cl11aria {)igevvorth

(1768-1849)

In his 1829 preface to Waverley, Walter Scott acknowledges his considerable debt to the artistry of Maria Edgeworth, author of the innovative novel Castle Rackrent (1800): "Without being so presumptuous as to hope to emulate the rich humour, pathetic tenderness, and admirable tact which pervade the works of my accomplished friend, I felt that something might be attempted for my own country, of the same kind with that which Miss Edgeworth so fortunately achieved for Ireland." Lord Byron recalled in 1813, "I had been the lion of 1812: Miss Edgeworth and Madame de Stael ... were the ex­ hibitions of the succeeding year." 1 Author of Belinda, Leonora, Patronage, and other novels and tales, Edgeworth was one of the most respected educational writers and novelists of the age. Moreover, her tales for children, informed by Enlightenment educational theory and shaped by her role as surrogate mother to her many younger siblings, were popular and influential. Born at Black Bourton, Oxfordshire, on 1 January 1768, Maria was the second surviving child and eldest daughter of Anna Maria Elers and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, an Anglo-Irish landowner, educational theorist, scien­ tist, and author. Maria Edgeworth's mother died in childbirth in 1773, and Maria grew up adoring and emulating her father, who married four times altogether, eventually producing twenty-two children, eighteen of whom survived infancy.2 His second wife, Honora Sneyd, was the foster sister of Anna Seward. Maria Edgeworth grew up on Anna Letitia Barbauld's Lessons for Children and attended boarding schools in England, where she received conventional instruction. Although she was sometimes considered "naughty;' her childhood was a relatively happy one. In 1782 her nonconformist father, who adhered to the ideas of the English

I. Byron's "Ravenna Journal;' 19 January 1821, in "Born for Opposition," vol. 8 of Byron's Letters and Journals (London, 1978), 29. 2. The last of Maria Edgeworth's siblings was born in 1812. She was older than her father's fourth wife. Maria Edgeworth

provincial Enlightenment and was the friend of Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley, Thomas Day, James Watt, and Josiah Wedgwood, returned with his family to his estate at Edgeworthstown, County Longford, Ireland, to take part in Irish reform. Maria, who was fifteen, became her father's intellectual companion, amanuensis, domestic helper, and assistant in running the estate. Her first literary work was a translation he requested of Madame de Genlis's Adele et Theodore. When her father returned to London in 1791, she remained in Ireland, where she forged a deep and lasting friendship with his sister, Margaret Ruxton. Edgeworth eventually joined her father and stepmother in England, but she disliked fashionable London society. The family returned to Ireland in 1793· In 1795 Edgeworth published Letters for Literary Ladies with Joseph John­ son, publisher of Erasmus Darwin, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Joseph Priestley, and others, who was to bring out all of her work until his death two decades later. The book argues for the intellectual capacities and rights of women but advocates that they remain in the domestic sphere rather than enter the political realm. The following year she brought out her hugely successful vol­ ume The Parent's Assistant, which comprised stories and a play for children in the tradition of Mary Wollstonecraft, Sarah Trimmer, Madame de Genlis, and Thomas Day, espousing Edgeworth family progressive educational theory. Edgeworth became her father's assistant in literary as well as in business matters, co-authoring several books with him, including Practical Education (1798), which outlines the theories behind the stories in The Parent's Assis­ tant. Practical Education applies Enlightenment principles to early childhood education, drawing examples from the Edgeworth family; it was immedi­ ately recognized as an important book. These ideas are further illustrated in Maria Edgeworth's Early Lessons (1801), for children. In 1799 she and her father proposed to Anna Letitia Barbauld that they start a liberal journal for women, to be called the Feminead, but Barbauld rejected the idea, be­ lieving that ideological differences between women authors would keep the journal from succeeding. Maria Edgeworth's innovative first novel, Castle Rackrent, published in January 1800, was written without her father's guid­ ance and published anonymously. Considered a landmark in the history of the novel for its technique, it is a portrait, both comic and critical, of Irish provincial life, with a humorously unreliable narrator using everyday speech. It depicts a series of irresponsible landlords, a metaphor for British over­ sight of Ireland, and the inevitability of capitalist forces' undermining the power of an already grossly corrupt and irresponsible aristocracy. This book was to have a profound influence on Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, and Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev. Her next book, Belinda (1801), is a novel of manners with an independent heroine who is both feminine and rational. M.aria Edgeworth 233

