The Art of Political Fiction in Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson 9780815397465, 9781351147729

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Dedication
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Art of the Unvarnished Tale
1 Hamilton's Letters of a Hindoo Rajah and the Making of a Professional Woman Writer
2 Maria Edgeworth in Blackface: Castle Rackrent and the Irish Rebellion of 1798
3 Edgeworth's Belinda: An Artful Composition
4 Revolutionary Landscapes: Political Aesthetics and Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl
5 "Domestic Rebellion": Hamilton's Cottagers of Glenburnie
6 "Have you Irish?": Heroism in Morgan's The O'Briens and the O'Flahertys
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Art of Political Fiction in Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson

For Larry

The Art of Political Fiction in Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson

Susan B. Egenolf Texas A&M University, College Station, USA

First published 2009 by Ashgate Publishing Reissued 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© Susan B. Egenolf 2009

Susan B. Egenolf has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

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 information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 2008050246 Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Publisher’s Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. Disclaimer The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact. isBn 13: 978-0-8153-9746-5 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-1-3511-4772-9 (ebk)

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: The Art of the Unvarnished Tale 1 Hamilton’s Letters of a Hindoo Rajah and the Making of a Professional Woman Writer 2

Maria Edgeworth in Blackface: Castle Rackrent and the Irish Rebellion of 1798

3 Edgeworth’s Belinda: An Artful Composition 4 Revolutionary Landscapes: Political Aesthetics and Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl

vi viii 1 17 43 73 105

5

“Domestic Rebellion”: Hamilton’s Cottagers of Glenburnie

129

6

“Have you Irish?”: Heroism in Morgan’s The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys

157

Epilogue

185

Bibliography Index

189 203

List of Illustrations 1.1 Facsimile of “Polyorama or 20, 922, 789, 888, 000 Vues Pittoresques.” A set of scenes that can be variously arranged (cf. Figure 14), similar to a polyorama published by Hodgson and Co., London, 2 in 1824. Collection of the author. 1.2

The Ghauts at Benares (1787), by William Hodges. Oil on canvas. © Royal Academy of Arts, London.

39

2.1

United Irishmen in Training, by James Gillray. London, 13 June 1798, published by Hannah Humphrey. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

58

3.1 The Watercress Girl (1780), by John Raphael Smith after Johan Zoffany. Mezzotint. © The Trustees of The British Museum.

83

3.2 Shrimps! (1782), by Francesco Bartolozzi after William Hogarth. Stipple Engraving. © The Trustees of The British Museum.

84

3.3 Lady Caroline Howard (1778), by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Oil on Canvas. Andrew W. Mellon Collection, Courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

89

3.4 Lady Cockburn and her Three Eldest Sons (1773), by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Oil on canvas. © The National Gallery, London. 94 3.5

Venus and Mars (c. 1485), by Sandro Botticelli. Egg tempera and oil on poplar. © The National Gallery, London.

View of Crescenza (1648–50), by Claude Lorrain. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, The Annenberg Fund Inc. Gift, 1978 (1978.205) Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

101

4.1

4.2

4.3

116

Bandits on a Rocky Coast (c. 1656), by Salvator Rosa. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Charles B. Curtis Fund, 1934 (34.137) Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

117

Dunluce Castle (c. 1841), by William Bartlett. Hand-colored engraving.  Collection of the author.

118

List of Illustrations

vii

5.1 The Cottage Door (1777–8), by Thomas Gainsborough. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Cincinnati Art Museum, Gift in honor of Mr. and Mrs. Charles F. Williams by their children.

131

5.2 Frontispiece. In The Cottagers of Glenburnie, a Tale, for the Farmer’s Fire-side, by Elizabeth Hamilton. Philadelphia: Isaac Peirce, 1812. Courtesy of The North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

153

6.1 Facsimile of “Polyorama or 20, 922, 789, 888, 000 Vues Pittoresques.” A set of scenes that can be variously arranged (Cf. Figure 1), similar to a polyorama published by Hodgson and Co., London, in 1824. Collection of the author. 188

Acknowledgments To borrow Mary Shelley’s description of her novel Valperga, this project also has been a “child of mighty slow growth,” and bringing it to maturity has involved the assistance of many people whom it is my pleasure to acknowledge here. I wish to thank the College of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University for a Faculty Research Enhancement Grant that enabled me to do archival research at the British Library. I also wish to thank Jim Rosenheim and the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research for a stipendiary fellowship and a forum in which to discuss my work with other scholars. I am grateful to my former department head Paul Parrish for his support and encouragement and the Department of English for a research grant and a much-needed semester of release time. I also wish to thank my current department head, Jimmie Killingsworth for his support during the final stages of manuscript preparation. The Department of English also generously provided subvention for the permission and reproduction fees for the images used herein. The Chawton House Library and the University of Southampton hosted the Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1830, Conference in 2003 and the Wild Irish Girls Conference in 2006. The opportunity to interact with other scholars at those two events provided inspiration and affirmation as I continued to pursue my work on women and political writing. I wish also to thank the staffs of the Boston Public Library, the British Library, the Huntington Library, and the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for their assistance in my research. Shorter versions of Chapter 2, Chapter 3, and Chapter 4 appeared in ELH, Women’s Studies, and Land and Landscape in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, edited by Úna Ní Bhroiméil and Glenn Hooper (Four Courts Press, 2007), respectively. I am grateful to those editors and readers who helped me refine and improve these essays. This study has benefited greatly from the insights of the many colleagues who have generously taken the time to read and respond to chapters in progress. I am grateful to Siraj Ahmed, Margaret Ezell, Joe Golsan, Melanie Hawthorne, Margaret Kelleher, and Patricia Phillippy. Jeffrey Cox and Mary Favret first started me on the path that lead to this project and have continued, long after I was their student, to offer guidance and encouragement. I wish to thank Julie Donovan for suggestions that enhanced my work on Sydney Owenson, Vanessa Reece for her timely research assistance, and Gina Opdycke for her careful reading and assistance with manuscript preparation. To my dear friends in Irish studies Marian Eide and Kate Kelly I owe a great debt of gratitude. They have read my work at a moment’s notice, participated in

Acknowledgements

ix

many conversations about eighteenth-century Irish politics and glosses during long walks, treated my children to outings while I was working, and made me laugh. To my friend Lynne Vallone, I offer thanks for her suggestions and encouragement, especially in the early stages of this project. To Mary Ann O’Farrell, I extend a warm smile for her insightful readings, midnight emails, care packages, and her founding, along with David McWhirter, the New Modern British Studies group, whose activities have been so important to the development of this project. I wish to thank NMBS members, particularly Bob Griffin, Terry Hoagwood, and Claudia Nelson, for their helpful comments on an earlier version of Chapter 4. I am indebted to Ann Donahue at Ashgate for her enthusiasm, prescience, and guidance that have made the publication process so pleasurable. I am also grateful to the Ashgate reader whose constructive criticism strengthened my overall study. I offer a heartfelt thanks to my parents Bob and Lupe Egenolf for encouragement and support that began many, many years ago and have continued without fail and to my siblings and their partners for kind enquiries and affirmations and tending their niece and nephew so I could do extended research. My husband Larry Reynolds is my first wonderful reader, my sounding board, and my unwavering supporter. I have tremendous gratitude for the untold hours that he devoted to reading my work, talking endlessly about my project, and making time for me to write. I wish to thank Robin for his good humor and kindness and Charlotte and Logan for their joyful and curious souls and their endless patience while their mama finished her B-O-O-K. Susan B. Egenolf Texas A&M University

C\ Taylor & Francis ~Taylor & Francis Group

http://taylora ndfra nci s.com

Introduction

The Art of the Unvarnished Tale

A history of popular games and toys of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries describes a toy that consists of a number of painted panels, depicting, for example, a pastoral scene in which various figures traverse the countryside, as in “Polyorama or 20, 922, 789, 888, 000 Vues Pittoresques” (c. 1824). What is fascinating about these panels is that they may be arranged and rearranged, forming a different narrative each time. In one rendition a ruin may be next to a village at the center of a landscape, while in another it may be in a sheep-filled pasture toward the very edge of the pictorial frame (Figure 1.1). This clever toy clearly represents a combination of genres as well as an exercise in revisionist narrative—any event may be privileged as the centerpiece of the story just as easily as it may hold a place on the periphery. The reading of each self-contained panel is altered depending upon its context. In this game, the emplotment of events, the construction of any history, has a refreshing openness and flexibility which makes the author and the reader self-consciously aware of the order which has been imposed on the events. One can imagine the panel game (and other such amusements as the toy theatre) being used to reflect the players’ varying stances towards the events occurring in their own world. That is, the pastoral scene might serve as an escape from revolutionary turmoil, whereas the toy theatre’s Bastille scene might allow one to engage and perhaps to control that turmoil. In addition to the openness and flexibility here, we may perceive a historical reality producing and being produced—desire and anxiety at work. The Art of Political Fiction in Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson is a book about the artistic craft and political engagement of three major women novelists of the Romantic period writing in Britain and Ireland—Elizabeth Hamilton, Maria Edgeworth, and Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan). As in the panel game described above, these writers often present their readers with disruptions in their narrative segments, called glosses, that call attention to themselves and momentarily alter the narrative. The forms these glosses usually take are the prefaces and notes of the putative editors, but they also include references to other media, primarily painting and drama, all of which provide an implicit means of expanding the significance of their narratives through non-narrative means. Although glossing is but one of  Constance E. King, Antique Toys and Dolls (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1979), 82. King notes that many toys, such as the polyorama, that eventually ended up in the nursery began as toys for the amusement of adults.    The author Sydney Owenson married Sir Charles Morgan in 1812, thus her earlier works are published under the name Owenson and her later works as Lady Morgan. 

Fig. 1.1 Facsimile of “Polyorama or 20, 922, 789, 888, 000 Vues Pittoresques.”

The Art of the Unvarnished Tale



many literary techniques used to convey political values and beliefs, its subtlety and indirectness made it a preferred and powerful means for women writers of the Romantic period to participate in so-called masculine discussions outside the sanctioned feminine sphere. The Anglo-Irish Edgeworth and Owenson and the Scottish Hamilton were all prolific writers, producing texts ranging from children’s literature to travel books to moral treatises. They were also quite politically aware. My focus is upon the ways their novels actively critique late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century politics and society, especially through their self-conscious use of glosses. This study features Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah and The Cottagers of Glenburnie, Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent and Belinda, and Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl and The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys. These novels effectively represent a wide range of types within the Romantic novel: the Oriental tale, the satire, the dialect tale, the novel of manners, the didactic novel, the historical novel, and the national tale, but as this study will show, all employ glosses not only to comment upon their narratives but also to intentionally disrupt them, revealing both their process of structuring and the cultural and social world beyond the texts being structured. The astute reader, in other words, discovers meanings beyond the world of the narrative, which challenge English, Scottish, and Irish institutions and sensibilities. To put this thesis in visual terms, the glosses examined here function much like the reflection of the King and Queen in the mirror in Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656). As you may recall, the figures of the royal parents are not visible as sitters in the foreground of the painting; thus the small constructed reflection of them in the background breaks the conceptual frame of the picture, drawing attention to the reality of monarchy, patronage, and parenthood beyond the world of the painting. Velázquez’s inclusion of himself in the painting also forces the viewer to be conscious of the creative process. The back of the immense canvas on the left occupies less than a sixth of the width of the painting but almost the entire vertical expanse of the left-hand side. As we read the painting, our eyes first meet the unseen canvas, making it impossible to view the scene without attention to the process, and the promised product, of Velázquez’s orchestrations. Much of the political art of the writers examined in this study likewise functions to make us conscious of the novel as literary production. As we look into the fictional worlds of Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson, their glosses also force our gaze outward, revealing a world not explicitly represented in the novel but there beyond its frame.    Patrick Parrinder has recently shown that what is called “the English novel” has, since its beginnings, interrogated concepts of national character and national identity, challenging official and ruling-class perspectives and becoming increasingly explicit (Nation and Novel: The English Novel from Its Origins to the Present Day [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006]). Parrinder concludes, “We may be confident that twenty-first-century novelists will continue to participate in the making and remaking of English identity” (414).

