preparation for different careers - Professional Education (1 8 0 9 ). That same month the Primate of Ireland, William Stewart, Anglican Archbishop of Armagh came to stay at Edgeworthstown, and RLE in particular was struck by his dignity and pres­ ence (he was the son of George Ill’s Prime Minister, the Marquess of Bute), and his graciousness, even niceness when he unbent. RLE’s impressionable­ ness instantly became a family joke (‘I hope my father told you how charm­ ing and how like a young man of fashion the Primate looks in his nightcap! He declares William in his nightcap is something like him - Indeed matters are come to such a pass that my father sees a likeness ... in everybody he likes.’) (ME to Mrs Ruxton, 3 0 May 1 8 0 9 ). Nevertheless, the manner was captured. The Primate’s visit was well timed, the first ‘skeleton’ had already been drawn up and discussed with RLE:

IX WORKS OF MARIA EDGEWORTH: VOLUME 6

It will be a Contrast in high life. Two families pursuing opposite courses each with sons of every profession. I shall use ... all that is good in the Freeman family - Tell my aunt the leaden pipe (Sorrow take it!) will not be used - nor the Prince of Wales - but I shall have occasion for a foreign Prince and will not tell to what court he belongs - so many German princes are to be found that I can easily leave the public in the philosophic state of doubt - Mme de Genlis ...in La Siege de Rochelle [has] ... a king and court and princess and ministers and all without a habitation or a name.

By March 1810 she was calling the new tale Patronage, and from this time she invited family and friends to send in ‘anecdotes of meritorious people suffering and kept down by want of patronage - or shamefully pushed up by patrons’ [n.d., fragment, to CSE [June 1810]. Also at this time Edgeworth begins to worry at the length of the materials she already has. At least a volume and a half (‘Vivian’ and ‘Emilie de Coulanges’) was already available for the 3- volume second series of Fashionable Tales. One and a half volumes was short, by novel standards; and, in addition to the two main families, Patronage at this point included a subplot about a family of Irish absentees in London, called the Tipperarys. Edgeworth was still pushing on with Patronage Mark I in June 1811 (when she told Sophy she had speeded up Caroline’s refusal of Mr Barclay to make it outright). But in August she quickly wrote a play (called ‘The Absentee’) for performance to her sister Anna Beddoes and her children, who, four years after Anna was widowed, came on a rare visit from Bristol. All that autumn Maria Edgeworth was pushing on Patronage, every time report­ ing her mounting sense of the heaviness of the task, and the novel’s inordinate length. The publisher since Johnson’s death, Johnson’s nephew John Miles, had long wanted the second three volumes of The Tales o f Fashionable Life to appear by the spring of 1812, not more than three years after the first series. At the end of 1811 RLE called a halt, on the grounds that Patronage was far too long to fit into the series. He suggested Maria should make a second Irish tale to match Ennui in the first, by merging the play called The Absentee (which had a lord from England travelling incognito to Ireland) with the Irish émigré family in Patronage (who were originally patients of Dr Erasmus Percy in London). The Absentee went off piecemeal in packets, the last in late April, to be published in June 1812. That same month, Maria reported to the Ruxtons that she was back at Patronage once more. She finished it, if as seems reason­ able we accept the date the publishers provide, on 26 March 1813.

Sources A number of minor figures in Patronage are linked either by name or by char­ acteristic traits to real-life people, most them Irish rather than English. Mrs Hungerford, the dignified elderly neighbour of the Percy family, was the name of Maria Edgeworth’s maternal great-grandmother, an aristocratic lady

x INTRODUCTORY NOTE who was in secret a Catholic.1 The fictional Mrs Hungerford and her daugh­ ter also however resemble another aristocratic older woman and Irish neigh­ bour of the Edgeworths, Lady Moira (d. 1808) and her daughter, also a neighbour, Lady Granard. This was not the first or the last time such a com­ pliment was paid in kind to Lady Moira: she was the likely model for Lady Oranmore in The Absentee (1812) and, later, the Countess of Annaly in Ormond (1817). A similar compliment, in the form of an idealised Lord Chief Justice is paid to a gifted leading Irish lawyer, the Irish Solicitor-Gen­ eral, Charles Kendal Bushe, who visited Edgeworthstown in August 1810 and wrote a warm, charming description of it as a model domestic society to his wife.2 The approval was obviously mutual - though Edgeworth had a lawyer half-brother in Charles Sneyd Edgeworth, so that the compliment was not necessarily disinterested. A minor figure encountered by Dr Erasmus Percy, a painter angry with his patron, is plainly a portrait of James Barry, the contentious but brilliant Irish history-painter of the American-war period. Speculation was rife among reviewers and readers about the identity of the dominant politician who presides over Patronage's version of the public sphere, Lord Oldborough. The allegorical name is pointedly political: it refers to an electoral system in which most parliamentary seats were ‘pocket boroughs’, a system concentrating power in the hands of wealthy oligarchs, which William Cobbett the radical journalist dubbed ‘Old Corruption’. Oldborough is however a complex character, represented as having great abilities, presence and even nobility. Different elements in his career, espe­ cially the involvement with the secret service and European courts, and the politicking that surrounded and followed his departure from office, are bor­ rowed from William Coxe’s Life of Walpole (1798). Before Walpole, the dominant politician for a quarter of a century, ministers ‘fell’ rather than retired, and were often impeached, followed by a flight into exile or trial and execution. Walpole was in fact threatened by this: a secret committee, packed with his enemies, investigated the last ten years of his career for signs of corruption, especially in the large sums spent on the secret services. They found nothing usable: but the atmosphere soured Walpole’s departure and retirement, much as Oldborough’s departure from office is soured. Yet Edgworth based the personality and aura of Oldborough on the Irish Primate of her day, William Stuart or Stewart, Archbishop of Armagh; the character may also have traits of his father, the Marquess of Bute, a Scottish grandee who had been appointed Prime Minister by George III from May 1762 to April 1763, but was then driven from office by his unpopularity. Apart from his imposing manner, Bute was a politician who engaged in much covert international intrigue. He was notoriously anti-Whig and anti­ popular. He had been a tutor to the future George III, and did his best to teach him Bolingbroke’s theory that a king should not only reign but govern. Oldborough resembles Bute in his bad political relations with parliamentary

XI WORKS OF MARIA EDGEWORTH: VOLUME 6 and min isterial colleagues, and the suspicion that he maintains covert rela­ tions with the King even when out of office. Finally, Oldborough has posi­ tive traits of the much-admired William Pitt the elder, Earl of Chatham. In a paper on the invention which he called a ‘Tellograph’, read to the Royal Irish Academy on 25 June 1795, RLE has a learned introduction concerning the importance to the political process of good intelligence, in which he makes a cryptic reference to an eminent politician:

‘He who smote the house of Bourbon with one hand and in the other wielded the democracy of Britain’ was supposed to have had the best intelligence of any minister that ever presided over the British councils. It was this circum­ stance that gave a secret power to his eloquence over the minds of those who knew that his prophetic strain was the language of polished experience, not of ignorant enthusiasm.3

This is certainly a reference to Pitt the Elder, Prime Minister for most of Britain’s Seven Years’ War with France, 1756-63. Lord Oldborough is thus the ‘type’ of an able statesman of the old régime: such a figure necessarily deals with the devious competitive courts of the European nation-states, led by the leading Catholic powers France and Spain, but including German states such as Prussia, and by allusion St Petersburg. He is implicitly likened to Richelieu and to Mazarin (the latter being the most notorious of early modern spymas- ters). Indeed, in the closing stages of the plot Oldborough’s past begins to take on a complex definition, suggesting conflicting loyalties: he had an aristocratic Italian Catholic mistress, who was consigned to a convent because she was bearing his child; his son, Mr Henry, who does not know his father’s identity, while the father does not know of his son’s whereabouts, is secretly supported in Dublin by what seems to be a Catholic and Jacobite network, to which Old­ borough ultimately belongs. The allusions to the Jacobite politics of the first half of the eighteenth century help establish the generalised and serious alle­ gorical nature of Patronage's portrayal of English politics. The ‘Cabal’ or secret Cabinet belonged in real life to the political grouping of Clifford, Arling­ ton, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale in 1672, during the reign of Charles II. Edgeworth establishes her English statesman in the European and English political history of the old régimes, or despotisms; her principal foreign char­ acter, Lord Altenberg, has a similar background. Even so, the contemporary reader at the outset would have assumed com­ fortably that he or she was reading a story of the closing phase of the Napoleonic wars, after the French armies had been driven out of Germany (October 1813). The plot begins dramatically with a shipwreck on the Hampshire coast of a Dutch vessel carrying a French diplomat and spy, the Count de Tourville. As a result of this accident, in which Mr Percy and his family play a heroic and subsequently a kindly part, two important docu­ ments or packages go astray. The first, a casualty of the shipwreck, is de

xii INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Tourville's package of highly sensitive political intelligence, which when finally decoded uncovers an English political conspiracy against the (prime) minister, Lord Oldborough. The second belonged to the Percys- the deeds of their estate - and it has either been destroyed in a fire in their library, started by the carelessness of one of the Dutchmen, or gone astray in the subsequent confusion. The loss of this latter document soon leads to the Percy's loss of their estate, after Mr Percy's ownership is successfully chal- lenged by a malevolent and litigious cousin, Sir Robert Percy. The family is driven to a smaller house and estate that they own, called 'The Hills', where they live in straitened circumstances for most of the novel, before being bankrupted, and in Mr Percy's case imprisoned, by another suit brought by Robert Percy. Eventually the novel's virtuous family is able to establish that both these lawsuits are based on forged evidence, fraud and perjury, involv- ing the suborning of witnesses. The main public and private plots thus par- allel one another; together they represent public life and the public or legal face of private life as manipulable and corrupt. The treachery and conspiracy involving the Percy family, locked in a fero- cious quarrel with their cousin Sir Robert, derives directly and richly from Edgeworth family history, as detailed in Richard Edgeworth's manuscript 'Black Book of Edgeworthstown', now in the National Library of Ireland (N.L.I. MS 7631). Before considering the legal detail, it is worth observing that the story goes back to the 1690s and early 1700s. Yet another public figure is directly touched on in the same section of the 'Black Book' that relates the lawsuits: James Butler, Second Duke of Ormond(e), who in the first decade of the eighteenth century was for a while a patron both of Francis Edgeworth, Richard Edgeworth's father, and of one of Francis's younger brothers, Sir John Edgeworth's seventh son, William. Openly, the Duke came in September 1703 to the christening of Francis's younger son and Richard's brother; the baby, who was to die in childhood, was named Ormond after the Duke (fol. 292). Covertly, William later told Richard that after the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 Ormond had made overtures to William, now a half-pay officer; he would be given command of a regiment if he would promise to 'serve the Duke implicitly'. At first William thought his services would be in relation to the Duke's amours. But the go-between, Colonel Owens, 'explained the matter to him, which was that he should serve the Pretender so as to have him established as successor to the Crown after Queen Anne's death.' (ff. 207-8) William told Richard that he had asked for time, which he spent 'reading all the books wrote in defence of passive obedience and inde- fensible hereditary right'. As a result he was able to tell Owens what he told Richard- that he was now a Jacobite 'out of principle and by conviction'. Owens introduced William Edgeworth to Ormond, and Ormond presented him to the Queen, as an impeccably loyal officer. But the Queen died shortly afterwards, with the scheme obviously not yet ripe, for the succession went in