It critiques fashionable society and the ideology of sensibility as it portrays Belinda making her way for the first time in the adult world and choosing between three suitors. Edgeworth collaborated with her father to pen the Essay on Irish Bulls (1802), a complex and highly ironic text ostensibly about "Irish bulls," a type of contradiction or paradox, but, more importantly, a defense of Irish speech patterns and culture. In the fall of 1802 Edgeworth took a tour through the Midlands of England with her family, continuing on to Paris, where she and her father were feted for their educational works and met intellectuals and writers, including Madame de Genlis. With much pain, in December she declined a proposal of marriage from a Swedish courtier and intellectual, Abraham Niclas Clewberg-Edelcrantz, though her father urged her to accept. Before returning home they visited Glasgow and Edinburgh, where Maria met the novelist Elizabeth Hamilton and leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment. Her Popular Tales (1804) are a critique of Hannah More's "Cheap Reposi­ tory" tracts, which advocate patience, uncomplaining suffering, subordina­ tion, and a religious faith that looks to an afterlife for its reward. Edgeworth focuses instead on the virtues of toleration, self-discipline, self-improvement, and the support of the family. Unbeknownst to her father, in 1805 Edgeworth published The Modern Griselda, a satire on women who aspire to high society and reject domestic roles. She elaborates in Leonora (1806), an epistolary, satirical novel with a bright, virtuous, domestic heroine at its center. In 1809 the Edgeworths brought out Essays on Prefessional Education, concerned with moral and intellectual instruction and advocating professions independent of the patronage system. Maria Edgeworth's Tales ef Fashionable Life (1809, 1812), including "Ennui" and "The Absentee;' set the social criticisms of the Essays in fictional form, using realistic detail and dialect. These tales attack rniddle­ class aspirations for "fashionable" society and advocate reform, principally through the professionalization of the gentry. In l8II she wrote notes and a preface for Mary Leadbeater's Cottage Dialogues Among the Irish Peasantry. Although by this time Edgeworth had become one of the most widely read and respected authors in Britain, she repeatedly rejected invitations to leave Ireland to be lionized. But in the spring of 1813 she did make a long trip to England with her family. She saw William Roscoe in Liverpool, and in London she met Mary Berry, Thomas Malthus, Lord Byron, Thomas Moore, and Jane Marcet, a scientist with whom she corresponded for some years afterwards. While Edgeworth was well liked, her father was consid­ ered overbearing. On this trip Edgeworth also saw Etienne Dumont, a Swiss intellectual with whom she had been exchanging letters for years and whom she considered marrying. Patronage (1814) contrasts the lives of two families belonging to the landed Maria Edgeworth

gentry, the Falconers and the Percys. The Falconers ultimately fail because of their reliance on the patronage system and blind chance; the Percys pros­ per by cultivating self-discipline, independence, and professional knowledge. Caroline Percy is Edgeworth's model woman, who looks for an intellectual equal in a husband and marries Count Altenberg, an idealized version of Edgeworth's own unsuccessful Swedish suitor, Edelcrantz. Edgeworth earned the enormous sum of twenty-one hundred pounds for this reformist novel. Edgeworth published her Continuation of Early Lessons in 1814 and wrote the preface and final chapter, "On Parody," for her father's Readings on Poetry (1816). Her memoir of the novelist Elizabeth Hamilton appeared in the Sep­ tember 1816 issue of the Monthly Magazine, and in r817 she published Comic Dramas in Three Acts. Harrington (1817) is a novel inspired by a correspon­ dence with Rachel Mordecai, an American Jew who wrote to Edgeworth to object to her stereotyping of Jewish characters. Harrington contains several examples of admirable Jewish characters, including the virtuous, cultivated, and wealthy Montenero, an intellectual, Israel Lyons, and an honorable ped­ dler. The hero of the novel, the young professional Harrington, overcomes his fear ofJews and eventually falls in love with and marries Berenice, whom he believes to be Jewish but who is revealed in the end to be Christian. The novel also includes some of Edgeworth's earlier themes-the superiority of reason over prejudice or custom, the potential of the middle class to be­ come cultured and public-spirited, and the need for the working classes to be treated more fairly. Ormond, a novel published with Harrington, has an Irish protagonist mod­ eled on Henry Fielding's Tom Jones who has adventures in England, Ireland, and France. He rejects French court culture and fashionable coquettes and marries a virtuous and sensible Englishwoman, symbolically carrying out a "union" of English and Irish gentry. Eighteen seventeen was a difficult year for Edgeworth, for in June her father died; she completed and published his Memoirs in 1820. She journeyed to England several times in the early 1820s, and in r823, on a visit to Scotland, met Walter Scott. The two became fast friends, and he and John Gibson Lockhart, his son-in-law, visited her at Edge­ worthstown in r825. At about this time Edgeworth took over control of the Edgeworth estate, which was being mismanaged, from her brother Lovell; she continued to manage the estate until 1839. Her last novel, Helen (1834), which took five years to write, is a critique of the silver-fork novels then in vogue; it portrays a strong bond between two women and asserts the primacy of the domestic sphere over all others. Elizabeth Gaskell admired this book and imitated it in Wives and Daughters. Maria Edgeworth died at Edgeworthstown on 22 May 1849 after a brief illness. She had been the most commercially successful novelist before Walter Maria Edgeworth --- 235 Scott eclipsed all others with Waverley (1814). According to her own calcu­ lations, Edgeworth earned more than eleven thousand pounds from writing during her lifetime. Edgeworth's favorite poets included Pope, Barbauld, and Scott, whose Lay of the Last Minstrel is said to have aided her recovery after a serious illness. In her preface to Readings on Poetry, for children, she complained that "an un­ conscionable quantity of what we may be permitted to call common place poetry, is by many parents forced upon the youthful memory." 3 Instead of rote memorization, the standard practice at the time, she championed teaching children to understand the meaning of poetic language, exposing them to the best poetry, and encouraging them to form their own judgments about it. In her chapter "On Parody," she observes that "it would be more satis­ factory to us, to hear young persons make one observation of their own, it would be more satisfaction to us, to see the pleasure lighten in their eyes, on the discovery of an allusion, an imitation, a parody, on the perception of any beauty of poetry discerned for themselves, and by themselves, than it could possibly give us to know that every word in this book, that all the criticisms of Warton, or Johnson, or of all the best criticks that ever wrote, were merely impressed on the memory of the pupil." Although writing poetry seems to have been an integral part of Edge­ worth's everyday life, she never published a line of it. Family albums, how­ ever, contain not only transcripts in her hand of verse by her father but also signed poetry of her own composition, along with poems by other members of the household.4 Maria Edgeworth's verse seems to have been produced solely for the entertainment of her family, for the private communication of feeling to family members or friends, or for special occasions. None of her writing, whether prose or poetry, was penned in private; she was almost always surrounded by children or subject to other frequent interruptions.