The Art of Political Fiction in Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson



As Mikhail Bakhtin has theorized, the novel’s incorporation of alternative genres reveals a reality outside the text. With “novelization,” other genres “become more free and flexible, their language renews itself by incorporating extraliterary heteroglossia and the ‘novelistic’ layers of literary language, they become dialogized, permeated with laughter, irony, humor, elements of selfparody, and finally—this is the most important thing—the novel inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain semantic open-endedness, a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality (the open-ended present).” Just as the reflection and the presence of the painter and canvas in Las Meninas make evident the presence of a “still-evolving contemporary reality,” the glosses of a novel, when the central narrative shifts to alternative genres, make “contact” with the “contemporary reality” of the author’s life. The tension of these shifts imparts the “extraliterary heteroglossia” of the novel. This study attends to peripheries (in terms of both the texts and contexts) and argues for an enfolding of the authors, writings, and events of the margins into the central narratives of Romanticism. Hamilton, Owenson, and Edgeworth occupied the liminal position of women writing from the English satellites of Ireland and Scotland; however, all three women were among the most popular novelists at the beginning of the eighteenth century, indicating that both their craft and the issues that most concerned them had stirred the public imagination. Their use of both textual and cultural glosses shows a sophisticated understanding of contemporary international political events and cultural trends, an understanding that has faded from view due to changes in reading habits. As H.J. Jackson has argued in his recent compelling study, Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia (2005), Romantic readers were cued to attend to the periphery, to understand works as fluid and evolving: “[m]any readers had been deliberately trained to mark and annotate books using techniques” that suggest the readers’ consciousness that “books do not grow, but are made; that they are constructed from separate parts that can be dismantled and used again somewhere else.” A reviewer of Owenson’s Patriotic Sketches (1807) in Le Beau Monde evidences the marked attention to the construction of the text, that is, to the physical form of the text upon the page and the text as a commercial production: “The appearance of the two volumes, eking out matter which might easily compress itself in one, the fine wire-wove paper exhibiting its neat ‘rivulet of text, flowing through a meadow of margin,’ seemed   Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 7.    Ann H. Jones in her Ideas and Innovations: Best Sellers of Jane Austen’s Age (Brooklyn: AMS Press, 1987) determines this based on publication records and reviews and lists them as among the most popular novelists from 1800–1820; as noted in Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 4.    H.J. Jackson, Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 252. 

The Art of the Unvarnished Tale



to us to indicate rather a more substantial reason; and at the end of every ‘Sketch,’ really it required all our politeness to forget the idea of book-making altogether! Miss Owenson will, no doubt, consider this remark rather beneath the dignity of criticism, but truly nine shillings for the two volumes of Patriotic Sketches is a forcible consideration, which the critic feels too sensibly to forget.” Owenson’s critic highlights the attention to the text on the page that Gérard Genette believes is inescapable: No reader can be completely indifferent to a poem’s arrangement on the page— to the fact, for example, that it is presented in isolation on the otherwise blank page, surrounded by what Eluard called its ‘marges de silence,’ or that it must share the blank page with one or two other poems or, indeed, with notes at the bottom of the page. Nor can a reader be indifferent to the fact that, in general, notes are arranged at the bottom of the page, in the margin, at the end of the chapter, or at the end of the volume; or indifferent to the presence or absence of running heads and to their connection with the text below them; and so on.

This study explores the constructedness of the Romantic novel and its indebtedness to glosses and paratexts, including titles, epigraphs, footnotes, and intertitles, that is, those words that occupy the spaces beyond the central narrative. While most of these terms will be familiar, a brief explanation of Genette’s term “intertitle” may be particularly useful in attending to the discussion of the glosses in Chapters 3 and 5. The intertitle is any title internal to the text, such as a chapter title. As Genette remarks, “in contrast to general titles, which are addressed to the public as a whole and may have currency well beyond the circle of readers, internal titles are accessible to hardly anyone except readers . . . and a good many internal titles make sense only to an addressee who is already involved in reading the text, for these internal titles presume a familiarity with everything that has preceded.” Another difference between intertitles and general titles is that they are “by no means absolutely required,”10 thus the author’s decision to employ them may have ironic or comic implications for the narrative. Examinations of earlier forms of glossing make clear that the gloss and the central text often exist incompatibly. In his study of annotations and marginal art in medieval texts, Michael Camille explores the move from interlinear glosses, “[s]queezed between the lines of text” that “‘spoke’ the same words, only in a different language” to the marginal gloss that “interacts with and reinterprets a text

  Quoted in Jacqueline Belanger, ed. Critical Receptions: Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan (Bethesda, MD: Academica Press, 2007), 108.   Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin. (1987; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 34.    Ibid., 294. For Genette’s full discussion of the intertitle, see pp. 294–316. 10  Ibid. 



The Art of Political Fiction in Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson

that has come to be seen as fixed and finalized.”11 Camille characterizes thirteenthcentury glossing as the “irreverent explosion of marginal mayhem” in religious texts and theorizes the “edge” as both a “dangerous” and a “powerful” place: “In folklore, betwixt and between are important zones of transformation. The edge of the water was where wisdom revealed itself; spirits were banished to the spaceless places ‘between the froth and the water’ or ‘betwixt the bark and the tree.’”12 Hamilton, Edgeworth and Owenson seem to comfortably command the “spaceless places” of the textual margin, understanding the power of glosses that compete with and transform the central narrative. In the history of the book, as marginalia moved from visual to textual, the uneasy relationship between the center and the edge persisted in the modern age. Anthony Grafton notes that “[e]ven if the intentions of text and annotation have become somewhat blurred, however, the radical nature of the shift from providing a continuous narrative to producing a text that one has annotated oneself seems clear. Once the historian writes with footnotes, historical narrative tells a distinctly modern, double story.” Footnotes used in fictional writing, of course, also engender this “double story.” Though the gloss appears to afford stability to the central narrative, Grafton observes: “To the inexpert, footnotes look like deep root systems, solid and fixed; to the connoisseur, however, they reveal themselves as anthills, swarming with constructive and combative activity.”13 Chuck Zerby, in his study of the footnote, suggests that early “Bibles were battlefields; their left and right margins were the trenches from which scriptural annotations and citations were lobbed at previous Bibles’ misinterpretations.”14 What Grafton and Zerby both make clear is that the footnote’s contentious relationship with the central narrative effects an openness or duality in the interpretations of the text as a whole. For the novel, as for narrative poems, ekphrastic or visual glosses have a comparable effect in their interaction with the textual narrative. I use ekphrasis here in the sense of a verbal representation of a visual representation, a definition that both W.J.T. Mitchell and James A.W. Heffernan advocate as the most useful for theoretical discussion.15 Heffernan finds ekphrasis to be the “unruly antagonist of narrative, the ornamental digression that refuses to be merely ornamental”: “Because it verbally represents visual art, ekphrasis stages a contest between rival 11  Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 20. 12  Ibid., 22, 16. 13   Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (1997; repr., London: Faber and Faber, 2003), 23, 9. 14   Chuck Zerby, The Devil’s Details: A History of Footnotes (New York: Touchstone, 2002), 21. 15   See W.J.T. Mitchell, “Ekprhrasis and the Other,” South Atlantic Quarterly 91 (1992): 695–719, and James A.W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 3.

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modes of representation: between the driving force of the narrating word and the stubborn resistance of the fixed image.”16 However, Heffernan also theorizes that ekphrasis is not static, but dynamic. Envisioned as a “struggle for mastery between word and image” that “is repeatedly gendered,” ekphrasis “speaks not only about works of art but also to and for them.”17 This gendered quality of ekphrasis accords with the way that I see the gloss working more generally here, where that which seems to be silenced and marginalized has the power to effectively alter our interpretation of the central masculinized narrative. The Romantic period witnessed a preoccupation with such glossing and varnishing, terms indebted to painting and referring to enhancement. Examples of glossing included reference to a painting to describe an individual, or the citation of a drama to clarify the structure of a moment in the action or, most simply, the use of annotations, offered as clarifications. Yet it was understood that these glosses were also varnishes, supposedly transparent coverings of the text that altered it. The unique double meaning of gloss and varnish—in the material sense a glaze or protective covering and rhetorically, a device which explains, interprets, amplifies, or subverts meaning—provides a concrete level for discussing media shifts as layers of meaning through which a reader interprets the text. It also provides a theoretical means of understanding the decentralization of an authoritative historical voice. The etymology of the term “gloss” bears some examination: defined principally by the OED as an “explanatory rendering,” it is “[a]lso, in a wider sense, a comment, explanation, interpretation. Often used in a sinister sense: A sophistical or disingenuous interpretation,” an “amplification.” As early as 1608, the following phrase occurred in Hall’s Virtues & Vices: “Neither doth his tongue . . . make good a lie with the secret glosses of double or reserved senses.” In 1743 the London Magazine writes, “The authentick Gazette, which . . . never once dealt in Puff or Varnish, but told the Truth,” and Dryden, in the Preface to his Fables, remarks, “In many places he has perverted my meaning by his glosses, and interpreted my words into blasphemy and bawdry, of which they were not guilty.”18 During the Romantic period, few took glosses at face value. John Thomas Smith exhibits a general distrust of paratexts in his illustrated Remarks on Rural Scenery (1797): In the course of my little reading, I have too frequently observed prefaces, promising information which the reader hath never been able to find, and dedications in which the dedicator hath extolled the dedicatee for virtues which not only did not exist in that particular instance, but could hardly have existed in any other: I am afraid therefore, that these prefaces and dedications cannot be considered as very creditable on either side; and shall accordingly offer these slight memorials to the public, . . . and instead of pretending to disclaim all 16

 Heffernan, 5, 6.  Ibid., 6–7. 18   Oxford English Dictionary. 17

The Art of Political Fiction in Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson



views of vanity or of interest—(points on which, in my humble opinion, no author ought to be believed)—freely acknowledge that I hope, in however small a degree, both to please my reader, and benefit myself.19

Smith demonstrates here the extent to which the motivation behind prefaces and dedications was understood, but he also advances the more generally held belief that glossing may be duplicitous and misleading. However, Smith takes his stand against the gloss in his Advertisement, where he follows the preceding admonishment with a humorous quote from “Mr. Walpole” and a “sincere thanks” to his subscribers, thereby fulfilling the usual goals of the preface and perhaps supporting his own treatise on paratexts. Later in the nineteenth century, the gloss was still used to distort the truth, and, according to Joseph A. Boone, the technique took on a gendered aspect. Richard Burton’s introduction to his A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments (1885–86) “begins with an anatomical metaphor that bestows on his translation a specifically male body. Prior bowdlerized editions, he complains, have ‘castrat[ed]’ the tales, producing only ‘ennui and disappointment’ in the reader, whereas his aim is to ‘produce a full, complete, unvarnished, copy of the great original.’”20 However, as Boone notes, Burton’s restoration of the text to “its ‘uncastrated’ manhood is curious” because he “adorn[s] it with footnotes, annotations, and appendixes whose copiousness rivals the primary text, creating a proliferation of multiple (one might argue feminine) sites of textual pleasure.”21 Boone’s reading emphasizes the connection between rhetorical glossing and a multivocal or feminine form of discourse as opposed to a straightforward, univocal masculine form. The feminine gloss is regarded as dangerous as it “threaten[s] to explode the complete and contained male body” of the text.22 The suspicion attending the technique of glossing or varnishing finds its most famous precursor in Othello’s remark before the Venetian senate: “Yet, by your gracious patience, / I will a round unvarnish’d tale deliver / Of my whole course of love” (I.iii.89–91). Then Othello follows his claim with the fantastic tales of heroics that seduced Desdemona and, in their retelling, spellbind the Duke and Senators as well. Thus Shakespeare alerts his audience to the idea that the promise   John Thomas Smith, Remarks on Rural Scenery, with Twenty Etchings of Cottages, from Nature (London: Nathaniel Smith, 1797), n.p. 20   Joseph A. Boone, “Vacation Cruises; or, the Homoerotics of Orientalism,” PMLA 110 (1995): 92. 21   Boone, 92. For an extended treatment of the masculine and feminine aspects of Burton’s text, see Sandra Naddaff, Arabesque: Narrative Structure and the Aesthetics of Repetition in “The 1001 Nights” (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991). 22   Much work remains to be done on the gendering of the gloss. In some cases the gloss is claimed to act as the scholarly, masculinized voice which contains an unruly narrative; although, as will be seen in the Castle Rackrent chapter, this “containment” actually results in the feminized, multivocal form discussed by Boone. 19