Xlll WORKS OF MARIA EDGEWORTH: VOLUME 6

1714 to the Protestant Elector of Hanover, King George I. In 1715, Ormond was impeached, largely thanks to the young Robert Walpole, and fled to the Old Pretender’s court in France. Two at least of Edgeworth’s Irish tales, Castle Rackrent and Ormond , refer more or less covertly to the Second Duke of Ormond, whose long career as first a secret and afterwards an active leading Jacobite had great human inter­ est; his ‘fall’ in Protestant eyes, and the loss of his great estates, is one of many melancholy examples of disillusioned statesmen alluded to in the text. The high politics of Patronage, with its strong flavour of despotism, absolutism and secrecy, establishes the presence of internal conflicts, leading to family schisms and political subversion, both in and after the 1690s, and again in the 1790s, in which even the harmonious Percy family are implicated. Late in the novel, the Percy sisters choose a favourite piece of music, two poems by the poet Thomas Campbell which have each been set to music. Rosamond, the elder sister, chooses a lament, T h e Exile of Erin’; Caroline the robust and patriotic ‘Mariners of England’. The choices are very different aesthetically, politically and nationally: for Rosamond’s seems to indicate pro-Catholic sentiment, and an identification with the Irish ‘insurrection’. These two con­ trasted sisters, one impulsive and emotional, the other cool, rational, near­ perfect, recur, usually bearing the same names, in several of Edgeworth’s works of fiction for children and adults; the family associated Rosamond with Maria herself, Caroline with ‘the second Honora’, her half-sister, the daughter of Mrs Honora Edgeworth, who died in 1790 before she was fif­ teen (see vol. 1, General Introduction). During the eighteenth century, from Swift on, it was a recurring convention of political pamphleteering to repre­ sent England and Ireland, or Scotland and Ireland, as sisters, or occasionally any two of them as brother and sister, or as lovers, as in Adam Ferguson’s John Bull and Sister Peg (1759).4 Edgeworth’s ‘national’ deployment of her two sisters is sufficiently unusual to puzzle the reader, and to call for expla­ nation. Making the Irish figure the elder is certainly unusual, if not unique; giving her a name associated both with the author and with one of the best- known, best-loved of her characters would surely have made a bigger state­ ment at the time than on a casual reading now. If the Percys are viewed as a stylized representation of the Edgeworth family, the polarisation of two siblings by religion and perhaps by national­ ity is not in itself surprising. Sir John Edgeworth, a Royalist courtier at the court of Charles II, had eight sons, at least half of whom became Catholics, or had Catholic sympathies - again, not surprising for young men coming of age in the 1680s and 1690s, and having to choose between King James and King William. Sir John’s eldest son and heir, Francis or Frank, who built the first house at Edgeworthstown, remained a Protestant: it is through his eyes that his descendants, including Maria, understood the story of the litigation of the 1690s to 1727. At least five separate episodes from the ‘Black Book’

xiv INTRODUCTORY NOTE are used, most illustrating the worst stages of this furious family dispute, which appeared (from Edgeworthstown) to have been driven as much by malice as greed. The first incident is the second will Sir John made on his deathbed (the night of 26 January 1700), when only two witnesses for his signature could be found. Sir John had set his seal to the will; but, when Frank later tried to get the second will proved, the seal and signa­ ture were found to have been (mysteriously) torn off. Frank was involved in legal actions with his mother and three of his brothers until his death in 1709, which his son believed was hastened by the quarrels (ff. 73-86, and 186). His son Richard did not get his second will estab­ lished until 27 December 1727 (ff. 168-79 and, for the torn seal, ff. 172-5). Readers of the novel will recognise the features of this story as that of the essential legal plot instigated by Robert Percy in Patronage (see the trial scene in ch. XLII), though several other family cases pro­ vide further detail. In another dispute, Robert’s eldest son, Edward, ‘married a Popish lady, against his [father’s] consent’; his father threat­ ened to disinherit him, but Edward ‘produced articles supposed to have been made in 1692 on Robert’s marriage with his [Catholic] wife Catherine Tyrell’, which indicated that the large Tyrrell estates were entailed on Robert and Catherine’s eldest son. Two trials attempted to establish whether these documents were genuine; afterwards the case went on slowly through the Court of Chancery and the House of Lords, which finally granted a perpetual injunction against Edward Edgeworth: the case ‘perplexed’ the twelve last years of Robert’s life (1718-30) and was not settled when he died (ff. 188-91). On another occasion, Henry Edgeworth, Sir John’s third son, ‘by sharp practice secured certain lands forming part of Francis’s marriage settlement’ (fol. 193), which Richard Edgeworth managed to recover in 1723. (In spite of this, Richard Edge- worth approved of Henry for his excellent management of his affairs - ‘he was the best economist of his name’, and he left estates to three sons, Henry, Essex and Robert.) One of the most spectacular of the lawsuits, described ff. 200-5, was manufactured by the fifth son, Ambrose, a character allegedly as unpleasant as Robert, just before Frank’s death; as a result of this Richard Edgeworth, as an orphaned 8-year old, was deprived of the new house his father Frank had just built, which was recovered only in 1722 with the assistance of one of the boy’s guardians, the Co. Meath lawyer Walter Nugent. Ambrose was presumably the anonymous person who first informed the Commissioners of Revenue in 1708 or 1709 that ‘the lands of Garryandrew in the County of Longford which Sir John and Frank had successively enjoyed for upwards of forty years were undisposed lands not passed in patent to any person since the forfeiture’ [in the 1641 war]. Immediately after Frank’s death in April 1709 Ambrose petitioned the government that his grandfather, father and

xv WORKS OF MARIA EDGEWORTH: VOLUME 6 family had possessed the lands for years, but had lost their title deeds during the wars. He therefore prayed ‘to be made easy as a tenant on this position’. The Lords Justice and Council ‘made him a lease of Garryandrew from Sep­ tember 1709 for 99 years at £15 per annum.’ Presumably on the minor’s behalf, a ‘Writ of Seizure was issued to take the lands into the Queen’s hands’. Ambrose’s response was highly effective:

The night before the execution he prevailed on certain poor (fol. 202) wretches to tread out the real bounds of Garryandrew in the dark, but to shew false bounds to the Sheriff and Jury the next day, which false bounds surrounded near 60 acres of the lands of Edgeworthstown (otherwise Mastrim) adjoining to Gar­ ryandrew; on part of which 60 acres Francis Edgeworth had a short time before built a new house on the spot where my present mansion house stands; and pos­ session was given according to these false bounds, which occasioned suits between me and the Crown and those deriving under Ambrose Edgeworth. Many years after one of the wretches who shewed the bounds declared when dying the injury he had done and the equivocation that he had trod or traced the true bounds; which he had in truth done the night before, though he shewed false ones to the Jury the day following. Ambrose Edgeworth did not live to receive even a years rent of his ill-gotten possession, but going to England and continuing his idle courses there, he had occasion to take physic and by the mis­ take of an Apothecary’s boy got a potion which put an end to his life (fol. 202).

Richard Edgeworth’s account of Ambrose is as unfavourable as that of Robert: ‘his pride and vanity were excessive almost to madness, his rapa­ ciousness and extravagance unbounded, his anger or rather fury outrageous, and his morals so bad that he would stick at nothing’ (fol. 200). At least his career contributed to the portrayal of both the legal and medical professions (via the story of the apothecary’s boy) in Patronage. Ambrose’s portrait by Richard, who can barely have known him or remembered him, is however much more generalised than his memorable description of Robert, the second son, who clearly suggested the character and behaviour in court of Sir Robert Percy in the novel. Richard’s account of his uncle’s character begins by observing that Robert’s religion was not clear, but that socially he consorted with Catholics more than Protestants, and with

Attornies of low rank or rather with Pettifoggers, [from whom] he imbibed a strange sort of principles. I do not mean that he was a Papist, nor do I think he was one, but his religion sat very loose upon him, and was very little interwo­ ven with moral virtues of any sort. A turn to chicane and artifice, a fondness for law, a grasping at all his elder brother’s estate, envy and irreconcilable hatred of those who had done him the greatest services, a very slight or rather no regard to truth, and no slight tendency to bragging and vapouring were qualities with which he was plentifully endowed. Added to these qualities he had no notion of good breeding, was outrageously rude and abusive to per­ sons he disliked, had a strange disposition to fighting and quarrelling and was

xvi INTRODUCTORY NOTE

quite void of fear of any man living, but was most childishly fearful of appari­ tions and goblins, especially after he had killed Mr Atkinson in a duel in Clon- tarf wood; after which time he could never lie without a lighted candle in his room and a servant either in his chamber or within his call (fol. 187). Richard Edgeworth saw a great deal of his uncle Robert in the latter’s dis­ tressed last years, when Robert was fighting in various courts against his own eldest son, that is between 1718 and 1725, when Richard (b. 1701) was taking over his own affairs:

Robert Edgeworth did not live to see the end of this cause, but was perplexed with it and many other suits of his sons the last twelve years of his life. It was during the first seven years of these twelve that I had any conversation with Robert, who was perpetually talking of his lawsuits with his son Edward and abusing him. He seemed to have a perpetual hurry and disturbance of mind and agitation of spirits. His eyes rolled about in his head like the artificial eyes in puppets or clockwork images; and his whole life seemd to be a hurri­ cane. He hated many people, loved nobody, nor nobody loved him, though many pitied him on account of his severe trials in regard to his son Edward. (fol. 190; see Patronage ch. XLII: ‘Sir Robert ... was never tranquil one second - but was continually ... beckoning or whispering to his attorney - while convulsive twitches ... betrayed the malignant flurry of his spirits.’) Later, Edward even managed to get into the house in which his father was dying, and to get him to execute ‘some deeds of revocation of former deeds and wills’ - but these were afterwards set aside as fraudulent (fol. 191). On the face of it, the main action of the novel is set in England and involves two families, each with three sons and two daughters: it looks as if the attempt of all ten of these young people to establish themselves in the world, and indirectly the preparation the young people had from their families is the novel’s raison d'etre . Obviously the ‘family contrast’ continues to matter: for instance, several of the names occurring in the two families have ethnic his­ torical or a symbolic significance. The other family are called Falconer, just as the unpleasant upper-class family in Manoeuvring (Tales o f Fashionable Life 1st series, 1809) is called Hunter. In this family, the son who becomes a devi­ ous diplomat, even more unreliable towards his employer than towards for­ eigners, is called Cunningham; his more sympathetic brother, forced by his father to take orders and become a Dean, is ‘Buckhurst’, a name suggesting a ‘buck’ or hunting and worldly parson. Among the Percys, Rosamond’s future husband, a lawyer, is called ‘Temple’, a stylized and probably idealising name after the London Inns of Court; Erasmus the doctor is named after Erasmus Darwin, RLE’s old friend; Alfred the lawyer after the law-making Anglo- Saxon King, a politically-significant choice since it suggested the more open, democratic and republican structure of Anglo-Saxon England, technically an elective monarchy before the Norman Yoke, according to republicans, ele­ vated a single family to permanent power above the law.

xvii WORKS OF MARIA EDGEWORTH: VOLUME 6

This reliance on names puts the action on to a theoretical, abstract plane. Different systems of government and law are being evoked, strongly remi­ niscent of James Harrington in his Oceana (1656), the classic exposition of republicanism during England’s Commonwealth period. Harrington describes two model systems of governance, of which the one currently in use, the second, derives historically from the Roman empire; like virtually all modern systems it is in practice monarchical or aristocratic or both. In an earlier stage of historical development, smaller nations organised them­ selves in communities which were egalitarian and republican: examples Har­ rington gives are Jewish governance in the early books of the Bible (and the early Christian church), together with the two most famous ancient-world republics, Athens and pre-imperial Rome. Harrington defines the imperial or monarchical system as one which puts a single man, or family, or group of families above everyone and everything else, and the republican or com­ monwealth system as one which puts the law, involving all the people and applying to them all, above everything else. Thus Edgeworth’s choice of the name Alfred for one of her lawyers, Temple for the other, and her linking of the German hero Altenberg to the late seventeenth-century republican Algernon Sidney, polarises her characters into two groups: those who in dis­ cussion speak as republicans, as all these, Erasmus and Mr Percy do, and most other male characters, at home and abroad, who are mostly corrupt manipulators not just of law and governance but of all the professions. As a whole, then, the British scene is set out as far more a typical old régime than, in the flattering British estimation of themselves, a society committed to free speech, individualism and shared citizenship. The use of so many negative Irish examples tips the scales further downwards. In a suggestive, eloquent article, ‘The Tedium of History: an Approach to M E’s Patronage’,5 W. J. McCormack cleverly identifies the novel’s thorough­ going ingenious deployment of names, whether real-life or allegorical, its odd vagueness with regard to place (including the subversive undercurrent of Irish allusion) and its preoccupation with documents, genuine and forged, sketches, other texts, codes and cryptograms; as a further refinement, men­ tion is made of the opposite of a secret language, notional ‘universal lan­ guages’ that everyone would be able to speak. McCormack’s argument makes Patronage a destablised postmodern performance, apparently remarkable in its time and within Edgeworth’s own career. His description of the intriguing text is so convincing that one would not wish to cavil with it: but in fact Patronage is more typical of one strand of Edgeworth’s fiction, novels that deal with English ruling-class society, than McCormack suggests. Beginning with the play ‘Whim for Whim’ (1798), certainly continuing with the epistolary tale of French-English espionage, Leonora (written 1803-5 and published December 1805), Ennui (written 1803-8 and published 1809), Manoeuvring (1809), Vivian (1812) and going on after Patronage to

xviii INTRODUCTORY NOTE the very suggestively named Harrington and Ormond (1817), Edgeworth produced a series of sophisticated novels of ideas which all exhibit three main features: a severe representation of English public life as subject to a form of corruption that spreads downwards from above and derives from the Francophilia of the English upper classes; an implied preference for pro­ fessional and commercial-class values and for the egalitarian and communi­ tarian republican ethos; and a selfconscious preoccupation with languages, including networks and a variety of codes, from literary allegory to forg­ eries, libels and cryptograms. A key source for the latter is RLE’s important essay in the Transactions o f the Royal Irish Academy of 1797. This was originally a paper read to the Academy on 25 June 1795 promoting RLE’s ‘Tellograph’, following the suc­ cessful transmission of messages across the sea between Ireland and Scotland. Intellectually and philosophically it also traces the topic of ‘philosophical lan­ guage’ back to the ancient world and, in modern (seventeenth-century) times, to Bacon, Leibnitz, and John Wilkins, the remarkable polymath with whom RLE felt particular affinity, because Wilkins was both an ingenious mechanic and a highly imaginative linguist. RLE had plainly read widely in seventeenth- century linguists, particularly in the international grouping which included James Ussher in Ireland, Samuel Bochart in France, Jan Comenius in Poland, and the Prussian Samuel Hartlib, based from the 1620s in England, in their wide-ranging objectives - to facilitate cosmopolitan communication, whether by publishing a poly-lingual Bible, or by inventing a universal language based on signs (as Chinese was deemed in this period to be). The nation-states’ attempts to guard their own secrets through the use of codes contributed indirectly to the same endeavour, since code-breaking fos­ tered a new exactness in linguistic analysis. RLE’s essay ends with the picto­ rial representations of the linguistic signs he used for his tellograph, and a pull-out listing of the ‘a’ entries in his accompanying codebook. He was, in 1795, urgently offering his tellograph to the Dublin government, for use in the defence of Ireland against a French invasion. Mr Percy resembles RLE both in being interested in cryptograms and philosophical language, and in preferring a life of retirement. He too had in 1796 built a second home in Co. Longford called ‘the Hills’,6 intended eventually for his eldest surviving son Lovell - who never lived there, partly because he was interned in France for eleven years from 1803 to 1814. This piece of topographical informa­ tion is in conflict, of course, with the location of the main Percy estate on the southern coast of England, and the evidence conveyed in the story, that the two estates are not more than a few hours apart. Like all the family sources, it gives knowing readers an extra dimension, which seems semi­ secret, not intended for everyone - that the novel is about Britain rather than England. Undoubtedly one of Edgeworth’s most ambitious representations of the

xix WORKS OF MARIA EDGEWORTH: VOLUME 6 nati onal community, Patronage uses the device of the German traveller, Count Altenberg, to explore British society and discriminate between its people and their lifestyles. In an excellent chapter of her stimulating Cam­ bridge thesis on Edgeworth’s fiction, Clfona ÔGallchoir convincingly uncovers Edgeworth’s debts to Germaine de Staël’s study of German culture and national character, UAllemagne (1810) or Germany.7 The name of Edgeworth’s hero, Altenberg, makes him sound like Oldborough; both, indeed, are leading politicians of two very different states, nevertheless shown to be old régimes; Oldborough’s Britain, a world power, and Altenberg’s anonymous homeland, a relatively small German principality. Altenberg is associated in different ways with other nationalities and cul­ tural traditions, especially the best, though not the officially-sanctioned, aspects of England. He refers in one place both to Philip Sidney, the chival­ rous Elizabethan poet, who died after the battle of Zutphen, 1586, and to the late seventeenth-century republican Algernon Sidney, executed 1683, a hero and martyr of the English Commonwealth tradition. Altenberg’s mother is, in fact, English, and at the end of the novel he is prepared to settle in England to become, like Mr Percy, a private country gentleman. He defends (English) patriotism to French Clay and praises Shakespeare (against Voltaire) to English Clay. These brothers fall into absurd extremes of Francophilia and Francophobia, both betraying the national sense of infe­ riority. Altenberg rejects the Clays and reinterprets English nationhood, when he picks out the educated, principled, sincere English woman, illus­ trated by the Percy sisters, especially Caroline, rather than the politicians and high-society men, to represent the spirit of the nation. He originally left Germany because the prince of his state was enslaved by a mistress called Euphrosyne. This woman was in real life the Finnish mistress of Peter the Great’s unsatisfactory son Alexei,8 and she personified the worst side of the most despotic of European courts. Altenberg stands for northern, individualistic virtue. He is more than an ally of Protestant England, though Prussia and larger German states were allies during the Napoleonic wars, and Germaine de Staël and other Genevans had steadily pushed the idea of a single Northern European Protestant identity. In U Allemagne Staël promotes Germanic national char­ acter and cultural traditions compounded of late medieval Christianity, essentially Protestantism and folk culture: Shakespeare, warbling his native woodnotes wild, also represents this natural and homogeneous natural cul­ ture of the north, which Staël in her highly political study contrasts with French Classicism, elitism and superficiality. It is largely thanks to Staël’s book and its popularity in Britain, that Germany ceased to be regarded by the British press as a pro-French, pro-Jacobin sphere of influence, as in the 1790s, and became a past homeland. Edgeworth certainly admired both U Allemagne and De la littérature considérée dans ses Rapports avec les

xx INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Institutions sociales, which was published and reviewed in England in 1813, taking both much more seriously than StaëPs novels.9

