Patronage Volumes I & II

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. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identificationand explanation without intent to infringe. BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress 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.

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