The Art of the Unvarnished Tale



of an unvarnished tale is a rhetorical ploy to increase the sense of trust between the narrator and his/her audience. But story-tellers crafty enough to begin by securing their authority, have no doubt the sagacity to employ other conventions of tale-telling in order to keep their listeners spellbound. A number of authors of the period 1789–1830 asserted the importance of telling the truth through a “plain unvarnished tale.” In Castle Rackrent (1800), for example, Maria Edgeworth’s masculine “Editor” in his gloss of a Preface warns against those writers “used to literary manufacture,” claiming, “A plain unvarnished tale is preferable to the most highly ornamented narrative. Where we see that a man has the power, we may naturally suspect that he has the will to deceive us.”23 Likewise, Thomas De Quincey assures the reader of the veracity of his fantastic relation in a note that glosses his Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821): “It would vitiate the interest which any reader might otherwise take in this narrative, if for one moment it were supposed that any feature of the case were varnished or distorted.”24 Despite such assurances of unvarnished tales, narrative glossing reached a particularly sophisticated form in novels of the Romantic period. As I show in the case of Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, the Editor, like Othello, emphasizes the common quality of the dialect narrative which follows; however, the textual glosses, including Edgeworth’s Preface, footnotes, and Glossary, result in a highly complex invented history serving the author’s sociopolitical purposes. In his attempt to define the novel, Terry Eagleton has called it “less a genre than an anti-genre. It cannibalizes other literary modes and mixes the bits and pieces promiscuously together.”25 Yet, for the novelists Edgeworth, Hamilton, and Owenson, at least, such mixing, when it comes to the use of literal and performative glosses, serves quite deliberate artistic and political ends. The interaction of disparate media within their novels encourages a look both at and away from the narrative itself, calling the reader’s attention to particular worldly concerns in the very act of highlighting the ways the narrative is constructed. While the textual examples above assert that varnishing and verisimilitude are mutually exclusive, the more varnished narrative, denigrated for its deceptive quality, is tied most directly to historical reality, because the tension between textual levels forces us beyond the text, allowing us to glimpse elements of the form’s constructedness, and often of its relation to a particular cultural moment. In other words, the media shifts generate breaks in the text where artifice or glossing engages the world through dialogic tension in a way that the fabled “plain, unvarnished tale” cannot. The prolific use of generic shifts and editorial apparatuses during the Romantic period has not gone unnoticed, but such attention is still fairly scarce. Gary Kelly proposed the label of the “quasi-novel” for the novels and texts of the early  Maria Edgeworth. Castle Rackrent: An Hibernian Tale Taken from Facts and from the Manners of the Irish Squires before the year 1782 (London: Joseph Johnson, 1800), 2. 24   Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821; reprinted Ware, England: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), 88–89. 25   Terry Eagleton, The English Novel (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 1. 23

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The Art of Political Fiction in Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson

nineteenth century that “seem to contain or to be dominated by material not considered to be usual in novels.”26 For novels that incorporate such a “range of factual, public, and political material” via their notes, such as Hamilton’s Letters of a Hindoo Rajah and Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, Kelly uses the term “footnote novels.” He suggests that such quasi-novels “redeem the novel from mere narrativity while steering between the discursive extremes of fictional fantasy” and the “philosophical” and “political issues of the day.”27 In Lawrence Lipking’s imaginative take on “The Marginal Gloss,” where much of the essay (or an alternate essay) is printed as a gloss in the wide right-hand margin, he finds that one function of the gloss is to prevent textual closure: “Thus the apparatus of the margin, with its constant suggestion that revisions are possible, explanations are needed, delivers a vivifying truth: however much the text pretends to finality, it is always open to change.”28 I would argue similarly that the gloss creates a narrative rupture that opens the text to the outside world. As Shari Benstock points out, notes are “continually extending” the “boundaries” of the text “to include the reader,” and often with comic effect.29 Also, as Clare Simmons has shown, the Romantic gloss as employed in the “Romantic Oriental poem” relates to contemporary cultural understanding and becomes associated for Robert Southey with the “‘wasteful’ use of ornament” that he associates with the “impractical Oriental mind.”30 Use of the gloss is not unique to the genre of the Romantic novel, of course, for it appears in Romantic poetry as well—William Blake’s plates have long been discussed as glosses upon his poetry; the Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads obviously has much in common with the Preface of Castle Rackrent; Coleridge’s glosses to the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Charlotte’s Smith’s botanical and geological notes to Beachy Head (1807), and Byron’s copious notes to Childe Harold are notable instances where the gloss interacts dialectically with the central poem. Jerome McGann’s work has been especially useful in elucidating the sources of such practices and their various uses. He has shown, for example, that Coleridge’s 1817 prose glosses to the Rime of the Ancient Mariner function “to strengthen the original archaic aspect of the work” and to further Coleridge’s “own hermeneutic models,” supporting the idea of media shifts as self-conscious narrative constructs.31 McGann has argued for the ever-evolving, multi-voiced interpretation 26  Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period: 1789–1830 (London: Longman, 1989), 252–60. 27  Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution: 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 157. 28   Lawrence Lipking, “The Marginal Gloss,” Critical Inquiry 3 (1977): 611. 29   Shari Benstock, “At the Margin of Discourse: Footnotes in the Fictional Text,” PMLA 98 (1983): 207. 30   Clare A. Simmons, “‘Useful and Wasteful Both’: Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer and the Function of Annotation in the Romantic Oriental Poem,” Genre 27 (1994): 84. 31   Jerome J. McGann, The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 141.

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of Coleridge’s Rime by citing Coleridge’s ideas on reading the Scriptures and the glosses of those Scriptures. In his Aids to the Reflection and The Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, Coleridge urged readers to “approach the Scriptures with a double understanding. First, readers must see that the received documents—primitive texts, interpolations, commentaries—report historically mediated materials and hence must be ‘examined each in reference to the circumstances of the Writer or Speaker, the dispensation under which he lived, the purpose of the particular passage, and the intent and object of the Scriptures at large.’”32 As McGann points out, here and elsewhere the reader is not presented with a single authoritative point of view that should be privileged but rather with a developing dialectic.33 The same could be said of the glosses that appeared in periodicals of the period, such as the fictional letter used by Blackwood’s to authenticate the discovery of the Scottish mummy in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) or such seemingly innocent glosses as the index, where the AntiJacobin Review and Magazine listed “Prostitution—See Mary Wollstonecraft.”34 Glossing provides an important connection between genres that have previously seemed too disparate to be studied within the same era. In actuality, there was great creative cross-fertilization among the various genres of the Romantic period. Hamilton, Edgeworth, Owenson and other novelists are as skilled at conjuration as any of the romantic poets, and the rupture created by the gloss brings their contemporary reality into the present reading moment. To argue that novelists such as Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson were self-conscious in their rhetorical manipulations is not to set them apart, for all indications are that other late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century authors were keenly aware of the importance and marketability of textual glossing. In 1785, Samuel Henley convinced Joseph Johnson, who also published Edgeworth and Godwin, to publish William Beckford’s Vathek by promising “to supply an elaborate apparatus in the form of ‘Notes’ to further the impression that this was

  Quoted in McGann, Beauty of Inflections, 149.  In a related theoretical discussion, Linda Hutcheon notes that the debate about narrative theory seems less concerned with seeking a “single definition of what constitutes a truth claim” and more with “the questions of whose truth is being claimed and what one hopes to achieve by such a claim” (Linda Hutcheon, “Presidential Forum: Discourses of Truth,” Profession [1992], 19). Hutcheon cites Foucault: “It seems possible to me to make fictions work within truth, to introduce truth-effects within a fictional discourse, and in some way to make discourse, ‘fabricate,’ something which does not yet exist, thus to fiction something” (19). This theoretical interest in locating the “truth” less in the content of the narrative and more in the dialectic tension of the “fabrication” of these “truth effects” informs my examination of rhetorical glosses, especially through media shifts, found in the Romantic novel. 34  See Ralph M. Wardle, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1951), 318. 32

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12

indeed a tale translated from the Arabic source.”35 In fact, according to James Hogg in his short-lived weekly, The Spy (September 1810–11), “notes” were clearly the rage. Hogg plays upon the pun of the “notes” that stylish women used to fill out their underwear and the notes poets used to fill out their poetry volumes: “what is the meaning of the huge bunches of trumpery which these ladies wear upon their rumps? . . . These . . . are worn merely for the sake of adding to their bulk . . . Without these, Sir, they could never be put to bed, for they would not fill one pair of sheets; nor if put to bed could they ever rise again, as it would be a shame to appear without stays in public, and their slender bodies would be quite lost in them. These things, Sir, the ladies call notes, and they are the very tip-top of the fashion.”36 Hogg’s less-than-delicate description, which also alludes to the mistresses of certain poets, shows us that Hogg understood, and expected his audience to understand, that form was closely tied to a work’s chances for publication and to its “public” reception. His comments also suggest that the “slender bodies” of the poems or narrative proper required the “stays” of editorial apparatuses to be noticed in the marketplace—the notes to Byron’s immensely popular Childe Harold filled a fascinating volume in themselves. In the process of examining the remarkable art that characterized the use of glosses by the three women writers considered here, this study will highlight the political meaning of the 1798 Irish Rebellion as a major event in British Romantic writing, suggesting that representations of the Irish insurgency amplified both reactionary and progressive responses to the French Revolution. Three chapters that examine Edgeworth and Owenson novels explore the context of the Rebellion and show how events in Ireland held the attention and imagination of the British reading public, bringing to the fore issues of imperialism, race, and nationalism, with which the other novels in this study engage, though within different sociopolitical contexts. Although Owenson was the only one of the three authors to explicitly style herself as a political writer, examination of the editorial and cultural glosses employed by Hamilton and Edgeworth reveal their own commitments to political intercourse. This study does not assume uniformity in the values and beliefs of the authors studied here, though it does reveal their shared concern for art, drama, politics, and the role of women within British society. All three of these women writers delight in crossing disciplinary boundaries, often with humorous effect, and they employ the theories and practices of a variety of art forms beyond literature. The performing arts as well as painting engaged their interest, and all were familiar with the aesthetics of the picturesque and the sublime, as established by Burke and Gilpin, often challenging the conventions that had developed around these concepts, especially as they intersected with notions of nation and gender. All  Gerald P. Tyson, Joseph Johnson: A Liberal Publisher (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1979), 59–60. 36   Quoted in David Groves, James Hogg: The Growth of a Writer (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1988), 29. 35

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three women wrote one of the novels examined here in the guise of a seemingly naïve male narrative voice, and in later novels, all three depict female characters able to manipulate other characters and orchestrate the plot. Edgeworth’s and Hamilton’s political positions have been notoriously difficult to pin down, and Owenson’s political views changed markedly in the twenty years between her two novels discussed here. Edgeworth and Hamilton both shared the ambiguity of being conservative progressives and both maintained an interest in children’s education as a route to social progress. All three women claim a close tie with Ireland, most obviously Owenson and Edgeworth, but Hamilton called Ireland the “land of my nativity,” and her brother and sister were raised in northern Ireland, where she often visited for months at a time. Perhaps the strongest bond linking these writers was their dedication to craft and their desire to make it bear upon the world in which they lived. The Art of Political Fiction details the complexity and occasional ambivalence of these women writers who were heavily invested in the outcome of the political and cultural events of their day, and it suggests that their widely read works had transformative potential, especially in the area of gender relations. My discussion of their novels is organized chronologically and begins with an examination of the glosses in Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796). In Chapter 1: “Hamilton’s Letters of a Hindoo Rajah and the Making of a Professional Woman Writer,” I demonstrate how editorial glosses, including footnotes, an extended “Preliminary Dissertation” detailing various cultural practices of the “Hindoo” people, and a Glossary of “Oriental” terms, illuminate the complicated relationship between England and India and the creative generic negotiations of a woman writer taking on a political topic. I argue that the text and paratexts of the novel contribute to the sense of Hamilton’s Letters of a Hindoo Rajah as a progressive Asiatic Miscellany, demonstrating how Hamilton joins the mission of the miscellanies by editing, compiling, and manipulating the works of the Asiatic Society in her novel to reach a wider audience while subtly subverting the tenets of the male Orientalists with her progressive idealism. Like Hamilton’s Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, Castle Rackrent (1800) features a native male narrative voice offset by extensive editorial commentary.  The tension between Thady’s native dialect narrative and the glosses of Edgeworth’s fictional English or Anglo-Irish editor exposes the anxieties of colonial oppression in Ireland.  Chapter 2: “Maria Edgeworth in Blackface: Castle Rackrent and the Irish Rebellion of 1798” represents the first extensive exploration of Castle Rackrent in the context of the proliferation of Irish Rebellion narratives published contemporaneously.  Expanding upon James Newcomer’s characterization of “disingenuous” Thady, I show that Edgeworth assumes the voices of a knowing Thady and of the non-native editor to contend with the violence committed by and against the native Irish in the rebellion of 1798. Drawing upon Edgeworth’s correspondence and many of the previously unexamined narratives of the rebellion (including narratives written by women), I detail her knowledge of this violence and argue that by assuming Thady’s voice, she performs what I term “linguistic blackface” for her English and Anglo-