Reception W. J. McCormack’s summary not only of the riddling, allusive narrative mode of Patronage, but of its political and social import, remains broadly accurate:

No single reading of Patronage is possible ... Whereas Jane Austen’s narratives work to confirm the propriety of existing social relations, by eliminating intru­ sive fashion or ‘improvement’, and so present English society as a seamless and proportioned garment, Edgeworth’s fiction more often resembles a quilting tech­ nique in which textures of different ages and tonalities are organised to serve a particular, never absolute, end. Herein lies the political thrust of her work ... Patchwork is an art of contraries and ‘Without contraries is no progression.’10

But ÔGallchoir’s insights into Edgeworth’s use of Staël, both her broader cos­ mopolitan republicanism, and her distinctions between the supposed English and German character, also provide a framework for Edgeworth’s portrait of English society. Furthermore a specifically contemporary plot is set, consis­ tently, in a self-consciously historical context, involving references to English, Irish and European politics over a century and a half; just as the topography is both specific to southern England, and oddly elastic, as one European court merges with another. As in her political Irish tales, Edgeworth was both reporting contemporary life, using purportedly real detail, and setting it against an abstract, generalising scheme, based on theory. But this time the reporting seemed less closely observed or convincing; and in any case the theory, and the combination of the two had never been easy for her readers. Maria Edgeworth’s best-informed London correspondent, the Genevan expatriate Etienne Dumont, began immediately after the book’s publication to convey the bad news. What he called a parti nombreux of professionals - London physicians, surgeons, churchmen, burgers and politicians - were expressing outrage at the way she portrayed their respective professions.11 The reaction was all the stronger because of the glowing praise bestowed in 1809 and 1812 on the exact realism of her reporting of Ireland - ‘the truth of her fiction - if fiction it can be called’. (See Introductory note to The Absen­ tee, vol. 5.) It was true that Edgeworth had collected her materials on, for example doctors and hospitals, from sources that were over a generation old, and more Scottish than English: Frumpton the surgeon, described in the text as a ‘farrier’, is a caricature of an already eccentric personality, the self-edu­ cated Scottish medical man and son of a Berwickshire labourer John Brown (1735-88), whose extraordinary career and opinions had been graphically described by Thomas Beddoes in a long memoir prefacing a translation (1795) of his Latin magnum opus, Elementa Medicinae (1780). Sir Samuel Romilly, the leading politician, who with his wife had become a friend and

xxi WORKS OF MARIA EDGEWORTH: VOLUME 6 correspondent during the Edgeworth visit to London in 1813, also wrote to remonstrate. Edgeworth immediately resolved to rewrite ‘the whole of the odious Frumpton scene - have broken the leg in the street and had had the man carried into a shop instead of a hospital and have made Erasmus quarrel with Frumpton in favour of the hospitals... We hear the supposed attack on the London hospitals had made a great combustion in London.’12 Patronage, which had appeared in December 1813, went into a second edition in February 1814 and a third in April. Edgeworth missed the second edition with her corrections, and caught some copies of the third edition; but Hunter did not sell as many copies of the second edition as he had expected, perhaps because the unfavourable reviews hurt the sales. Some copies of the uncorrected second edition were given the third edition title page and sold therefore as ‘corrected’, though in fact they were not. The first edition con­ sistently to carry the corrections was the Tales and Novels , 14 vols, 1825. The legal errors were even more troublesome to Edgeworth, though not as offensive professionally. She altered Alfred Percy’s first triumph in court, because it had turned on the statute of limitations, which she had misunder­ stood. (See Patronage, ch. 40, and variants.) More annoyingly, she found that she had consigned Mr Percy to prison quite wrongly, for an alleged debt to his cousin, which would have had to be proved in a court of law: altering this would have impaired her happy ending, which has the Percys emerging from jail and restored to their original estate. Her first instinct, on taking advice from a family friend, Judge Fox, was to leave well alone. But in May 1815 a determined lawyer, signing himself Lycurgus, detailed all her legal mistakes, including those corrected in April 1814. She accordingly rewrote the end quite comprehensively, even despatching the heroine Caroline for a while to Germany (see variants). The furore over what was in effect a satirical caricature of politics and the professions gives some indication of Edgeworth’s standing at this time. Often, of course, the objections were empirical, to points of fact; again, there is an implied compliment here, that she of all writers was expected to get her facts right. Like any woman writer, she was not expected to be vulgar: at Mrs Inchbald’s suggestion, she removed the word ‘spittle’; and she toned down two other scenes readers found offensive, one in which Buckhurst Fal­ coner saves a gluttonous bishop from choking by blowing down his ear, and another in which a miser, to avoid waste, makes his footman drink up the residue in every bottle of medicine. Offensive in a different way were the scenes introducing the King, even by identifying his head on a coin - for this opened up the events and characters to a dating exercise, and encouraged speculation that either the King or a specific real-life minister was being por­ trayed. The reception and subsequent modifications to Patronage are in fact an exceptionally interesting case of the ability of the readership to reshape a work, and in effect to modify its message, after publication.

XXII INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Finally, one influential reader indicated, both in print and through Étienne Dumont as an intermediary, that he understood and was fully satisfied with the politics of Patronage. Jeremy Bentham, the philosophical radical and notable critic of institutions, wrote a letter signed ‘A Pupil of Miss Edgeworth’s’ and dated 7 February 1814 to Leigh Hunt’s radical weekly, the Examiner. This letter appeared in two consecutive issues of the Examiner, 20 February 1814, pp. 124-6 and 27 February, pp. 140-1, under the title ‘Major-General Clay and Cap­ tain Pilkington’. It begins: ‘Late last night I finished the study of Miss Edgeworth’s admirable and most instructive picture of Patronage, in which two Clays by the name of “French Clay” and “English Clay” cut so conspicuous a figure’.13 In fact, however, Bentham who, as John Dinwiddy shows, was certainly the author, was not particularly interested in the two fictional brothers. It was a real-life Clay who prompted the letter, a Major-General .who was tried by court-martial in Barbados in 1813 on eight charges brought against him by a subordinate officer, Captain G. Pilkington. Clay was acquitted on all but part of one charge: it was established that after having a house built at govern­ ment expense ostensibly for his servants, he installed an aide-de-camp there and charged him for his lodgings. Clay was ordered to refund the money and receive a reprimand from his commanding officer; but the court was more severe towards the junior officer. In pressing charges, ‘Captain Pilkington ... does not appear to have been wholly activated by a desire to promote the good of the service’. When the Prince Regent confirmed Clay’s light sentence, he also ordered that Pilkington’s services should be dispensed with. John Dinwiddy established that Bentham’s letter in the Examiner was com­ menting on a very recent article on the Clay case in the Morning Chronicle of 5 February 1814. Bentham complains that ‘the case illustrates in a most revealing way the real character and modus operandi not only of the army but of “the whole official establishment”. It shows how lenient and protective the system is with regard to those in authority who exploit their position, and how harshly it operates against those who attempt to call such people to account’ (p. 209). Or, as Bentham himself worded it in his inimitable late style:

a general principle fully established and steadily acted upon under our excel­ lent Constitution or Church and State is - that the population of the country is composed of two classes or casts [sic] of people, viz. one [for whom] ... in case of misfortunate or want of dexterity, the obligation o f refunding ... is, in case of detection and prosecution and conviction regarded as a sufficient check; the other, for whose reformation ... the operation of hanging by the neck is to be provided/ (p. 209)

Dinwiddy shows decisively how interested Bentham was at this time in the pervasiveness of ‘influence’ and of injustice, and how he approved of the Examiner and of its editor Leigh Hunt, who had been sent to jail in 1812 for libelling the Prince Regent. Maria Edgeworth had already been told by

xxii i WORKS OF MARIA EDGEWORTH: VOLUME 6

Dumont how delighted Bentham was by her Patronage, which he reason­ ably enough believed was activated by a similar critical spirit. ‘Notre Philosophe Bentham est enchanté ... il ne voudrait pas souffrir qu’on retranchât le moindre chose, il trouve les objections puériles.’14 Not only did he urge her not to retract: he thought the objections to the novel puerile. He headed a blank sheet of paper on 31 August 1814, ‘Modern Novelists the best Moralists’ - and obviously intended to write on Edgeworth’s Patron­ age■, though unfortunately the page is blank. For Bentham had been hearing for some years about Maria Edgeworth and her novels from Etienne Dumont, his close collaborator and chief early interpreter, especially to the French-speaking Continent. Dumont had not only been Edgeworth’s most sustained intellectual correspondent since 1805, he had steadily pressed her to introduce ideas of a public as well as a private and moral kind into the conventionally private and feminine sphere of the novel. That Bentham was persuaded of the significance of Edgeworth’s novel is further confirmed by his praise of her fiction in his Rationale of Judicial Evidence for ‘instilling the love of justice and veracity’.15 A book which Bentham praised in a radical weekly for meeting his own progressive standards of justice and veracity was not likely to please review­ ers across the general run of commercial journals. Adroit publishers target- ted different readerships; they had their own distinct if not always obtrusive political and religious stance, from the programmatically clerical and Angli­ can British Critic to the more polished, up-market Tory-Anglican Quarterly Review (which became more aggressively partisan from 1817) to the lib- eral-Whig, moderately sceptical and ‘materialist’ or scientific Edinburgh Review. Sure enough, the prestigious rivals, the Quarterly and the Edin­ burgh, both reacted uneasily to Patronage, as though they found it difficult to reconcile its harsh, systemic criticism of British society, and the jarring political note struck by Altenberg’s first act, his attack on press-ganging, with Edgeworth’s reputation, largely established by their own journals, as a writer of witty, good-humoured comedies. Significantly, the Quarterly invited a relative newcomer as a critic, the Tory MP John Ward (1781-1833), who as the 1st Earl of Dudley was briefly Foreign Secretary in 1827-8, to review a book essentially concerned with the public world. Ward was a gentleman, who expressed himself with a civil­ ity that the more professional reviewers did not think necessary or indeed appropriate. He was furthermore a correspondent of Mrs Dugald Stewart, as was Maria Edgeworth, and he had already written favourably about Edgeworth’s Irish novels in that correspondence; but Patronage caused him to shift his allegiance to the relative newcomer, Jane Austen.16 In the Quar­ terly he more courteously but firmly states that he finds her representation of English society unacceptable. ‘What we have to complain of ... is not so much the inaccuracy of any particular sketches, but the general effect of the