MAJOR WORKS: Letters for Literary Ladies, to Which is Added An Essay on the Noble Science of Self-justification (London, 1795); The Parent's Assistant; or, Stories for Children, 3 vols. (London, 1796); Castle Rackrent: an Hibernian Tale. Taken from the Facts, and from the Manners of the Irish Squires, Before the Year 1782 (London, r8oo); Belinda, 3 vols. (London, 1801); Early Lessons, IO pts. in 5 vols. (London, 1801-2); Moral Tales for Young People, 5 vols. (London, 1801); Popular Tales, 3 vols. (London, 1804); The Modern Griselda: A Tale (London, 1805); Leonora, 2 vols. (London, 1806); Tales of Fashionable Life, 6 vols.

3. P. xx of the edition published in Boston in 1816. This book was co-authored with her father, but Maria Edgeworth penned the preface and the chapter entitled "On Parody." 4. See David C. Sutton, ed., Location Register of English Literary Manuscripts and Letters: Eigh­ teenth and Nineteenth Centuries, 2 vols. (London, 1995), 760-61, for an inventory of Maria Edgeworth's unpublished verse. Maria Edgeworth

(London, 1809 [vols. l-3], 1812 [vols. 4-6]); Continuation ef Early Lessons, 2 vols. (Lon­ don, 1814); Patronage, 4 vols. (London, 1814); Comic Dramas, in Three Acts (London, 1817); Harrington, a Tale; and Ormond, a Tale, 3 vols. (London, 1817); Rosamond: A Sequel to Early Lessons, 2 vols. (London, 1821); Frank: a Sequel to Frank in Early Lessons, 3 vols. (London, 1822); Harry and Lucy Concluded: Being the Last Part ef Early Lessons, 4 vols. (London, 1825); Helen: a Tale, 3 vols. (London, 1834).

WITH RICHARD LOVELL EDGEWORTH: Practical Education, 2 vols. (London, 1798); Essay on Irish Bulls (London, 1802); Readings on Poetry (London, 1816); Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Esq., 2 vols. (London, 1820).

TEXTS USED: Text of "On Chauntry's Statue of Watt in Handsworth Church" from an Edgeworth family commonplace book in the National Library oflreland, MS 23,445; texts of "To Mrs. Carr Accepting From Her as a Keepsake a Lamp Which She Had Used for Twenty Years in Her Children's Room & Which She Lately Lent to Me dur­ ing My Sister's Illness at Frognel l May 1819," "Laura Leicester, Supposed to Exclaim at the Sight of a Colourbox and Portfolio Sent to her by Mrs. and Miss Sneyd Jan 7 1819;' and "With a Dyed Silk Quilt Sent to Aunt Ruxton to be Thrown over When She Lies on the Sofa" from another Edgeworth family commonplace book in the National Library of Ireland, MS 23,447, acc. 3744. Each poem was signed by Maria Edgeworth.