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Irish readers, to allay their fears and hers. Castle Rackrent, like the other novels examined in this book, is thus both product and producer of its charged context, which we glimpse through openings created by authorial glosses, or “varnishings.” Chapter 3: “Edgeworth’s Belinda: An Artful Composition” treats the only novel in this study set exclusively in England, though, as I show here, British and French colonial ventures underlie the central plot as do issues of the controversial Rights of Woman debate. This chapter examines the glosses or the intertitles of chapters, but it also moves from the literal gloss to examine the cultural varnish of portraiture. The literal glosses of Edgeworth’s 1801 novel of manners, such as the chapter titles “Rights of Woman” and “Domestic Happiness,” underscore the novel’s concern with the contemporary debate over women’s education and gender roles. By examining the conventions of eighteenth-century portraiture, I argue that as Belinda’s characters critique the visual representations of women and assign generic labels—fancy piece, history piece, family history piece, portrait—they engage in the project of constructing narratives dependent upon context, reproducing Edgeworth’s own self-conscious flaunting of novelistic conventions and directing the reader’s attention to the problems of constructing women characters who could both amuse and instruct within nineteenth-century life and art. Continuing the discussion of the provocative use of multi-media glosses, Chapter 4: “Revolutionary Landscapes: Political Aesthetics and Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl” explores the dialectic between the hero’s observations and the literal editorial glosses, as well as the cultural glosses of the picturesque and landscape painting in Owenson’s 1806 novel.  Unlike Hamilton’s Rajah and Edgeworth’s Thady, Owenson’s narrator displays the telling naiveté of the British traveler in a strange land; the blunders and ruptures in the text result from the unaware and unknowing British observer.  Owenson’s glosses, coupled with her later writing, especially Patriotic Sketches of Ireland (1807) and The Life and Times of Salvator Rosa (1824), I suggest, reveal the threat of potential native unrest. As I demonstrate, although the ruins and the aestheticized landscapes of The Wild Irish Girl reassure British readers of native Irish impotence, of a civilization to be admired but not feared, the introduction of Salvator Rosa creates tension between imperial nostalgia and potential insurgency. Though Hamilton openly mocks the rhetoric of revolution, Chapter 5: “‘Domestic Rebellion’: Hamilton’s Cottagers of Glenburnie” argues that her glosses illuminate women’s involvement in transformative national domestic agendas, particularly poverty reform and education. Further, this chapter shows how Hamilton’s Dedication to Hector MacNeill challenges depictions of Scottish national character fostered by Robert Burns. Her progressive reforms, both in the novel and in her other writings, such as Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education (1801), focus upon educating the lower orders (Hamilton herself was instrumental in the founding of the Edinburgh House of Industry for Women in 1804); however, in Cottagers, where a chapter is dedicated to “Hints Concerning the Duties of a Schoolmaster,” she derides the “pretensions” of teaching the “hic,

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hæc, hoc” to peasant children. Flying in the face of the endearing national characters popularized by Burns, Hamilton, I show, attacks the “national modes, manners and customs” as detrimental to progress among the lower orders. Such progress is to be achieved through Hamilton’s revolutionary advocacy of the participation of women in matters of national reform. Treating the most explicit fictional representation of actual rebellion, Chapter 6: “‘Have you Irish?’: Heroism in Morgan’s The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys” revisits Ireland and the period of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 to examine the rhetorical glossing of a now seasoned and expressly political commentator. In the Preface to her 1827 novel, Owenson explicitly acknowledges the political goals of her writing, choosing to set her novel in an “epoch of transition between the ancient despotism of brute force, and the dawning reign of public opinion.”37 I argue that Owenson skillfully employs her extended gloss in the form of a transcription from an illuminated manuscript, “The Annals of St. Grellan,” both to represent the depredations of colonial oppression upon the Irish and to critique violent revolution. In the character of Shane-na-Brien, the “rapparee,” Owenson offers a complement to her portrait of Glorvina as The Wild Irish Girl. In the O’Briens and the O’Flahertys, Owenson inverts this argument, casting Shane as a “most perfect picture of a wild Irishman,” “a fine and noble animal, degraded into savagery.” In resituating Ireland in relation to the Continent, particularly France, Owenson, I argue, destabilizes the traditional Irish-English binary, providing a forum in which the Irish rebellion might be read less as an uprising of barbaric Catholic peasants and more as a revolution, the “result of causes deep-seated in the institutions” it attempted to destroy. This project obviously builds upon critical developments of the past twentyfive years that have radically changed our sense of the Romantic period.38 37  Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys: A National Tale (1827; repr., London: Pandora, 1988), xv. Hereafter cited parenthetically as O. 38   Among many others, see Marilyn Butler’s Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Gary Kelly’s English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789–1830, and his The English Jacobin Novel, 1780–1805 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976); Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); the Studies in the Novel (Summer, 1994) special issue devoted to the Romantic novel; Mellor, Mothers of the Nation; Adriana Craciun, Fatal Women of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); E.J. Clery, Women’s Gothic: From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley (Devon, U.K.: Northcote House, 2000); as well as the collections Fetter’d or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670–1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986); At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Feminist, and Materialist Criticism, ed. Mary A. Favret and Nicola J. Watson, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,

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The Art of Political Fiction responds to a literary canon undergoing geographical and generic expansion to include Irish, Scottish and colonial writings. As my notes should indicate, this study is indebted to this growing body of scholarship, and I hope the following chapters add substantially to it. As demonstrated in the individual chapters, The Art of Political Fiction offers a new perspective on the novel by suggesting that the key meanings of fictional structuring in the Romantic period appear not only within the central plot but also in apparently subordinate additions, supplements and glosses. Ironically, when these novels shift from their narratives to the editorial, the essayistic, the visual or the theatrical, they both display their fictional nature and, in so doing, open themselves up to the world outside the text that they complexly represent. This book thus offers what I hope is a useful contribution to the comparative study of Irish and Scottish literature, to the study of women’s fiction of the Romantic period, and to our understanding of the art of political fiction more generally. I show here that the readers of the 1790s and early 1800s would have been encouraged to question their conceptions and knowledge about the Indian, the Irishman, and the Scott by reading these texts and their various kinds of glosses. The examination of these glosses reveals that history (specific to this period and History in a more abstract sense) and national identity are constructed by interpretation, and these three authors, in employing the gloss, draw readers’ attention to this construction that is far from fixed and final. 1994); and Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1995). During the last twenty years, Edgeworth has enjoyed a literary renaissance as the well known Castle Rackrent has been joined by six other Edgeworth novels and selected Tales from Maria Edgeworth in modern scholarly editions. Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl and The Missionary: an Indian Tale are both available in editions for classroom adoption, as are Hamilton’s Letters of a Hindoo Rajah and Memoirs of Modern Philosophers. In July 2006, the Chawton House Library and the University of Southampton hosted an international “Wild Irish Girls” conference in England devoted exclusively to the writings of Owenson and Edgeworth, indicating active scholarly interest in these authors. In the past decade, three Edgeworth monographs have been published, Clíona Ó Gallchoir’s Maria Edgeworth: Women, Enlightenment and Nation (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005), Sharon Murphy’s Maria Edgeworth and Romance (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), and Brian Hollingworth’s Maria Edgeworth’s Irish Writing: Language, History, Politics (London: Macmillan, 1997). Also in 2004, Julie Nash edited a collection entitled New Essays on Maria Edgeworth (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006), and Heidi Kaufman and Chris Fauske edited An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and Her Contexts (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004). Ina Ferris’s The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Mary Jean Corbett’s Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and Katie Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997) all treat authors and issues relevant to my study. Gary Kelly’s Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790–1827 offers two chapters on Hamilton’s writing, the most extended contemporary critique of her work.

Chapter 1

Hamilton’s Letters of a Hindoo Rajah and the Making of a Professional Woman Writer

In her Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton (1818), Elizabeth Benger attempts to portray Hamilton as a woman intellectual and to highlight her immense powers of understanding while positioning her among the most virtuous of female authors. Benger’s unduly modest description of Hamilton’s talents, however, emphasizes the importance of Hamilton’s brother Charles: Nature often lavishes on women talents unprofitable to society and to their possessor; compared with men, they are but gleaners in those fields of literature and science which yield such ample harvests; and the operations even of genius must be impeded or circumscribed by imperfect knowledge and partial experience: if the requisite materials be wanting, the artisan but wastes time and labour in preparing the flimsy fabric. It was not, however, that Miss Hamilton borrowed from her brother’s mind, but that he taught her to explore her own latent and hitherto unappropriated treasures: it was for his penetration to discover, in the beautiful flowers that embellished the surface, the qualities of the soil beneath. From sympathy, rather than emulation, she was led to assimilate herself to him in the character of her pursuits. His conversation inspired her with a taste for oriental literature; and without affecting to become a Persian scholar, she spontaneously caught the idioms, as she insensibly became familiar with the customs and manners of the East.

What Benger elides here is Hamilton’s desire to learn about India and to position her among the male Orientalists of the time. Benger, in preferring the vaunted feminine trait of “sympathy,” presents a demure and proper Hamilton, someone displaying neither intent nor agency in her acquisition of knowledge. In this chapter, I focus upon an altogether different Hamilton and show how the editorial glosses or paratexts of her first novel illuminate not only the complicated relationship between England and India at the end of the eighteenth century, but also the creative generic negotiations of a woman writer taking on a political topic. Hamilton’s glosses clearly reveal that with this novel, she positioned herself as a professional woman writer and actively entered into the political debates  Elizabeth O. Benger, Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton, with a Selection from her Correspondence, and Other Unpublished Writings, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1818), 1: 109–10. 

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concerning the British presence in India. In Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), Hamilton glosses her epistolary novel with an extended “Preliminary Dissertation on the History, Religion, and Manners, of the Hindoos,” detailing various cultural practices of the “Hindoo” people and including a Glossary of terms that she employs liberally in the novel. Her central narrative, purporting to be a translation of a collection of letters written by and to Hamilton’s hero Zāārmilla, Rajah of Almora, critiques both British and Indian culture, as many critics have suggested. In choosing to write an epistolary novel concerning India, embellished with a learned “Preliminary Dissertation” and extensive footnotes, Hamilton made several ideological choices that place her firmly in the company of the accomplished men of letters, including Sir William Jones and Hamilton’s own brother Charles, who translated Oriental culture for the British. I argue that the text and paratexts of the novel contribute to the sense of Hamilton as complicit in the ventures of the East India Company, though she complicates and subverts several of the prevailing precepts of the writers of the Asiatic Society. Critics have struggled to place Letters of a Hindoo Rajah generically, calling it “a eulogy, a religious satire, a political satire, and an Oriental tale.” I would suggest that the multigeneric quality of Hamilton’s work draws upon another popular form of Orientalist writing, the miscellany, and that Letters of a Hindoo Rajah functions as a feminized Asiatic Miscellany. The end of the eighteenth century saw the publication of several miscellanies out of India, including the Asiatic Miscellany, Consisting of Translations, Imitations, Fugitive pieces, Original Productions, and Extracts from Curious Publications (1787), the Oriental Repertory, published in the early 1790s, and the Asiatic Annual Register, beginning for the year 1799. The 1799 proposal for the Register acknowledged that subjects concerning Hindustan, and Asia more generally, despite the fact that those regions had “become most intimately connected” to Great Britain, were “neither so well understood, nor so generally known in Great Britain, as their importance confessedly demands.” To remedy this, the Register proposed “diffusing, throughout Great Britain, a general knowledge of her Eastern Provinces.” In her novel, Hamilton joins the mission of   See Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution: 1790–1827; Claire Grogan, “Crossing Genre, Gender and Race in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah,” Studies in the Novel 34, no. 1 (2002): 21–42; Susan B. Taylor, “Feminism and Orientalism in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah,” Women’s Studies 29 (2000): 555–81; Balachandra Rajan, “Feminizing the Feminine: Early Women Writers on India,” in Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834, ed. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996): 149– 72; and Anne K. Mellor, “Romantic Orientalism Begins at Home: Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations [sic] of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah,” Studies in Romanticism 44, no. 2 (2005): 151–64.   Grogan, 23.    Plan of an Asiatic Register ([London: J. Debrett, 1799]), 1, 2.   Ibid., 3.

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the Miscellany and the Repertory and anticipates the Register, in editing, compiling, and manipulating the works of the Asiatic Society to bring knowledge of India to a wider audience. Unlike the miscellanies, however, Hamilton’s writing brings a sense of progressive idealism to bear upon the project of the male Orientalists. Though it seems fairly obvious to twenty-first century critics that Hamilton wished to engage the project of the male Orientalists, Benger describes Hamilton’s motives for writing Letters of a Hindoo Rajah as emerging from more sentimental causes. Benger views Hindoo Rajah as a form of a memorial for Hamilton’s dearly beloved brother Charles; she asserts that Hamilton in mourning Charles, “was thus insensibly led to conceive the design of writing the Hindoo Rajah, in which she was not only permitted to recal [sic] the ideas she had acquired from her brother’s conversation, but to pourtray his character, and commemorate his talents and virtues.” There is ready textual evidence for such a conclusion. Hamilton includes a line in her Dedication about “a Beloved, and Much Lamented Brother,” and the character of Captain Percy, the wounded British officer who first sparks Zāārmilla’s desire to visit England because of Percy’s manifest goodness, is obviously based on Hamilton’s brother who had died in 1792 shortly before his return to India. Charles served the East India Company in India from 1772 to 1786, when he returned to England and Scotland to work on a translation of the Hedàya, commissioned by the Company. Hamilton, who had been raised in Scotland by her paternal aunt and uncle apart from her brother and sister in Ireland (her mother was unable to support all three children after their father’s death, so Hamilton was sent to Stirling when she was four), idolized her brother. When Charles returned from India in 1786, he rescued, as Benger describes it, Elizabeth from a very pleasant but retired life with her widowed uncle: By Miss Hamilton, who delighted to ascribe to her brother the developement [sic] and almost the creation of her mind, this auspicious season was always represented as the era of a new existence. Allowing for the exaggeration of enthusiasm, it was impossible that she should not have been essentially benefited by her daily intercourse with an enlightened man, who, from natural and acquired endowments, was eminently calculated to enlarge her views, and to regulate her opinions, by correcting the mistakes incident to a self-taught recluse, and ingrafting liberality and candour on her native stock of good sense and mental independence.