XXIV INTRODUCTORY NOTE whole group.’ In her writing of Ireland she had distinguished the nation from England and from other nations, and within Ireland shaded off one class from another. ‘All the materials are drawn from her own stores, and she is never obliged to supply the defect of actual observation by hearsay or conjecture.’ He attributes her poorer performance on England partly to lack of enough firsthand knowledge. ‘Miss Edgeworth, though enjoying the friendship of many of the most distinguished persons in this country, and the esteem of all, has taken only an occasional and cursory view of English society.’ She appears to be working out a prejudice against ‘two classes of persons ... those who engage in ambitious pursuits and those who compose what is sometimes called “fashionable company” in the metropolis.’ Ward concedes that a few fashionable people are ‘as silly, as coarse and as void of feeling as any she has represented’, but a compara­ tively small number, and he sees no merit in her reluctance to admit ‘the idea of virtue and sense except in retirement’.17 Stael, whom Ward, Dumont and others had met during her visit to England in 1813, when Edgeworth had unfortunately missed her, agreed with Ward and indeed with a general perception, that the English middle and upper classes had shared a notion of civic activism and service, at least from Elizabeth I’s day, which is why the historian Patrick Collinson has termed the Eliza­ bethan period a monarchical republic. This consideration, and the even more telling absence of good documentary reporting, no doubt help to account for initial and continuing resistance to the novel over the years. For such reasons, Ward’s mildly-worded remonstrance stands up better than Sydney Smith’s more eccentric performance in the Edinburgh Review. There was a history behind Smith’s obviously personal line of attack. He had expressed his dislike of RLE the previous time he reviewed an Edge- worth book, the jointly-authored Essay on Irish Bulls, in 1803. (See Intro­ ductory note, vol. 1) Then, with some reason given the title page, he had insisted on treating RLE as in effect the author, and had ridiculed him for so constantly thrusting himself before the reader. In an interval of over a decade, his own journal, and especially its editor Francis Jeffrey, had strongly favoured almost all of Maria Edgeworth’s publications, on philo­ sophical and moral grounds and in the interests of general social utility. (See Introductory notes to Leonora, vol. 3 and The Absentee, vol. 5) Indeed, so visible was a kind of partnership between Edinburgh and Edgeworthstown after 1809, with Jeffrey’s effusive reception of the first series of Tales o f Fashionable Life, that two sectarian journals which did not habitually review novels, the Anglican Christian Observer and the Nonconformist Eclectic Review , each weighed in with strongly moralistic reviews of Edge­ worth’s allegedly secular tales, and Jeffrey’s partisan reviewing. (See Intro­ ductory note to Ennui, vol. 1) Hence Smith’s roguish opening:

xxv WORKS OF MARIA EDGEWORTH: VOLUME 6

None of our regular readers, we are persuaded, will be surprised at the eager­ ness with which we turn to every new production of Miss Edgeworth’s pen.... but the calmer spirits of the South can hardly yet comprehend the exhilarat­ ing effect which [the] reappearance [of this distinguished lady] uniformly pro­ duces upon the saturnine complexion of their Northern Reviewers.... it is no slight consolation to us, while suffering under alternate reproaches for ill-timed severity, and injudicious praise, that no very mischievous effects have as yet resulted to the literature of our country, from this imputed misbe­ haviour on our part.... it is indeed delightful now and then to meet with authors ... whose genius is of that vigorous and healthful constitution as to allow the fair and ordinary course of criticism ... without fear that their rick­ ety bantlings may be crushed in the correction.18

Smith goes on to declare confidently that Miss Edgeworth is such a writer: ‘the overweening politeness which might be thought due to her sex, is for­ gotten in the contemplation of her manly understanding.’ Though this sug­ gests that severity is to come, Smith gives no indication of his criticisms, but instead moves into a 14-page section of plot-summary and extracts (in an 18-page article), virtually devoid of commentary by the reviewer. After­ wards he moves to the character of Lord Oldborough, whom he usually alludes to as the ‘ Patron’ - ‘notwithstanding it is evidently a laboured and a favourite sketch, we confess we are not much captivated or edified’, (p. 431) Edgeworth, he thinks, should have made up her mind whether we should take him as good or evil. He goes on to wonder sardonically what the royal novel-readers at Windsor Castle will make of the minister and of his ‘accu­ rately-reported conversations with George III at Windsor’, and whether Oldborough or the novel’s other public figures are taken from life. The nov­ elist is, he suggests, ‘somewhat enamoured of high station’ - and on the basis of that proposition he moves into the substance of his criticism, four para­ graphs from the end:

our part, we confess, we think the clumsy machinery of majesty, and the cum­ brous agency of ... ministers and favourites, so extremely unlike the simpler and purer taste of Miss Edgeworth’s former fables, that we have been some­ times tempted to doubt, whether [these] ... are the unmixed productions of her pen.... Miss Edgeworth has hitherto shown an instinctive aversion to bad taste ... Surely some heavy spirit... has obtruded its ponderous patronage on her book - has swelled the bulk of the work, but taken from its characteristic delicacy - and has distilled its poppies on pages, which we are compelled to allow are now and then prosing and tedious.19

This is the substance of Smith’s offensiveness; but Dumont knew that Maria Edgeworth would be pained by this rudeness and ridicule of her father - which she had to take some responsibility for, since if she had not used her tales to portray RLE flatteringly, critics would not have been tempted to mock them both. Dumont did what he could to soften the blow by relating

xxvi INTRODUCTORY NOTE

London gossip, that Smith suspected the Edgeworths knew an old story of his own entry into a career in the Church which, like Buckhurst Falconer’s, supposedly involved large debts, an exasperated father, and a vacant living. Smith’s own letters do suggest a personal animus, not necessarily focused on a caricature of himself - ‘If she has put into her Novels people who fed her and her odious father, she is not Trustworthy.’20 Meanwhile Edgeworth wrote agitatedly to relatives and acquaintances in England and Scotland, demand­ ing to know if they thought a father could really be meant by the word ‘patron’. It may be that Smith was irritated by successful women or Irishmen or a combination of the two; her sex, respectability and gentility had till now made her almost unassailable, as Lady Morgan, Germaine de Staël and even Mrs Barbauld were not. Attacking her through her father (in the guise of an Irish vulgarian, a religious infidel, or an exploiter of her success) was perhaps more a convenience than a considered judgment. An outcome of Smith’s review was thought by the family to be the relative failure of Patronage, which did not bring Hunter in the very high sum, £2,100, that he gave for it, in the year in which Scott earned £700 for Waverly and Austen herself paid for the publication of Mansfield Park ; Edge- worth had to agree to making up the shortfall with her next work, Comic Dramas (1817). Smith also prompted some of the changes to Patronage: the removal of the name of the king whose head is on the coin under the seal, and the new Preface to the third edition of 1814 and 1815, in which Edgeworth denies that anyone else has contributed to the text of her novel. But the story does not end there, for in 1820 Maria Edgeworth finally brought out her father’s Memoirs, after promising him against her better judgment to do so, while he was in his last illness. As she had feared, the critics were lying in wait: all the pent-up malice which she on her own had been proof against burst out when the topic was his Life, and she was only the editor and second author. One of the most celebrated critical butchers of the day, John Wilson Croker, who as an Irishman had eloquently sung the praises of The Absen­ tee, got the publisher Murray and the editor Gifford to let him savage RLE's Memoirs in the Quarterly (‘he tells of having some personal object’), while he also urged them not to let his authorship be known.21 Croker’s long review of thirty-nine pages is well-constructed, exact and lethal. RLE at the age of 15 had shared a joke with a girl at a party, during the late-night revels known as ‘the raking pot of tea’, to go through a mock wedding ceremony about which neither was serious. RLE’s father had had enough problems with wedding settlements in his lifetime to take crisis mea­ sures - ‘he instigated a suit of “jactition of marriage” in the ecclesiastical court, to annul these imaginary nuptuals’.22 Croker either did not believe in this divorce or affected not to, and accordingly brought RLE’s already pro­ lific marriage-count up to five, taking care to stress as he narrated the suc­ cession of brides just how unconventionally short the interval between

xxvii WORKS OF MARIA EDGEWORTH: VOLUME 6

RLE’s wives always was. Shortest of all was the three months after the death of Maria’s mother, the former Anna Maria Elers, by Croker’s count the second Mrs R. L. Edgeworth. In discussing the Memoirs's treatment of her death Croker skilfully implicates Maria Edgeworth as well as her father, though RLE was the narrator of the first volume:

She was, we believe, the mother of the celebrated daughter; but strange to say, neither the gratitude of the father, nor the piety of the daughter, have thought it worth while to throw away even the most transient expression of affection or regret upon the unhappy mother. In fact, if the family cat had died in kit­ tening, the circumstances could not be noticed with less ceremony.23