On Chauntry's Statue of Watt in Handsworth Church*

He thinks, he lives, he breathes celestial breath, 'Tis but the trance of thought-it is not death, - One moment more & he will move, will rise There is 'within him that which never dies: Immortal as th' immortal soul is he That body incorrupt shall ever be: The perishable body gone, the flesh the bone Of Watt-th' immortal genius lives in Chauntrys stone. (wr. 1831)

*James Watt (1736-1819), a Scottish inventor responsible for an improved steam engine, was a friend of the Edgeworth family. He had a house in Handsworth and was Maria Edgeworth buried in a vault in the Handsworth parish church beneath a chapel built expressly to house the life-size marble statue of him by the noted sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey (1781-1841).

To Mrs. Carr, Accepting from Her As a Keepsake a Lamp Which She Had Used for Twenty Years in Her Children's Room & Which She Lately Lent to Me during My Sister's Illness at Frognel l May 1819 •

Lamp! never doomd to waste the midnight oil In Fashion's revels-Fashion's ceaseless toil Thy happier lot-with steady ray serene To mark the bliss of life's domestic scene When soft with cautious step, & noiseless tread The mother sought her sleeping darlings' bed With breath suppressed lowbending stood to view Their arms entwined their cheeks of rosy hue Your friendly flame assisted her to trace The father's likeness in the infant face: IO And oft you saw the child in slumber blest Feel the soft kiss & turn to be carest, While still in sleep the ready smile would play Then sweet in circling dimples, melt away­ No torch triumphant nor the festal blaze Of full illumination's proudest rays Had e'er the power such pleasure to impart As thou, dear Lamp! to the fond Mother's heart In sickness, doubly dear thy faithful light Watched the lone hours of suffering's lengthy Night 20 In forms grotesque thy flut'ring shadows thrown Amused the feverish eye with wonders all thy own Unwearied still thy paly circlet burned Till the grey morning's rising sun returned: Dear humble Lamp! I love, I prize thee more Than ever magic lamp was prized of yore For thine is fond Association's art To call up images that touch the heart; 238 Maria Edgeworth

Full to my mind you bring affection's face, 30 And every kind & every winning grace That soothed the anxious, blest the happy hour With Friendship-Wisdom -wit's united power Dear keepsake Lamp! your constant flame shall shine Soon at my much loved home for me & mine While grateful friends exulting in the sight Eye the safe shade & bless the useless Light! (wr. 1819)

* Francis Morton Carr, who lived on Frognel Lane, was a neighbor of Joanna Baillie in Hampstead.

Laura Leicester, Supposed to Exclaim at the Sight of a Colourbox and Portfolio Sent to Her by Mrs. and Miss Sneyd Jan. 7 1819

Chalks! dear Mamma! red green & blue For me!-and a portfolio too! Paper! oh give me in a minute I'll draw the world and all that's in it I'll draw a house - I'll draw a town I'll draw a bird-I'll draw a flower! Each flower that buds each flower that blows Carnation - Honeysuckle Rose All things that creep all things that fly IO I have you all within my eye I'll paint the Parrot's crimson beak I'll paint the Linnet's yellow streak I'll paint the caterpillar's rings Stay Butterfly-I'll paint your wings I'll paint the Sun in all his Glory I'll paint the blindmen in the story Or beggarman with legs uneven Or puppet show-with puppets seven I'll draw in miniature-in small Maria Edgeworth 239

Man -woman child I'll have ye all! 20 I know an eye that's bright and witty I know a nose that's very pretty Turn Sophy-turn my dear, this way No-leave her for another day I'll draw poor Puss-she takes it ill! I'll draw Mamma-for she'll sit still But ma'am today I'm not quite steady Besides you know we've nothing ready Tomorrow then we will begin And then-what praises I shall win! 30 I'll draw at once like Emma Sneyd You smile! but Ma'am I will indeed I'll work so hard!-I'll never play Begin I will this very day Begin! my child-that's wondrous easy And ma'am I'll finish too-to please ye (wr. 1819)

With a Dyed Silk Quilt Sent to Aunt Ruxton to Be Thrown over When She Lies on the Sofa•

Go wretched dyed resuscitated thing Round my dear Aunt your dingy covering fling Warm on her feet-& light upon her breast Hung round her shoulders soothe her soft to rest Henceforth poor quilted one, nor Lyrian dye Nor persic loom far famed, with thee shall vie While rival cachmeres jealous boast their art Close & more she'll fold you to her heart While fondly murmuring betwixt sleep & wake She owns she loves you 'Jor Maria's sake" IO Ay! & will love you ever o'er and o'er

6 persic) Persian. 7 cachmeres] Cashmeres. Maria Edgeworth

The older, still she loves her friend the more Loves with a love that youthful love defies So warm -so well bred-& I think so wise (wr. 1821)

* Margaret Edgeworth Ruxton, sister of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, was for half a century, until her death in 1830, a major influence on Maria Edgeworth's life.