  Benger, 1: 125.  Elizabeth Hamilton, Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, edited Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell (1796; repr., Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1998), 54. Hereafter abbreviated H and cited parenthetically by page number.    Benger, Memoirs, 1: 108. 

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Undoubtedly, Hamilton’s few adult years with her brother marked a water-shed moment in her life. What Hamilton adds to this picture of realizing the expansive potential of her mind in conversation with her brother are recollections of how her reception in England affected the development of her intellect. In a letter to H.M. (likely, Hector MacNeill), she writes at length about the different sphere in which she circulated in England: Next to the wish for esteem, is the desire of sympathy—sympathy in taste, in opinion, in sentiment. From this commerce of intellect, (if I may so call it) I felt myself excluded. It was my lot to meet with few who understood the traffic; and of those few, almost with none who would deign to exchange their precious ores for my unpolished pebbles. On coming to England, the scene was not only changed, but I found myself as if I had at once assumed a new character. Men of learning addressed themselves to me, as to a being who was actually capable of thinking. Men of wit seemed to imagine that I could understand them; and both men and women, very superior both in point of situation and abilities, to those with whom I had been accustomed to associate, conversed with me so much upon a footing of equality, that sometimes I was inclined to exclaim with the wee wife, ‘Surely, this is no me!’”

Hamilton’s emphasis here on the terms “commerce,” “traffic,” and “exchange” foregrounds the idea that intellectual interaction has currency for her; she associates it with an exchange value. She also begins to construct herself as a participant in this economy of exchange. Her humorous final passage connotes her sense that with this new intellectual life, she was fashioning herself into a very different person than the Scottish domestic woman, the “wee wife.” However, the role of the proper woman proved difficult to leave behind. In a “sketch” of Mrs. Hamilton “from the pen of a most intimate friend,” published by Benger in the Memoirs, it is clear that Hamilton struggled to assume the role of professional woman writer: “A female literary character was even at that time a sort of phenomenon in Scotland. Even though most Scotchwomen read, and were not inferior to their southern neighbours in general information and good taste, very few had ventured to incur the dangerous distinction of authorship.”10 This friend intimates, however, that Hamilton was the right type of woman author for her times: “No one that ever knew her could discover that she founded any pretensions on authorship, or that she valued her literary reputation on any other ground but as a means of usefulness. There is no question, however, that her



  Benger, 2: 34–5. In the lines immediately following this passage, Hamilton emphasizes that her status in these intellectual circles did not alter after Charles’s death: “In every place where my sister and I took up our residence, we found our society sought after, and our friendship solicited by some superior minds” (2: 35). 10   Qtd. in Benger, 1: 176.

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reputation for talents gave her a very high place in the society of Edinburgh.”11 Hamilton had internalized social prejudices against women authors and expressed ambivalence about how to characterize herself, as she discussed in an 1802 letter to Dr. S _______: “The character of an author I have always confined to my own closet; and no sooner step beyond its bounds, than the insuperable dread of being thought to move out of my proper sphere (a dread acquired, perhaps, from early association,) restrains me, not only from seeking opportunities of literary conversation, but frequently withholds me from taking all the advantage I might reap from those which offer.”12 Despite her reluctance expressed to Dr. S., within the year, Hamilton penned another letter that demonstrates a desire to fashion her public persona. She clearly viewed herself as a developing professional and was reluctant to take a governess job that would cast her in a demeaning light. She discusses her concerns in a letter to Mrs. S_____, Coniston, July, 1803: I need not to you, my dear madam, explain how necessary it is to the happiness of an active mind, to have some object worthy of its powers. The consciousness of this necessity first induced me to take up my pen. It was the only way by which it appeared to me possible to get rid of that mortifying sensation, that arises from feeling one’s self a piece of useless lumber in creation. The formation of the infant mind has always been with me a favourite study. Having endeavoured to impress others with a sense of its importance, I should, had I followed my own inclinations, have long ago sought an opportunity of putting in practice the lessons I had given. I was only restrained by the two following reasons: In the first place, I saw that in our sex, the cultivation of the intellectual faculties is so much considered as a secondary object, that to undertake the education of a female is in some respects to be put on a footing with fiddlers and dancing-masters; in short, to be deprived of the respectability of independence. A man of education, when he undertakes the charge of a pupil, is considered in a very different light. Neither parent nor pupil would think they had a right to treat Mr. ______ as an inferior because he had accepted a salary; but while the minds of women are so little valued, their instructors will be considered as mere drudging mercenaries.13

Hamilton’s letter to her female auditor addresses much more than her reluctance to take a particular teaching position. The relation of her initial motivation for writing describes writing not as a task of usefulness but as fulfilling a basic need 11

 Ibid., 1: 177.  Ibid., 2: 40. 13   Benger, Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton, with a Selection from her Correspondence and Other Unpublished Writings. 2nd edition. 2 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1819), 2: 52–4. 12

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in the development of her identity, that which keeps her from being a “piece of useless lumber in creation.” Though she expresses interest in the “study” of the “formation of the infant mind,” that is, in the theory of education, Hamilton is less eager to engage in the practical aspect of education because of its association with “drudging mercenaries.” She understands this to be a result of gender prejudices more so than class prejudices; the “education of a female” and the “cultivation of the intellectual faculties” in “our sex” are the categories of devaluation. Interestingly, Hamilton seems loathe to sacrifice her own “respectability of independence” in order to attempt to ameliorate the situation.14 Hamilton’s writing of Letters of a Hindoo Rajah thus emerged from her deliberate cultivation of both her craft and her reputation as a professional. Her own descriptions of her writing process indicate that she labored diligently to become proficient in her subject matter. In a letter written from Grasmere in 1802, she remarks that the “command” of the Bishop of Llandaff’s “fine library is to me an inestimable privilege. . . . Conscious of my deficiency in classical knowledge, I have resolved to go through all the Roman historians of any celebrity, whose works have been translated; as however remote the subjects on which they treat may be from those to which I mean to confine myself, the ideas received from them are so intimately connected with it, that they cannot fail to be of use.”15 The vast number of footnotes to the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, many of them citing particular passages or page numbers in the works of the male Orientalists, tells us that Hamilton worked with the same resolve to become informed about the literature, history and politics of India. Belying Benger’s assertion that Hamilton “spontaneously” learned of the culture of India from Charles is the fact that several of the texts cited and integrated into the narrative of Letters of a Hindoo Rajah were not published until after Charles’s death in 1792, meaning that Hamilton would have had to procure the books and study them independently in order to incorporate them into her own work, along with critical commentary and evaluation.16 14   Despite her objections, in 1804 Hamilton did take a six-month position as a governess for Lord Lucan’s daughters. She was able to incorporate her practical experience into her development as a professional writer by publishing Letters Addressed to the Daughter of a Nobleman on the Formation of the Religious and the Moral Principle (1806). 15   Benger, 2: 47. 16  For instance, Hamilton directs readers to “the elegant engravings, illustrative of Mr. Hodges’s remark on this subject in his Travels in India” (H, 205). William Hodges’s Travels in India, during the Years 1780, 1781, 1782, & 1783 were published in 1793 (London: Printed for the Author, 1793). In a footnote to a quotation later in the novel, Hamilton writes, “This passage appears to have been taken from the Tervo-Vaulever, a composition which bears the marks of considerable antiquity, and which, though written not by a Bramin, but a Hindoo of the lowest order, is held in high estimation, for the beauties of its poetry, and intrinsic value of its precepts; part of it has been lately translated into English by Mr. Kindersley” (H, 249). Nathaniel Edward Kindersley, Specimens of Hindoo Literature: Consisting of Translations, from the Tamoul Language, of Some Hindoo Works of Morality and Imagination, with Explanatory Notes (London: W. Bulmer and Co., 1794).

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In producing a “Translation” in a series of “Letters,” Hamilton embraces both a profession, that is, translation, and a genre acceptable for women writers (though I am unable to find any women translating Sanskrit or Persian at this time), and she simultaneously engages in the heated politics of British involvement in Asia. In the long list of members of the Asiatic Society, there are no women, but Hamilton borrows the standard paratextual language employed by the male members of the Asiatic Society in the documents and translations, many solicited and/or underwritten by the East India Company, they produced, thus asserting her position in their ranks. To publish “Letters” from India during the 1790s was far from a feminine or even neutral act. As Hamilton would surely have known, the chief evidence produced during the Warren Hastings trial came from letters; thus even fictional letters of an eye-witness account of the Rohilla wars would be weighted with the political valence of evidence in the controversial administration of British government in India. The first important gloss in Letters of a Hindoo Rajah is Hamilton’s dedication: “To Warren Hastings. Esq. Late Governor General of Bengal. Under whose auspices, as the distinguished patron of Shanscrit, and Persian literature the most important of the Oriental translations, have hitherto appeared. To Him, as the honoured patron, and friend, of a beloved, and much lamented brother, is this trifle, (as a sincere, though humble tribute of esteem, and gratitude) respectfully inscribed, by his much obliged and obedient servant, Eliza Hamilton.” In the original and the facsimile page reproduced in the Broadview edition of the novel, the text is all capital letters with the lines “Warren Hastings, Esq.” and “To Him” in a considerably larger font than the rest of the dedication, making it impossible to miss the famous name appearing almost daily in the public news—the Hastings impeachment trial began in 1788 and ended in 1795. In her dedication to Hastings, Hamilton imitates a pattern employed in a host of writings from India, many of them translations, published at the end of the eighteenth century. For example, in his translation of A Code of Gentoo Laws, or, Ordinations of the Pundits (1776), Nathaniel Brassey Halhed includes an address To the Honble Warren Hastings, Esq., Governor-general of the British Settlements in the East-Indies, &c. &c. Honourable Sir, By the Publication of the Collection of Gentoo Laws, made under your immediate Authority, I find myself involuntarily held forth to the Public as an Author, almost as soon as I have commenced to be a Man. It is therefore with some Propriety that I claim to this Work the Continuation of your Patronage, which as it at first selected me from a Number of more worthy Competitors to undertake the Task, so it has by constant Assistance and Encouragement been the entire Instrument of its Completion.17

17  Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, trans. A Code of Gentoo Laws, or, Ordinations of the Pundits (London: n.p., 1776), vi.

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Halhed emphasizes here not simply Hastings patronage, but also his active interest in the project of translation. Halhed credits Hastings’s “happy Suggestions” with the “whole Result of the Execution” of the work.18 The record of Hastings’s support of the translation of both legal and literary documents from Sanskrit and Persian into English indicates the extent to which representations of India were deeply influenced by the East India Company. As Kate Teltscher argues compellingly in her India Inscribed, eighteenth-century representations of India, even scholarly ones, were hardly disinterested as they worked to promote the agendas of the Company.19 Halhed signs his dedication “Your most obliged, And most obedient Servant,” as Elizabeth Hamilton would do twenty years later.20 Though the complimentary closing was a standard one for a dedication, I would argue that it functions here to solidify the writers’ relationship with Hastings and the East India Company. Though Halhed’s relationship was economic, that is, he was commissioned to translate the Code of Gentoo Laws, Hamilton implies such an official relationship with Hastings and by extension the East India Company. By citing Hastings as the “distinguished patron of Shanscrit, and Persian Literature the most important of the Oriental translations, have hitherto appeared,” Hamilton’s own Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah thus positions itself within the category of the Orientalist writings; her gloss serves to insinuate her novel into the world of official discourses and translations in the service of the Company. In Hamilton’s brother Charles’s dedication for The Hedàya, or Guide; a Commentary on the Mussulman Laws: Translated by Order of the GovernorGeneral and Council of Bengal, published in 1791, during the impeachment trial, he incorporates language echoing that employed by Halhed and likewise serving as character reference for Hastings: To Warren Hastings, Esq; Late Governor-General of Bengal, &c. Sir, After the labour of several years, I am at last enabled to present you with a translation of the HEDÀYA. To you, Sir, I feel it incumbent on me to inscribe a work originally projected by yourself, and for some time carried on under your immediate patronage.—However humble the translator’s abilities, and however imperfect the execution of these volumes may be, yet the design itself does honour to the wisdom and benevolence by which it was suggested and if I might be allowed to express a hope upon the subject, it is, that its future beneficial effects, in facilitating the administration of Justice throughout our Asiatic territories, and uniting us still more closely with our Mussulman Subjects, may reflect some additional lustre on your Administration.—I have the honour to be, with the 18