Having drawn in Maria even on the Memoirs's general treatment of RLE’s Life, Croker is able to deliver the coup de grace in his last seven pages, in which, turning aside from the father’s life, he focuses with precision on their obviously linked writings, and above all on what a Tory writing in a Tory journal considered their weak point - their religion. Maria Edgeworth as author of the second volume of the Memoirs and editor of the whole is again implicated in Croker’s main charge, which is that both of them are here and have always been evasive or mendacious on this issue. In his seven-page per­ oration Croker closes in on what is finally his central point - that the issue of religion must affect our judgment not only of RLE’s Life but of Maria Edge­ worth’s Works in their entirety. In his cogent conclusion he picks up ten passages or in some cases phrases, all in fact from the second volume, M aria’s, and does in fact demonstrate that both of them choose their words with such care that a believer must feel they equivocate. For example, at vol. II, p. 386 Edgeworth praises RLE for giving his children ‘a sense of religion, a profound veneration for the unknown cause of their being [and his] inscrutable decrees.’ Croker ripostes, This is mere pagan philosophy. Nay, it falls short of Plato and Cicero.’ The key point for him is the absence of reference to a Saviour (p. 544). At vol. II, p. 4 Maria Edgeworth reminds readers that many distinguished churchmen of the established church have honoured RLE with their friendship; Croker remarks tersely that ‘Miss Edgeworth must have been pushed hard for evi­ dence when she has recourse to such as this.’ She collects all her forces at the end (II, p. 407) to insist how aware her father was of the ‘consolatory power of religion’; ‘she does not say a single word about his own personal faith in this doctrine. - These are mere facts, which everyone sees, and which Hume and Voltaire could not and do not deny’ (p. 547). He sums up by saying he ‘could not pass over in silence ... a design to induce us to believe ... the thing which is not - to represent Mr Edgeworth as a Christian - ... When we find a system of education rejecting the Christian doctrine for use in schools it becomes a duty to pull off the mask’ (p. 548). RLE as a biographer emerges ‘silly, trivial, vain and inaccurate.... In society ... he was as disagreeable as

xxvi ii INTRODUCTORY NOTE loquacity, egotism and a little tinge now and then of indelicacy could make him.’ As for the two-volume biography, ‘a mistaken tribute of vanity and filial piety’, it is best forgotten (p. 549). Maria Edgeworth went abroad to Switzerland to avoid the reviews of the Memoirs. It is hard to believe Croker especially did not have an impact on her thinking about when and how she would publish another book. The savage sectarian literary politics of the 1820s in the English journals was as bruising and disillusioning as Irish politics; it was in the Quarterly, at this time (1818-22) and by similar means, that Byron was toppled as the leading poet of the day and as a fit writer for middle-class family reading. Edge- worth did not ‘fall’ in the same way; but even her friend, Scott, joined the ‘Christian’ party among major writers, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Lamb, in hinting that something imaginative or spiritual was missing from her work. In practice she published in future for adolescents (Harry and Lucy Concluded , 1825), or in the relatively safe genre of a country-house novel (Helen, 1834), leaving the public-sphere themes behind her. The public was changing, and here again Croker may have had an impact. The year after his review of the Memoirs the Quarterly chose very late to review Jane Austen’s last set of novels, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, 1818; they got a churchman to do it, Archbishop Richard Whately of Dublin, and his review, an important one for Austen, focused on the topic of religion. Austen, it is true, was no more inclined than Edgeworth or than most novelists to write about Christianity’s Saviour, or its sure and certain hope of the resurrection. But her brother Henry, recently ordained and a convert to Evangelical Chris­ tianity, wrote an Introduction to the Persuasion volume that was as surely targetted at the Quarterly reviewers in their crusading zeal for Christian family reading as anything Maria Edgeworth wrote earlier with an eye to the Edinburgh's progressive mission. Directly comparing Austen with Edge- worth, Whately found for Austen as the author to offer the family, for she was much the sounder Christian. Her popularity seems to have overtaken Edgeworth’s during the 1820s. The main instruments of change were Chris­ tian reviewing. M.S.B.

NOTES

1. See RLE’s Memoirs I (1820), pp. 87-9 0 . 2. C. Kendal Bushe to his wife, 16 August 1810; E. O. Somerville and Martin Ross, Irish Memories, new edn 1925, pp. 4 9 -5 2 . Cited Butler. 3. Transactions o f the Royal Irish Academy, vi (1797), [pp. 9 5 -1 3 9 ], p. 111.

XXIX WORKS OF MARIA EDGEWORTH: VOLUME 6

4. S ee Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 133-7) 5. W. J. McCormack, ‘The Tedium of History’, in ed. Ciaran Brady, Ideology and the Historians (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1991), pp. 77-98. 6. RLE’s Memoirs, II, p. 177: ‘I intend to put him intoentire possession of the estate of some hundreds a year, with a pretty house on it.’ 7. Cliona OGallchoir,Maria Edgeworth , Cambridge University Library, PhD thesis, 1998. 8. For Euphrosyne, see Practical Education I (1801), p. 299, where Alexei is dis­ cussed as an example of a deplorably inconsistent upbringing. Thanks to this he grew up a profligate; when his father had him tried for rebellion, ‘Euphrosyne ... deposed to every angry expression which, in his most unguarded moments, the wretched son had uttered against the tyrannical father.’ 9. ME to Sophy Ruxton n.d. [May 1813], where she praises Stael’s ‘last book’. 10. McCormack, ‘The Tedium of History’, p. 96. He quotes Blake, ‘Proverbs from Hell’, Marriage o f Heaven and Earth (1793-4). 11. Dumont to ME and RLE, 26 Jan. 1814; quotes Butler (1972), p. 496. 12. ME to C. Sneyd Edgeworth, 26 Feb 1814; cf. letter to Lady Romilly of the same dates, quoted B. C. Slade, ME: A Bibliographical Tribute (priv. printed 1937), pp. 146-7. See also Appendix C, ‘The Post-Publication History of Belinda and Patron­ age’, in Butler, ME, (1972), pp. 4 9 4 -9 . 13. J. R. Dinwiddy, ‘Jeremy Bentham as a Pupil of Miss Edgeworth’s’, Notes and Queries, 29 (June 1982) [pp. 2 0 8 -1 0 ], p. 208. 14. Dumont to ME, 14 Feb. 1814. University College London, Bentham MSS, ch. xxiv..30. 15. The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the superintendence of John Bowring, 11 vols (Edinburgh, 1838 -4 3 ), vol. 7, p. 188. 16. ‘Have you read Mansfield Park ? ... She has not so much fine humour as your friend Miss Edgeworth, but she is more skilful in contriving a story, she has a great deal more feeling, and she never plagues you with any chemistry, mechanics or polit­ ical economy, which are all excellent things in their way, but vile cold-hearted trash in a novel and, I piously hope, all of old Edgeworth’s putting in. By the bye, I heard some time ago that the wretch was ill. Heaven grant that he may soon pop off.’ Letter of 11 Aug. 1814; Letters to ‘Ivy’ [Mrs Dugald Stewart] from the first Earl of Dudley, ed. S. H. Romilly (London, 1905). Cf. Ward’s letters of 28 Sept. 1809 and 3 Sept .1812, ibid., pp. 76 and 170. 17. Quarterly Review, vol. 10 (1814), p. 309. 18. ‘Miss Edgeworth’s Patronage’, Edinburgh Review vol. 22 (1814) [pp. 416-34], pp. 4 1 6 -1 7 . 19. Ibid., pp. 4 3 2 -3 . 20. Smith to Lady Holland, Letters o f Sydney Smith, ed. Nowell C. Smith, 2 vols (Oxford, 1953), vol.l, p. 244. For Dumont’s communications with Edgeworths- town, see Butler (1972), pp. 257 and 496. 21. H. and H. W. Shine (eds.), The Quarterly Review under Gifford , 1809-1824 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1949), p. 71. 22. R LE ’s Memoirs (1820), vol. I, p. 70. 23. Quarterly Review, vol. 23 (1820) [pp. 51 0 -4 9 ], p. 528.

XXX Patronage

PATRONAGE

BY

MARIA EDGEWORTH,

4UTHOIOF "TALES O r FASHIONABLE LIFE,” " BELINDA,”

" l eo n o ea , ” & c .

IN FOUR VOLUMES. VOL. I.

« Withoute Patron,—though I condescend « Sometimes to ctU a Ministermy friend.*

LONDON:

PRINTED FOR J, JOHNSON AND CO.

ST. PAUL'S CaumCH«YA!lO.

181V

[iii]

T O T H E R E A D E R

My daughter again applies to me for my paternal imprimatur, and I hope that I am not swayed by partiality, when I give the sanction which she requires.

To excite the rising generation to depend upon their own exertions for success in life, is surely a laudable endeavor; but, while the young mind is cautioned against dependance on the patronage of the great, and of office, it is encouraged to rely upon such friends, as may be acquired by personal merit, good manners, and good conduct.

RICHARD LOVELL EDGEWORTH

Edgeworth's Town, Oct .6,1813*/

5

[1/3]

PATRONAGE

C H A P T E R I

‘How the wind is rising!’ said Rosamond. - ‘God help the poor people at sea to night!’ Her brother Godfrey smiled. - ‘One would think,’ said he, ‘that she had an argosy of lovers at sea, uninsured.’ ‘You, gentlemen,’ replied Rosamond, ‘imagine that ladies are always thinking of lovers.’ ‘Not always,’ said Godfrey, ‘only when they show themselves particularly disposed to humanity.’ ‘My humanity, on the present occasion, cannot even be suspected,’ said / Rosamond, ‘for you know, alas! that I have no lover at sea or land.’ ‘But a shipwreck might bless the lucky shore with some rich waif,’ said Godfrey. ‘Waifs and strays belong to the lady of the manor,’1 said Rosamond, ‘and I have no claim to them.’ ‘My mother would, I dare say, make over her right to you,’ said Godfrey. ‘But that would do me no good,’ said Rosamond, ‘for here is Caroline, with superior claims of every sort, and with that most undisputed of all the rights of woman - beauty.’ ‘True - but Caroline would never accept of stray hearts,’ said Godfrey. ‘See how her lip curls with pride at the bare imagination!’ ‘Pride never curled Caroline’s lip,’ cried Rosamond - ‘Besides, pride is very becoming to a woman. No woman can be good for much without it, can she, mother?’ ‘Before you fly off, Rosamond, to / my mother, as to an ally, whom you are sure I cannot resist,’ said Godfrey, ‘settle first, whether you mean to defend Caroline upon the ground of her having or not having3 pride.’ A fresh gust of wind rose at this moment, and Rosamond listened to it anxiously. ‘Seriously, Godfrey,’ said she, ‘do you recollect how very dangerous our coast is?3 Do you remember the shipwrecks last winter?’ As she spoke, Rosamond went to one of the windows, opened the shutter,