 Ibid.   Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India, 1600–1800 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). See especially Chapter 4, “‘Foreign Conquerers’ and ‘Harmless Indians’: British Representations of Company Rule,” 109–56. 20  Halhed, vii. 19

Hamilton’s Letters of a Hindoo Rajah and the Making of a Professional Woman Writer 25 utmost respect, and the most lively gratitude and esteem, / Sir, / Your most obedient, / and most humble Servant, / Charles Hamilton.”21

Like Halhed, Charles notes Hastings’s patronage and close supervision of the text, similarly crediting Hastings with the “design itself” of his translation. One notable addition to Charles’s later introduction is the hope that his work “uniting us still more closely with our Mussulman Subjects, may reflect some additional lustre on your Administration.” In the face of descriptions of the horrors that had been visited upon the people during Hastings regime, the phrase “uniting us still more closely,” presupposes that a close union had already been fostered by the company with the Muslims in India. His wish elides the charges of bribery and corruption and pretends that unions might be solidified based upon knowledge.22 Hastings’ administration definitely needed “additional lustre” in the face of the challenges mounted by Edmund Burke, Philip Francis and Richard Brinsley Sheridan during the impeachment trial. Both Hamiltons understood this quite well. As early as 1787, at the onset of the impeachment proceedings, Charles Hamilton viewed his writings as tools that might sway public opinion and work to rehabilitate the reputation of the East India Company. In the Preface to his An Historical Relation of the Origin, Progress, and Final Dissolution of the government of the Rohilla Afgans in the Northern Provinces of Hindostan (1787), Charles, speaking of himself in the third person, makes a defense of the British actions in India one of his explicit goals: But, whilst solemnly disavowing any interest whatsoever in the views either of parties or of individuals in this publication, yet will he venture to confess that he is not altogether indifferent in the motives which have led him to it! Concerned for the honour of his country, and anxious for the reputation of a service in which he has spent the flower of his life, he would willingly, if possible, remove even in a single instance, some part of that horrid odium which has of late years, for whatever purpose, been so sedulously excited against those devoted men who, at the expence of all the most comfortable enjoyments of existence, are rendering

21  Charles Hamilton, trans. The Hedàya, or Guide; a Commentary on the Mussulman Laws: Translated by Order of the Governor-General and Council of Bengal, 4 vols. (London: Bensley, 1791), 1: i–ii. 22  See for instance Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s famous speech detailing Hasting’s interactions with the Nabob and the Begums of Oude (dowager princesses). Sheridan asserted that the Governor General promoted the “design of obliging the Nabob to plunder those unfortunate Princesses (his mother and grandmother) of their treasures, to confiscate their Jaghires and seize upon the ministers, throw them into a dungeon, there load them with chains, and keep them for many months close prisoners” (The Speech of R.B. Sheridan, Esq. On Wednesday, the 7th of February, 1787, In bringing Forward the Fourth Charge against Warren Hastings, Esq., 2nd. edition [London: n.p., 1787], 12.

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the public no unimportant nor unmeritorious (though certainly very thankless) services in India.23

Charles here makes the British reader complicit in the East India Company’s venture and seeks to emphasize the sacrifice of the men on behalf of their country. A service that has been distorted by the “absurd improbability of the very gross and universal depravity, which has been declared to contaminate the minds of our countrymen in that department of the empire, where they have been depicted, not in the characters of men, but of savages more fell than the tygers of the region in which they reside.”24 Likening British reports of the Rohilla War, painting the “conduct and consequences of it in the most horrible colours,” to histories of the “Goths” and “Vandals,” Charles proposes that one of the “aims” of his own history is to “confute aspersions so cruelly injurious to these gallant men.”25 In the glosses and the central narrative of her Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, Elizabeth Hamilton continues the mission that Charles outlines in his own Preface and counters the “horrid odium” excited against him and others. In various scenes depicting the officers of the East India Company and in the footnotes, she emphasizes their responsible stewardship of India. As Teltscher notes in her reading of Hamilton’s novel, “The raja continues to boost the colonial self-image with a description, clearly indebted to William Hodges’s Travels in India, of the thriving state of lands under British control and the dereliction of Muslimruled provinces.”26 As Gary Kelly has pointed out, “Hamilton’s novelization of her brother’s Orientalist project does aim to serve his memory by disseminating his work beyond the narrow circle of professional and political men to the entire ‘reading public.’ At the same time, she characterizes the work of her brother and the Orientalists as a feminized form of culture and politics, thus placing their work and hers on paths converging in a shared model of civil society.”27 As has gone unnoticed, the particular context of the Asiatic miscellanies, which Hamilton engages, serves to make her Orientalist writings conform to a genre the public knew well; the work of the Orientalists that appeared in this genre was not, however, a “feminized form of culture and politics,” as written, but rather, the only masculine colonial venture that Hamilton could bring herself to validate and participate in. In her novel, Hamilton indeed shifts the focus of discussion within the East India Company from military and commercial issues to the colonization of texts and culture. In the opening paragraphs of her gloss titled “Preliminary Dissertation,” Hamilton seeks to recast the British interest in the East. “The thirst of conquest  Charles Hamilton, An Historical Relation of the Origin, Progress, and Final Dissolution of the government of the Rohilla Afgans in the Northern Provinces of Hindostan (London: G. Kearsley, 1787), x–xi. 24   Ibid., xi–xii. 25   Ibid., xii–xv. 26   Teltscher, 141. 27   Kelly, Women, Writing and Revolution, 132. 23

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and the desire of gain, which first drew the attention of the most powerful, and enlightened nations of Europe toward the fruitful regions of Hindoostan, have been the means of opening sources of knowledge and information to the learned, and the curious, and have added to the stock of the literary world, treasures, which if not so substantial, are of a nature more permanent than those which have enriched the commercial” (H, 55). Later in her “Preliminary Dissertation” Hamilton singles out the Orientalists for special recognition: “A few of the original members of the Asiatic Society, still continue to pursue the great object of their undertaking with unremitted ardour, and undiminished success. Of the rest, some have returned to the bosom of their families, and native country, not enriched by the plunder, and splendid by the beggary and massacre of their fellow-creatures, as has been represented in the malevolent and illiberal harangues of indiscriminating obloquy; but possessed of those virtues which ennoble human nature, and that cultivation of mind and talents, which dignify the enjoyment of retirement. Others of that society, equally honoured, and equally estimable, are, alas, no more!” (H, 66–7). In taking on the “malevolent and illiberal harangues” that have slandered members of the Society, Hamilton sets up the novel that follows as a defense of these charges. She includes a gloss to this section that notes the “names of the original members of the Asiatic Society,” followed by the individual names of those members, including Charles Hamilton (H, 66–7). I would argue that this gloss seeks to accomplish several things. It amplifies the personalization of the members begun in the text with the discussion of their return to the “bosom of their families.” It emphasizes that the fictional portrayals of characters like Captain Percy have counterparts in the real world. Finally it echoes the list of contributors to the Dissertations and Miscellaneous Pieces Relating to the History and Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences, and Literature of Asia (1792) and forecasts the contributors to Hamilton’s own Asiatic writing. The defense of the colonial enterprise begun in the “Preliminary Dissertation” is extended in the observations of the Hindu Zāārmilla on the leisure time of the British officers: By some, it was employed in the pursuit of literature; and I am certain it must exalt my new friends in the estimation of Māāndāāra, when he is informed, that to the knowledge of the Persian, many of the English Chiefs add a considerable degree of information in the Shanscrit language. The time of vacation from immediate service wasted by the Mussulman Commanders in voluptuous indolence, is spent by these more enlightened men, in studies which add to their stock of knowledge, and do honour to the genius of their country. It is by these strangers that the annals of Hindostan, which her barbarian conquerors have sought to obliterate in the blood of her children, shall be restored! Already, have Temples, Palaces, and Cities, which Calli had covered with the mantle of oblivion, been, by the indefatigable researches of these favourites of Serraswattee, dragged to light. (H, 152)

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Here Hamilton has her native narrator praising the works of these “enlightened men” who have dedicated their “vacation” time to the preservation of Indian culture. When Zāārmilla suggests that this information must “exalt my new friends in the estimation of Māāndāāra,” it is clear that Hamilton hopes that the revelation should also exalt the members of the Asiatic Society in the eyes of the British reading public. Saree Makdisi observes that “[w]hat Jones proposed to do, through the agency of his Asiatick Society of Calcutta, which he founded in 1784, and through the publication of the Asiatick Researches (beginning 1788), was to establish an intellectual analogue to the extraction of material wealth from the Orient, and from India in particular, in the discovery and then the translation and circulation, not only of European knowledge about the East, but above all of the indigenous cultural, literary, artistic and scientific productions of the Orient ‘itself.’”28 In spite of the professed disinterested goals of the Asiatic Society that Hamilton promotes in her novel, she was not immune from the hopes that India could provide personal gain of a more material substance. Earlier, she imagined that her brother would return to her, not just enlightened by contact with another culture, but as a wealthy man: “A few years ago I beheld you placed in a lordly seat, with all the grandeur I have ever seen displayed by any of our eastern nabobs: I then descended so far as to give you four or five hundred a-year, with a house and equipage to correspond. But now that time has taught me the fallacy of all these fantastic hopes, my wish is to see you even in the humble sphere of Ingram’s Crook, where, with a competence sufficient to procure the necessaries and comforts of life, I sincerely believe you might possess more real happiness, than most of those who enjoy all its superfluities.”29 Though Hamilton gives up her fantasy of Charles as a wealthy “nabob,” her later writings indicate that he had made considerable financial gains in India. In a 1780 letter, Hamilton attempts to lure her brother home by reasoning with him, “Why then continue in a splendid banishment from every tender relation—from all the charities of life, as you yourself express it—when, even with your present fortune, you might here enjoy peace, ease, and independence?”30 As mentioned previously, after the early death of their father, the Hamilton family had been in such dire straits that their mother had had to divide her family to support them. Charles Hamilton’s service in India undoubtedly enriched him financially and gave him access to a learned and affluent society beyond his original means when he returned from India. Hamilton herself enjoyed this society and surely knew that her personal comforts were in part provided through the colonial enterprise. Hamilton obviously understood how to use such advantages in the development of her own profession. To the obviously political dedication, she added the 28   Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 106–7. 29   Benger, 1: 94. 30   Benger, Memoirs, 2nd edition, 1: 79.

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lamination of a “Preliminary Dissertation,” and in it she explicitly reasons that in light of the “ignorance, and apathetic indifference with regard to the affairs of the East, which is frequently to be remarked in minds, that are in every other respect highly cultivated, and accurately informed,” explanation is required; otherwise, her “letters of the Rajah” would seem “utterly unintelligible” (H, 56). She emphasizes her gender here by noting that the “Dissertation” may be “particularly” helpful to “those of my own sex, who may have been deterred . . . from seeking information from a more copious source” (H, 56). Like the editor of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, discussed in Chapter 2, Hamilton sets herself up as an authority, an insider, for her unknowing readers. She differentiates herself from those ignorant of the “affairs of the East,” and underscores that she, a woman, has studied the intimidating “copious source[s]” in order to bring the information in more palatable form to her wider audience. The “Dissertation” then continues with the discussion of the “History, Religion, and Manners, of the Hindoos” promised on the title page. The “Dissertation” is not extraordinary in the information that it sets forth about India, but what is extraordinary is Hamilton’s decision to include such a gloss called a “Preliminary Dissertation” in his fictional novel. In examining more than fifty texts published in the eighteenth century that made claims of a preliminary dissertation or preliminary discourse, I found only one authored by a woman—Hamilton’s Letters of a Hindoo Rajah. Her preliminary dissertation is styled as a learned text, often presented with proofs and scholarly support. In A Treatise on Venereal Maladies (1750) by M. Jourdan de Pellerin, the author promises a “preliminary dissertation; wherein I shew, by evident reasons and incontestable proofs, that the remedies laboured with care by a good artist, according to the invariable rules of true and genuine chemistry, which are no other than those of nature, . . . are preferable.”31 The preliminary dissertation connotes formal and extensive learning. In Asiatic Researches; or, Transactions of the Society, Instituted in Bengal, the “elegant preliminary Dissertation” of Robert Orme, “the Historian of India, who unites an exquisite taste for every fine art with an accurate knowledge of Asiatick manners” is discussed with a seemingly natural pairing of Orme’s expertise in India with the idea of the preliminary dissertation.32 The texts employing a preliminary dissertation tend to be biblical translation and exegesis, such as George Campbell’s The Four gospels, Translated from the Greek. With Preliminary Dissertations and Notes Critical and Explanatory (1789), medical, as seen above, or more general translation, as with The Hymns of Orpheus, Translated from the Original Greek: with a Preliminary Dissertation on the Life and Theology of Orpheus (1792). Thus Hamilton’s sense of the genre of the preliminary dissertation and its applicability to her topic is right on the mark; however, she also must have known that the genre had previously only been the  E. Jourdan de Pellerin, A Treatise on Venereal Maladies (London: A. Millar, 1750),

31

iv–v.

32   Asiatic Researches; or, Transactions of the Society, Instituted in Bengal, 20 vols. (repr. of the Calcutta edition; London: J. Sewell, 1799), 1: 420.

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domain of well-educated male authors, so there is some audacity in her decision to employ it. Her bold decision to include a “Preliminary Dissertation” forecasts the innovation of her larger project and her willingness to incorporate disparate discourses into the genre of the novel. In writing Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, Hamilton anticipated the mission of the Asiatic Annual Register, and sought to combine sound scholarship with entertaining reading. In their Plan of an Asiatic Register (1799), the creators differentiated their proposed work from the previous dry writings of the Orientalists thus: [A]lthough profound inquiries have been made, and much has been written respecting India, and its various political and commercial relations; although very faithful accounts have been published of the manners and customs of its inhabitants; yet, it should seem, those subjects are neither so well understood, nor so generally known in Great Britain, as their importance confessedly demands. Some men of vigorous minds and extensive learning, who have exercised their talents in the investigation of Indian affairs, have in their writings injudiciously neglected those simple ornaments of style, which invite the attention of superficial readers to subjects apparently abstracted from their views, and in which, therefore, they feel no interest. The consequence of this negligence has been, that works of great value have seldom attracted a notice so general as to demand a second edition, and are now known only to those whom literary curiosity induces to read them.33

I would suggest here that Hamilton, as she composed Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, was compiling and accruing information about India on a similar plan as that endorsed by the miscellanies. Letters of a Hindoo Rajah has always rested uneasily under its genre designation as a novel. Perkins and Russell deem it the “most difficult of her works to classify. Part anti-jacobin satire, like Modern Philosophers, part oriental fable, it is an ambitious piece of writing.”34 The multigeneric quality of Hamilton’s text with the layering of history, religion, fiction, and fable accords more closely with the components of the miscellany. As you may recall, the subtitle of the 1787 Asiatic Miscellany, that is, Consisting of Translations, Imitations, Fugitive pieces, Original Productions, and Extracts from Curious Publications, actually describes the genres of Hamilton’s novel as well as any modern critics have. A partial listing of the 1787 Asiatic Miscellany table of contents reads:

  Plan of an Asiatic Register; or, Proposals for Publishing Annually ([London: J. Debrett, 1799]), 2. 34   Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell, introduction to Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, by Elizabeth Hamilton, ed. Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1998), 12. 33

Hamilton’s Letters of a Hindoo Rajah and the Making of a Professional Woman Writer 31 Hymn to Camdeo, by Sir William Jones Hymn to Narayena, by the same Reflections on viewing the Mausoleum of Sheersham, at Sasseram, by Thomas Law, Esq. Extracts from the Yusef Zelekha Jami, by Thomas Law, Esq. The Enchanted Fruit; or, The Hindu Wife An Account of Embassies and Letters between the Emperor of China and Sultan Shahrokh, translated by W. Chambers, Esq. A Short Account of the Marratta State, translated by W. Chambers, Esq. Of the Customs and Manners of the Marrattas35

Like many of the productions of the Orientalists, Hamilton depends on the works of other Society members in acknowledged and unacknowledged collaboration. Perkins and Russell note that Hamilton’s “orient is rooted firmly in what was then cutting-edge literary and cultural scholarship,” while she “might occasionally—in typical eighteenth-century manner—be casual in the documentation of her sources, a reader who was familiar with them (or who was prompted to explore them because of Hamilton’s work) would have had no difficulty in tracing individual sections of the novel to the writers who inspired them.”36 Hamilton incorporates this scholarship, or these “fugitive pieces” and “extracts” and “imitations” to give life to her own “translation.” To understand how Hamilton uses glosses to the works of the Orientalists as part of her novel, it may be useful to examine an unattributed passage that she clearly borrowed from Hodges’s Travels in India. The original passage from Hodges describes his arrival in Calcutta: “The mixture of European and Asiatic manners, which may be observed in Calcutta, is curious: coaches, phaetons, single horse chaises, with the pallankeens and hackeries of the natives—the passing ceremonies of the Hindoos—the different appearances of the fakirs—form a sight perhaps more novel and extraordinary than any city in the world can present to a stranger.”37 Hamilton obviously imitates Hodges as she constructs Zāārmilla’s entry into Calcutta: Add to this, the variety to be seen in the streets, where you behold a concourse of people, whose dress, complexion, religion, and manners, all differ widely from each other: and whose numbers are so nearly equalled, that it is impossible to say who is the stranger. All appear to be at home. Here the holy Fakeer, with no other dress than a piece of muslin wrapped round his lean and shrivelled limbs, walks with folded arms, ruminating on some passage of the holy Shaster, and striving, by penance and mortification, to facilitate the moment of absorption and   The Asiatic Miscellany (Calcutta, 1785; repr., London: J. Wallis, 1787), n.p.   Perkins and Russell, 30. For a discussion of specific works borrowed by Hamilton, see pp. 30–31. 37  Hodges, 16. 35 36

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The Art of Political Fiction in Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson unchanging bliss. There the turbaned Mussulman, from the top of an adjoining minorat [sic], adjures the followers of Mahomet to attend the hours of devotion in the holy Mosque; while the stately Armenian, the money changing Jew, and the no less money-loving Englishman, mingle on the beach; too intent on their affairs of traffic, to listen to any voice save that which calls to the temple of Lacshmi [Goddess of Fortune]. European chariots, various in their form, and elegant in their structure, drawn by horses decked in silver studded harness, glide like meteors along the streets; passing, in their career, the country hackery, the heavy loaded camel, and even the majestic, but unwieldy, elephant, who turning up his great proboscis, wonders at the noise and bustle which surrounds him. (H, 167)

Comparison of the passages reveals that Hamilton had the skills necessary to attend to the “simple ornaments of style” that the Register suggested would make the Orientalist writings more popular. The coaches described in admirable variety by Hodges become almost mythological, “decked in silver studded harness, glid[ing] like meteors,” and Hamilton adds into Hodges’s list of conveyances the exoticism of the “loaded camel” and the “majestic, but unwieldly, elephant,” who she imagines “wonder[ing]” at the scene that “surrounds him.” Hamilton transforms Hodges’s brief mention of the “fakirs” into a narrative passage where she attends to the appearance of the “Fakeer,” “with no other dress than a piece of muslin wrapped round hi lean and shrivelled limbs,” but she also invests him with action and internal conflict, “striving, by penance and mortification, to facilitate the moment of absorption and unchanging bliss.” Hamilton expands upon Hodges’s “mixture of European and Asiatic manners” to specify the “Mussulman,” the “Armenian,” the “money changing Jew,” and the “no less money-loving Englishman.” Her delineation of the last three nationalities also offers a moral judgment as, unlike the “Fakeer” and the “Mussulman” busy in their spiritual devotions, the other characters are motivated by greed. As Zāārmilla discusses the mixture of peoples in the streets, he adds, “it is impossible to say who is the stranger,” a line which seems to underscore Hamilton’s case that the occupation of India by outsiders is somehow natural. What Hamilton demonstrates as she excerpts and then alters the passage from Hodges is that she had cultivated the craft of writing fiction; she understood how to take an eye-witness account and embellish it with the powers of an imagination engaged in her own idealized version of India. Hamilton worked purposefully toward aligning her own text with those produced by the Asiatic Society, but her Asiatic production is marked by particular turns from prevalent themes and tenets of the Orientalists. As Perkins and Russell remark, “The Monthly Review might complain that she ‘added nothing new’ to the scholarship she draws from, . . . but she has given it a new twist by using

Hamilton’s Letters of a Hindoo Rajah and the Making of a Professional Woman Writer 33

it in an attempt to create a character living the culture described and analysed in her sources.”38 Balachandra Rajan also perceives a difference in Hamilton’s representation of India: “Hamilton begins by drawing attention, not simply to the antiquity of Indian civilization, but to its remarkable continuity. She then proceeds to argue (quite unlike others who take up this subject) that this continuity must be due to the inherent stability of Indian institutions. The caste system, for instance, is perceived as socially cohesive rather than paralyzing. A loose federation of rajahs governed by a maharajah represents a monarchic structure that is responsive to autonomy, rather then one which is inflexibly totalitarian.” Rajan adds, “This is a perception interestingly close to the ‘revised’ view now offered by the New Cambridge History.”39 Mellor offers an admiring summary of Hamilton’s contribution to oriental literature: “[S]he promotes a positive view of Hindu culture and religion. She acknowledges the superior imaginative qualities of Arabic poetry; she celebrates the government of ancient India for its religious tolerance and sustained civil peace.”40 By means of her novel and its glosses, Hamilton thus seeks to alter perceptions of a culture she and her readers knew only through the mediations she glosses. In addition to Hodges, Hamilton enfolds the works of many other authors into her text. And again, the leading miscellanies feature the same authors cited in Hamilton’s copious footnotes. Hamilton’s decision to incorporate Sir William Jones’s translation of the poem, “Hymn to Camdeo,” in its entirety in the notes of the first edition of Letters of a Hindoo Rajah was likely influenced by the Asiatic Miscellany’s printing of Jones’s translation as the lead poem in its collection. Given that Sir William Jones’s collected works were not published until several years after Hamilton’s novel, it is most likely that she encountered his work in the Miscellany. The shared poem at the outset of both her novel and the collection thus links the texts that follow. The “Hymn to Camdeo” traces the exploits of the Hindu god that Jones aligns with Eros or Cupid. The sensual poem ends with Camdeo, as Jones describes in “The Argument,” “punished by a flame consuming his corporeal nature and reducing him to a mental essence; and hence his chief dominion is over the minds of mortals, or such deities as he is permitted to subdue” (H, 327). Though Hamilton’s own oriental writing is notably bereft of the eroticism in Jones’s poem and in many pieces in the miscellanies, she seems to have taken a cue from Jones’s sense that a being without a corporeal frame could influence the minds of men. By writing in the first person rather than the third, Hamilton allows Zāārmilla, her Indian protagonist, to become disembodied; that is, the body of the Other is not present for critique as it is in conventional colonial discourse. Descriptions of Zāārmilla’s own body are metaphorical: in the opening pages of his letter, he speaks about his “heart” and his “mind,” but these are more metaphorical than 38

  Perkins and Russell, 31.   B. Rajan, 155. 40  Mellor, “Romantic Orientalism,” 152. 39

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physical descriptions—“the very thoughts of my heart” (H, 78). Mellor mentions that Zāārmilla becomes the “object rather than the possessor of the specular gaze, defined as an exotic display for English eyes”; however, he does not become the object of the gaze in England until after his name and description appear in print. He finds in a “paragraph inserted in a newspaper of that morning, which, after mentioning my name, and describing my person, falsely and wickedly insinuated, ‘that I had come there on behalf of the Hindoo inhabitants of Bengal, to complain of the horrid cruelties, and unexampled oppression, under which, through the maladministration of the British governor of India, we were made to groan’” (H, 246). This scene in the coffee house gives Hamilton opportunity to parody Burke in a man who offers to “make a proper representation of [his] case” (H, 245) and the questionable authority of the newspapers, but Zāārmilla retains his subject position. He goes immediately to the newspapers to insist on a retraction, leading to his disillusionment regarding the disinterestedness of the press, but allowing him some control over his own voice. The very idea of placing a Hindu in England subverted the basic and widely held philosophy, “according to Burke,” that Indians could not—“purely on account of their own limitations—cross the material sea and travel to England, India itself cannot cross the great metaphorical divide of development to become like Britain.”41 This belief, Saree Makdisi argues, informed the “‘fact’ that, since the metaphorical journey of development from east to west cannot be accomplished (‘all change on their part is absolutely impracticable’), what is paramount is that the imperial move from west to east be guided by the ‘limitations’ imposed by eastern concepts.”42 By taking a Hindu rajah as her narrator and endowing him with the power to travel, to speak and to reason, Hamilton subverts these imperial notions about the stasis of Indian culture. In the same way that “Burke proposes to speak” “in the name of the otherwise silent Indian people,” Hamilton offers a counter native voice.43 Hamilton’s speaking Rajah offers the same threat that the many translations of the Orientalists offered. As Rajan suggests, in spite of the limits of the appropriation of culture facilitated by the Orientalists, “The sudden elevation of India’s past in the first wave of Oriental scholarship opened a moment of opportunity for understanding between peoples” by encouraging respect and ignoring the colonial imperative that “[s]ubject peoples are to be educated, not listened to.”44 Hamilton’s novel was written in this moment. Though Zāārmilla is characterized ultimately as an “unwitting critic” of British culture,45 I would say that several of Hamilton’s subversions make him more admirable than naïve.