7 [3/ 6] WORKS OF MARIA EDGEWORTH: VOLUME 6 and threw up the sash.3 - Her sister, Caroline, followed, and they looked out in silence. ‘I can see a light to the left of the beacon,’ said Caroline. - ‘I never saw a light there before. - What can it mean?’ ‘Only some fishermen’ - said Godfrey. - ‘But, brother, it is quite a storm,’ - persisted Rosamond. ‘Only equinoctial gales, my dear.’ ‘Only equinoctial gales! But to / drowning people it would be no comfort that they were shipwrecked only by equinoctial gales. There! there! What do you think of that blast?’ cried Rosamond, ‘is not there some danger now?’ ‘Godfrey will not allow it,’ said Mrs Percy - ‘He is a soldier, and it is his trade not to know fear.’ ‘Show him a certain danger,’ cried Mr Percy, looking up from a letter he was writing - ‘Show him a certain danger, and he will feel fear as much as the greatest coward of you all. — Ha! upon my word, it is an ugly night,’ continued he, going to the window. ‘Oh, my dear father!’ cried Rosamond - ‘did you see that light? - out at sea? - There! there! - to the left.’ ‘To the east - 1 see it’ - ‘Hark! did you hear?’ - ‘Minute guns’2 - said Caroline. There was a dead silence instantly. - Every body listened. - Guns were heard again. - The signal of some vessel in distress. / The sound seemed near the shore. - Mr Percy and Godfrey hastened immediately to the coast. - Their servants and some people from the neighbouring village, whom they summoned, quickly followed. They found that a vessel had struck upon a rock, and from the redoubled signals, it appeared that the danger must be imminent. The boatmen, who were just wakened, were surly, and swore that they would not stir, that ‘whoever she was, she might weather out the night, for that, till day-break, they couldn’t get along side of her.’ - Godfrey instantly jumped into a boat, declaring he would go out directly at all hazards. - Mr Percy, with as much intrepidity, but, as became his age, with more prudence, provided whatever assistance was necessary from the villagers, who declared they would go any where with him; the boatmen then ashamed, or afraid, of losing the offered reward, pushed aside the land-lubbers, and were ready to go.b/ Out they rowed - and they were soon so near the vessel, that they could hear the cries and voices of the crew. The boats hailed her, and she answered that she was Dutch, homeward bound - had mistaken the lights upon the coast - had struck on a rock - was filling with water - and must go down in half an hour. The moment the boats came along side of her, the crew crowded into them 8 PATRONAGE: VOLUME I [6/9] so fas t, and with such disorder and precipitation, that they were in great danger of being overset, which Mr Percy seeing, called out in a loud and commanding voice to stop several who were in the act of coming down the ship’s side, and promised to return for them if they would wait. But just as he gave the order for his boatmen to push o ff , a French voice called out - ‘Monsieur! - Monsieur l’Anglois! - one moment.’ Mr Percy looked back and saw, as / the moon shone full upon the wreck, a figure standing at the poop, leaning over with outstretched arms. ‘I am Monsieur de Tourville, Monsieur - a chargé d’affaires - with papers of the greatest importance - dispatches.’ ‘I will return for you, Sir - It is impossible for me to take you now, our boat is loaded as much as it can bear’ - cried Mr Percy - and he repeated his order to the boatman to push o ff ’ Whilst Godfrey and Mr Percy were trimming the boat, M de Tourville made an effort to jump into it. ‘Oh don’t do it, Sir!’ cried a woman with a child in her arms, ‘The gentle­ man will come back for us - for god’s sake don’t jump into it.’ ‘Don’t attempt it, Sir,’ cried Mr Percy, looking up - ‘or you’ll sink us all.’ M de Tourville threw down the poor woman who tried to stop him, and he leaped from the side of the ship. At the / same moment Mr Percy seizing an oar pushed the boat off, and saved it from being overset, as it must have been if M de Tourville had scrambled into it. He fell into the water. Mr Percy without waiting to see the event, went off as fast as possible, justly considering that the lives of the number he had under his protection, includ­ ing his son’s and his own, were not to be sacrificed for one man, whatever his name or office might be, especially when that man had persisted against all warning in his rash selfishness. - At imminent danger to themselves, Mr Percy and Godfrey, after landing those in the boat, returned once more to the wreck, and though they both declared that their consciences would be at ease even if they found that M de Tourville was drowned, yet it was evi­ dent that they rejoiced to see him safe on board. - This time the boat held him, and all the rest of his fellow sufferers, and Mr Percy and his son had the satisfaction / of bringing every soul safely to shore. - M de Tourville, as soon as he found himself on terra-firma, joined with all around him in warm thanks to Mr Percy and his son, by whom their lives had been saved. - God­ frey undertook to find lodgings for some of the passengers and for the ship’s crew in the village, and Mr Percy invited the captain, M de Tourville, and the rest of the passengers to Percy-Hall, where Mrs Percy and her daughters had prepared every thing for their hospitable reception. When they had warmed, dried, and refreshed themselves, they were left to enjoy what they wanted most, repose. The Percy family, nearly as much fatigued as their guests, were also glad to rest - all but Rosamond, who was wide awake, and so much excited by what had happened, that she continued talking to her

9 [9/13] WORKS OF MARIA EDGEWORTH: VOLUME 6 sister, who slept in the same room with her, of every circumstance, and telling her imaginations of all that might come to pass from the adventures of the night, / whilst Caroline, too sleepy to be able to answer judiciously, or even plausibly, said, ‘yes’ - ‘no’ - and ‘very true’ - in the wrong place, and at length, incapable of uttering even a monosyllable, was reduced to inarticu­ late sounds in sign of attention. These grew fainter and fainter, and after long intervals absolutely failing, Rosamond with some surprise and indig­ nation exclaimed - ‘I do believe, Caroline, you are asleep!’ - And in despair, Rosamond, for want of an auditor, was compelled to com­ pose herself to rest. In the course of a few hours the storm abated, and in the morning, when the family and their shipwrecked guests assembled at breakfast, all was calm and serene. Much to Rosamond’s dissatisfaction, M de Tourville did not make his appearance. Of the other strangers she had seen only a glimpse the preceding night, and had not settled her curiosity concerning what sort of beings / they were. On a clear view by day-light of the personages who now sat at the breakfast table, there did not appear much to interest her romantic imagination, or to excite her benevolent sympathy. They had the appearance of careful money-making men, thick, square-built Dutch merchants, who said little and eat much - butter especially. - With one accord, as soon as they had breakfasted, they rose and begged permission to go down to the wreck to look after their property. Mr Percy and Godfrey offered immedi­ ately to accompany them to the coast. Mr Percy had taken the precaution to set guards to watch all night, from the time he left the vessel, that no depredations might be committed. They found that some of the cargo had been damaged by the sea-water, but excepting this loss there was no other of any consequence; the best part of the goods was perfectly safe. As it was found that it would take some time to repair the / wreck, the Prussian and Hamburgh passengers determined to go on board a vessel, which was to sail from a neighbouring port with the first fair wind. They came previously to their departure to thank the Percy family, and to assure them that their hospitality would never be forgotten. - Mr Percy pressed them to stay at Percy-Hall till the vessel should sail, and till the captain should send notice of the first change of wind. - This offer, how­ ever, was declined, and the Dutch merchants, with due acknowledgments, said, by their speaking partner, that ‘they considered it safest and best to go with the goods, and so wishing Mr Percy a good morning, and that he might prosper in all his dealings; and - Sir,’ concluded he, ‘in any of the changes of fortune, which happen to men by land as well as by sea, please to remember the names of Grinderweld, Groensvelt, and Slidderchild of Amsterdam, or our correspondents, Panton and Co. London.’ / So having said, they walked away keeping an eye upon the goods. -

10 PATRONAGE: VOLUME I [13/16]

When Mr Percy returned home it was near dinner time, yet M de Tourville had not made his appearance. He was all this while indulging in a comfort­ able sleep. He had no goods on board the wreck, except his clothes, and as these were in certain trunks and portmanteaus, in which Comtois, his valet, had a joint concern, M de Tourville securely trusted, that they would be obtained without his taking any trouble. Comtois and the trunks again appeared, and a few minutes before dinner M. de Tourville made his entrance into the drawing room, no longer in the plight of a ship-wrecked mariner, but in gallant trim, wafting gales of momentary bliss, as he went round the room paying his compliments to the ladies, bowing, smiling, apologizing, - the very pink of courtesy! - The gen­ tlemen of the family, who had seen him the preceding night in his frightened, angry, drenched, and / miserable state, could scarcely believe him to be the same person. A Frenchman, it will be allowed, can contrive to say more, and to tell more of his private history in a given time, than could be accomplished by a person of any other nation. In the few minutes before dinner he found means to inform the company, that he was private secretary, and favorite of the minister of a certain German court. To account for his having taken his pas­ sage in a Dutch merchant vessel, and for his appearing without a suitable suite, he whispered that ‘he had been instructed to preserve a strict incog­ nito, from which, indeed, nothing but the horrors of the preceding night could have drawn him.’ Dinner was served, and at dinner M de Tourville was seen, according to the polished forms of society, humbling himself in all the hypocrisy of polite­ ness. With ascetic good-breeding, preferring every creature’s ease and con­ venience to his own, practising a continual system / of self-denial, such as almost implied a total annihilation of self-interest and self-love. All this was strikingly contrasted with the selfishness which he had recently betrayed, when he was in personal danger. Yet, notwithstanding these recollections were against him,3 the influence of polite manners prevailed so far as to make his former conduct be forgotten by most of the family. After dinner when the ladies retired, in the female privy council held to discuss the merits of the absent gentlemen, Rosamond spoke first, and during the course of five minutes pronounced as many contradictory opin­ ions of M de Tourville, as could well be enunciated in the same space of time. - At last she paused, and her mother smiled. ‘I understand your smile, mother,’ said Rosamond, ‘but the reason I appear a little to contradict myself sometimes in my judgment of character is, because I speak my thoughts just as they rise in my mind, while persons, who / have a character for judgment to support, always keep the changes of their opinion snug to themselves, never showing the items of the account on either side, and let you see nothing but their balance. - This is very grand,

11 [16/19] WORKS OF MARIA EDGEWORTH: VOLUME 6 and if their balance be right, very glorious. - But ignominious as my mode of proceeding may seem, exposing me to the rebukes, derision, uplifted hands and eyes of my auditors , yet exactly because I am checked at every little mis­ take I make in my accounts, the chance is in my favour, that my totals should at last be right, and my balance perfectly accurate.’ ‘Very true, my dear - as long as you choose for your auditors only your friends, you are wise; but you sometimes lay your accounts open to strangers, and as they see only your errors without ever coming to your con­ clusion, they form no favorable opinion of your accuracy.’ ‘I don’t mind what strangers think of me - much,’ - said Rosamond. ‘At / least you will allow, Mamma, that I have reason to be satisfied, if only those who do not know me could form an unfavorable opinion of my judgment - and, after all, ma’am, of the two classes of people, those who “Never said a foolish thing, and never did a wise one,” and those who never did a foolish thing, and never said a wise one, would not you rather that I should belong to the latter class?’3 ‘Certainly, if I were reduced to the cruel alternative: but is there an unavoidable necessity for your belonging to either class?’ ‘I will consider of it, ma’am,’ said Rosamond, ‘in the meantime, Caroline, you will allow, that M de Tourville is very agreeable?’ ‘Agreeable!’ repeated Caroline - ‘such a selfish being! - Have you forgot his attempting to jump into the boat, at the hazard of oversetting it, and of drowning my father and Godfrey who went out to save him - and when my father / warned him - and promised to return for him - selfish cowardly creature!’ ‘Oh! poor man, he was so frightened, that he did not know what he was doing - he was not himself.’ ‘You mean he was - himself’ - said Caroline. ‘You are very ungrateful, Caroline,’ cried Rosamond, ‘for I am sure M de Tourville admires you extremely - yes, in spite of that provoking incredu­ lous smile, I say he does admire you exceedingly.’ ‘And if he did,’ replied Caroline, ‘that would make no difference in my opinion of him.’ ‘I doubt that,' said Rosamond, ‘I know a person’s admiring me would make a great difference in my opinion of his taste and judgment - and how much more if he had sense enough to admire you!’ Rosamond paused, and stood for some minutes silent in reverie. ‘It will never do, my dear,’ said / Mrs Percy, looking up at her - ‘Trust me, it will never do - turn him which way you will in your imagination, you will never make a hero of him - nor yet a brother-in-law.’ ‘My dear mother, how could you guess what I was thinking of,’ said Rosa­ mond, coloring a little, and laughing, - ‘but I assure you - now let me explain to you, ma’am, in one word, what I think of M de Tourville.’

12 PATRONAGE: VOLUME I [19/22]

‘Hush! my dear, he is here’ - The gentlemen came into the room to tea. - M de Tourville walked to the table at which Mrs Percy was sitting, and, after various compliments on the beauty of the views from the windows, on the richness of the foliage in the park, and the superiority of English verdure, he next turned to look at the pictures in the saloon, distinguished a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds,4 then passing to a table on which lay several books, - ‘Is it permitted?’ said / he, taking up one of them - the Life of Lord Nelson.5 M de Tourville did not miss the opportunity of paying a just, and what to English ears he knew must be a delightful tribute of praise to our naval hero. Then opening several other books, he made a rash attempt to pronounce in English their titles, and with the happy facility of a Frenchman, M. de Tourville touched upon various subjects, dwelt upon none, but found means on all to say something to raise himself and his country in the opinion of the company, and at the same time to. make all his auditors pleased with them­ selves. Presently, taking a seat between Rosamond and Caroline, he applied himself to draw out their talents for conversation. Nor did he labor in vain. They did not shut themselves up in stupid and provoking silence, nor did they make any ostentatious display of their knowledge or abilities. - M de Tourville, as Rosamond had / justly observed, seemed to be particularly struck with Miss Caroline Percy. - She was beautiful, and of an uncommon style of beauty. Ingenuous, unaffected, and with all the simplicity of youth, there was a certain dignity and graceful self-possession in her manner, which gave the idea of a superior character. She had, perhaps, less of what the French call esprit , than M de Tourville had been accustomed to meet with in young persons on the Continent, but he was the more surprised by the strength and justness of thought which appeared in her plain replies to the finesse of some of his questions. The morning of the second day that he was at Percy Hall, M de Tourville was admiring the Miss Percys’ drawings, especially some miniatures of Car­ oline’s, and he produced his snuff-box, to show Mr Percy a beautiful minia­ ture on it’s lid. It was exquisitely painted. M de Tourville offered it to Caroline to copy, / and Mrs Percy urged her to make the attempt. ‘It is the celebrated Euphrosine,’ said he, ‘who, from the stage, was very near mounting a throne.’6 M de Tourville left the miniature in the hands of the ladies to be admired, and, addressing himself to Mr Percy, began to tell with much mystery the story of Euphrosine. She was an actress of whom the Prince, heir apparent at the German court where he resided, had become violently enamoured. One of the Prince’s young confidants had assisted his Royal Highness in carrying on a secret correspondence with Euphrosine, which she managed so artfully, that the Prince was on the point of giving her a written promise of marriage,

13 [22/5] WORKS OF MARIA EDGEWORTH: VOLUME 6 when the intrigue was discovered, and prevented from proceeding farther, by a certain Count Albert Altenberg, a young nobleman who had, till that moment, been one of the Prince’s favorites, but who by / thus opposing his passion lost entirely his Prince’s favor. The story was a common story of an intrigue, such as happens every day in every country where there is a young Prince; but there was something uncommon in the conduct of Count Altenberg. Mr Percy expressed his admiration of it; but M de Tourville, though he acknowledged, as in morality bound, that the Count’s conduct ‘had been admirable, just what it ought to be upon this occasion, yet spoke of him altogether as une tete exaltée,7 a young man of a romantic Quixotic enthusiasm, to which he had sacrificed the interests of his family and his own hopes of advancement at court. In support of this opinion, M de Tourville related several anecdotes, and on each of these anecdotes Mr Percy and M de Tourville differed in opinion. All that was produced to prove, that the young count had no judgment or discretion, appeared to Mr Percy proofs of his independence of character, and greatness of soul. Mr Percy, / repeated the anecdotes to Mrs Percy and his daughters; and M de Tourville, as soon as he saw that the ladies, and especially Caroline, differed from him, immediately endeavoured to slide round to their opinion, and assured Caro­ line, with many asseverations, and with his hand upon his heart, that he had merely been speaking of the light in which these things appeared to the gen­ erality of men of the world, that for his own particular feelings they were all in favour of the frankness and generosity of character, evinced by these imprudences - he only lamented that certain qualities should expose their possessor to the censure and ridicule of those, who were, like half the world, incapable of being moved by any motive but interest, and unable to reach to the idea of the moral sublime.’8 The more M de Tourville said upon the subject, and the more gesture and emphasis he used to impress the belief in his truth, the less Caroline believed him, and the more dislike and contempt she / felt, for the duplicity and piti­ ful meanness of a character, which was always endeavouring to seem, instead of to be. - He understood and felt the expression of her countenance, and mortified by that dignified silence, which said more than words could express, he turned away, and never afterwards addressed to her any of his confidential conversation. From this moment Rosamond’s opinion of M de Tourville changed. She gave him up altogether, and denied, or at least gave him grudgingly, that praise, which he eminently deserved for agreeable manners and conversa­ tional talents. Not a foible of his now escaped her quick observation, and her lively perception of ridicule. Whether from accident, or from some suspicion, that he had lost ground with the ladies, M de Tourville the next day directed the principal part of his conversation to the gentlemen of the family: comforting himself with the

14 PATRONAGE: VOLUME I [25/9] importance of his political and official character, he / talked grandly of poli­ tics and diplomacy. Rosamond, who listened with an air of arch attention, from time to time with a tone of ironical simplicity, asked explanations on certain points relative to the diplomatic code of morality, and professed her­ self much edified and enlightened by the answers she received. She wished, as she told Caroline, that some one would write ‘Advice to Diplomatists ,’ in the manner of Swift’s Advice to Servants;9 and she observed that M de Tourville, charge d’ affaires, &c., might supply anec­ dotes illustrative, and might embellish the work with a portrait, of a fin­ ished diplomatist. Unfortunately for the public, on the third morning of the diplomatist’s visit, a circumstance occurred, which prevented the fur­ ther development of his character, stopped his flow of anecdote, and snatched him from the company of his hospitable hosts. In looking over his papers in order to show Mr Percy a complimentary letter from some crowned head, / M de Tourville discovered, that an important packet of papers, belonging to his dispatches, was missing. He had in the moment of danger and terror stuffed all his dispatches into his great coat pocket, in getting out of the boat he had given his coat to Comtois to carry, and strange to tell, this chargé d’affaires had taken it upon trust, from the assertion of his valet, that all his papers were safe. He once, indeed, had looked them over, but so carelessly that he never had missed the packet. His dismay was great, when he discovered his loss. He repeated at least a thousand times, that he was an undone man, unless the packet could be found. - Search was made for it, in the boat, on the shore, in every prob­ able, and improbable place. - But all in vain - and in the midst of the search a messenger came to announce, that the wind was fair, that the ship would sail in one hour, and that the captain could wait for no man. M de Tourville was obliged / to take his departure without this precious packet. Mrs Percy was the only person in the family, who had the humanity to pity him. He was too little of a soldier for Godfrey’s taste, too much of a courtier for Mr Percy -- too frivolous for Caroline, and too little romantic for Rosamond. ‘So,’ - said Rosamond, ‘here was a fine beginning of a romance with a shipwreck, that ends only in five square merchants, who do not lose even a guilder of their property, and a diplomatist, with whom we are sure of noth­ ing but that he has lost a bundle of papers for which nobody cares.’ In a few days the remembrance of the whole adventure began to fade from her fancy. M de Tourville, and his snuff-box, and his essences, and his flat­ tery, and his diplomacy, and his lost packet, and all the circumstances of the shipwreck, would have appeared as a dream, if they had not been main­ tained / in the rank of realities, by the daily sight of the wreck, and by the actual presence of the Dutch sailors, who were repairing the vessel. /

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