41

  Makdisi, 102.  Ibid. 43   Makdisi, 103. 44   B. Rajan, 153. 45   Teltscher, 142. 42

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The gaze that ordinarily would cast native peoples in the object position of course recurred in many of the texts of British travel writers and Orientalists.46 To cite just one example, here is William Hodges’s description of his first contact with the Hindu natives as his boat arrived in India: This is the moment in which an European feels the great distinction between Asia and his own country. The rustling of fine linen, and the general hum of unusual conversation, presents to his mind for a moment the idea of an assembly of females. When he ascends upon the deck, he is struck with the long muslin dresses,* and black faces† adorned with very large gold ear-rings and white turbans. . . The natives first seen in India by an European voyager, are Hindoos, the original inhabitants of the Peninsula. In this part of India they are delicately framed, their hands‡ in particular are more like those of tender females; and do not appear to be, what is considered a proper proportion to the rest of the person, which is usually above the middle size. Correspondent to this delicacy of appearance are their manners, mild, tranquil, and sedulously attentive: in this last respect they are indeed remarkable, as they never interrupt any person who is speaking, but wait patiently till he has concluded; and then answer with the most perfect respect and composure.”47

The three footnotes indicated by symbols in this passage continue Hodges’s discussion of the dress and physical characteristics of the natives. Typically Hodges conflates their feminine appearance with a docility of temper. Hodges makes “delicacy of appearance” “correspondent” with mildness of temper. Hamilton was certainly aware of the convention of the feminized Indian, yet she subverts this convention by having Zāārmilla make observations that cast the British as the feminized Other. As Edward Said has argued, “Only an Occidental could speak of Orientals, for example, just as it was the White Man who could designate and name the coloreds, or nonwhites. Every statement made by Orientalists or White Men (who were usually interchangeable) conveyed a sense of the irreducible distance separating white from colored, or Occidental from Oriental; moreover, behind each statement there resonated the tradition of experience, learning, and education that kept the Oriental-colored to his position of object studied by the Occidental-white.”48 As several critics have noted, Hamilton’s novel presents a case that points to the weaknesses of Said’s sense of 46   Isobel Grundy points out that in travel accounts of the period “the ‘character’ of civilization they give to European culture includes proper masculine chivalry towards inferior women; the ‘character’ of barbarity they give the Other culture includes cruelty towards inferior women; it also includes effeminacy, as critics like Edward Said have shown” (“‘The barbarous character we give them’: White Women Travellers Report on Other Races,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 22 [1992], 73). 47  Hodges, 2–4. 48  Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 228.

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a “monolithic and homogeneous” European response to the East.49 She discusses Zāārmilla’s first introduction into British society at Chunar in terms that play with the language of typical travel narratives: On my arrival at Chunar, I found myself as if I had been all at once transported into a new world. Surrounded by the English Chiefs, whose dress, whose language, and whose manners, were all so different from what I had ever been accustomed to, I could scarcely persuade myself that I did not wander in the realms of delusion. At first, all Englishmen appeared to me to wear the same aspect, and to have the same manners. But when wonder had sufficiently subsided to admit of the calm accuracy of observation, I perceived that every countenance had a characteristic distinction; a distinction, which extended to the tones of the voice, and gestures of the body. This variety, like the Ráginís which preside over music, served but to render harmony more pleasing. (H, 151)

Hamilton has Zāārmilla, in observing the British, invoke the imperial notion that natives were indistinguishable from one another. When he does begin to discern differences, he describes the “variety” of the gentlemen as being like the “Ráginís.” Hamilton glosses this term: “The Ráginís, or female passions, are the Nymphs, which, according to the beautiful Allegory of the Hindoos, preside over musical sounds” (H, 151). The note here functions to endow Zāārmilla with the subject’s gaze, as he finds “pleasing” the appearance of the English gentlemen because they evoke the “female passions” or “Nymphs,” handmaidens of the arts. An even more pronounced example of this humorous inversion of the feminized Other occurs in England. When Zāārmilla attends Lady Ardent’s “rout,” he notes the entrance of “three effeminate-looking youths, dressed in the military habit, whose pale faces and puny figures, rendered it a matter of doubt, to which sex they actually belonged, till one of them being saluted Lord, relieved me from the dilemma. Whether there was anything exhilarating in the perfumes which these Saibs had plentifully bestowed upon their persons, I know not; but their appearance seemed to spread a sudden ray of animation over the dejected Bibbys” (H, 225). Though he terms the “lady-like gentlemen” “heroes,” their most gallant activity is playing cards with the “wrinkled Bibby” (H, 225). This insult to British masculinity is compounded by the fact that the “effeminate” young men are in “military habit.” Thus Zāārmilla’s casual observation questions the virility of British military might as represented by these exotically perfumed youths. In other Orientalist texts the casting of imperial subjects as effeminate established their unsuitability to determine their own destiny or control their own resources. Alexander Dow, described on the title page of his The History of Hindostan as “Lieutenant-Colonel in the Company’s Service,” comments further 49

  Teltscher, 6. See also Grogan, 27–8, and Mellor, 152.

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on this pacifism of the Hindu people in his “A Dissertation concerning the Origin and Nature of Despotism in Hindostan”: Government derives its form from accident; its spirit and genius from the inherent manners of the people. The languor occasioned by the hot climate of India, inclines the native to indolence and ease; and he thinks the evils of despotism less severe than the labour of being free. Tranquillity [sic] is the chief object of his desires. His happiness consists in a mere absence of misery; and oppression must degenerate into a folly, which defeats its own ends before he calls it by the name of injustice. . . Other motives of passive obedience join issue with the love of ease. The sun, which enervates his body, produces for him, in a manner spontaneously, the various fruits of the earth. He finds subsistence without much toil; he requires little covering but the shade. The chill blast of winter is unknown; . . . Property being in some measure unnecessary, becomes of little value; and men submit, without resistance, to violations of right, which may hurt but cannot destroy them. Their religious institutions incline them to peace and submission.50

Dow reasons that such “langour” and “indolence” left the Hindu open to the more aggressive challenges of their Muslim neighbours. As Teltscher suggests, “Many of the writers in this period are engaged in the attempt to produce non-threatening images of the colonial subject.”51 Like many of the documents of the Orientalists, Dow’s History presents the Hindu as unable to protect themselves or their land and in need of the British presence to sustain their livelihood and culture. In his journey to England, Zāārmilla meets with many British characters infected with such “indolence,” and Hamilton pointedly questions their ability to decide the fate of their own nation. Perhaps the best example is Doctor Severn’s long discourse on Sir Caprice Ardent whose many follies in the mismanagement of his property the Doctor traces to “early education” (H, 214). Like the natives described in Dow’s quotation, Sir Caprice’s refusal to address any of his passions with mental rigor and his inability to devote sustained attention to his projects leave him “too willing to be deceived” and ultimately unfit to govern his own holdings (H, 219). As Nigel Leask observes, Hamilton’s “appeal is to the sense of moral responsibility attendant upon the imperial civilizing mission in order to urge the moral reformation of the British ruling class.”52 Using Zāārmilla’s voice, Hamilton inverts the Orientalists’ conventional notions about natural scenes as well as native peoples. Painters such as William Hodges, the

  Alexander Dow, The History of Hindostan (London: T. Becket and P.A. De Hondt, 1772), vii–viii. 51   Teltscher, 142. 52   Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 101. 50

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only British artist in India “to receive a salary direct from the Company,”53 and Thomas and William Daniell had traveled extensively in India, taking the “views” in the service of the British empire. Their pictorial representations focused upon the lush countryside and the many historical monuments to Hindu and Muslim culture; ordinarily the native figures are almost obscured by the landscape. A favorite subject for paintings was the ruin because of the idea of a past and encapsulated culture. This cult of the ruin held especially true in India where the ruins marked a previously magnificent society now past. “For those who love ruins, it is the assurance that a previous political order and social system are indeed lost that enables their pleasurable feelings of sadness. The picturesque framing of Hodges’s visual and verbal views of Agra’s ruins produces ‘an elegiac acknowledgement of their vacated power.’”54 The detailed observations of a living, talking Zāārmilla subvert ideas of stasis in the culture. Instead of being part of the picturesque landscape of “vacated power,” Zāārmilla makes observations about the picturesque, thus indicating a sensibility that philosophers like Kant had been unwilling to grant to people in “other parts of the world.” Though Hamilton was undoubtedly familiar with the tenets of aesthetic ideology of the sublime and the beautiful, as will be discussed further in the Cottagers chapter, she opted to cast Zāārmilla as a man of sensibility, flying in the face of the devastating critique that Kant had applied to the “Indians” in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), where the memorable fourth section discusses “National Characteristics, so far as They Depend upon the Distinct Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime.” After attending more fully to the Western cultures, Kant gives a “fleeting glance over the other parts of the world,” finding that the “Indians have a dominating taste of the grotesque, of the sort that falls into the adventurous. Their religion consists of grotesqueries. Idols of monstrous form, the priceless tooth of the mighty monkey Hanuman, the unnatural atonements of the fakirs (heathen mendicant friars) and so forth are in this taste. The despotic sacrifice of wives in the very same funeral pyre that consumes the corpse of the husband is a hideous excess.”55 Well educated British readers of course knew their Kant and found him useful to their sense of cultural superiority. In both his travels in India and in England, Zāārmilla escapes his imposed national identity by readily spotting the picturesque elements of the landscape: “For the distance of many miles round Ardent-Hall, the country is irregular and undulating. It abounds in trees, which, though they boast not the height of the Mango, or the vast circumference of the Banyan, are neither destitute of grandeur, nor of beauty. These are not clumped 53

 Natasha Eaton, “Hodges’s Visual Genealogy for Colonial India, 1780–95,” in William Hodges 1744–1797: The Art of Exploration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 35. 54   Beth Fowkes Tobin, “The Artist’s ‘I’ in Hodges’s Travels in India,” in William Hodges 1744–1797: The Art of Exploration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 46. Tobin uses Sara Suleri’s phrase here. 55  Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (1764; repr., Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960), 109, 110.

Fig. 1.2

The Ghauts at Benares (1787), by William Hodges.

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together in solemn groves, or gloomy jungles; but are so planted, as to surround the small fields into which the country is divided; each of which small enclosures, now fraught with the riches of the yellow harvest, appears like a ‘Topaz in a setting of Emeralds’” (H, 263–4). Zāārmilla follows this observation with: “The chearful [sic] aspect of the peasants, busily employed in cutting down the grain, while their fancies seemed to revel in the scene of plenty, excited the most pleasurable emotions in my heart” (H, 264). Instead of being the obscure figure in the middle-distance, Zāārmilla controls the gaze and observes the “chearful” laborers working in the fields. Ordinarily, he would be one of the figures on the distant ghauts rising out of the river as seen in this image by Hodges (Figure 1.2), but here he is commanding our gaze as well. To emphasize both his sensibility and his position in the text as the picturesque traveler (that is, as the owner of the gaze with the power to appropriate scenic views), Hamilton has Zāārmilla describe at length his encounter with a picturesque waterfall in England: It was here, that the glories of the cataract burst upon our senses.—But how shall my feeble hands, do justice to such a scene? Can I, by description, stun the ears of Māāndāāra, with the thunder of the falling waters; or present to his imagination, the grotesque figures of the rocks, surrounding the magnificent bason [sic] into which they fell? Can I bring terror to his bosom, by the mention of the over-jutting crags, which, on one side, topped the precipice; or produce in his mind, the sensation of delight, by a minute description of the various trees and shrubs, whose thick foliage ornamented the opposite bank?—Ah no! The task is impossible; or possible only to the magic pen of poetry. By Zāārmilla, it must be passed over in silence! (H, 265)

Here Zāārmilla, and by extension Hamilton, demonstrates an advanced understanding of the aesthetic principles of the beautiful and the sublime, a knowledge that Kant and Burke align with European males of taste. Though he claims he cannot “do justice to such a scene,” Zāārmilla dwells upon the sensations of sight felt in the body; he desires that his description of the scene will “stun the ears of Māāndāāra,” “bring terror to his bosom,” and “produce in his mind the sensation of delight.” When he claims that the scene “must be passed over in silence” because he lacks the poetic skill to render it justly, he has already effectively described the torrents and rocky crags. In this instance, Zāārmilla has far out-stripped the traditional orientalist depiction of the body of the colonized as subject for the gaze; here Hamilton empowers him through his rhetoric with the ability to affect the body of the reader. Hamilton has Zāārmilla, while still traveling in India, observe the “picturesque, and beautiful scenery,” commenting that the areas where the English are stationed “may easily be traced by the flourishing state of the country, which surrounds them” (H, 156). Zāārmilla continues with a defense of the British during the devastating famine, extolling the “benignant charity of the English Chiefs” that “sustained the lives of thousands” (H, 157). Hamilton knows here that she has Zāārmilla offering a controversial view of British management, so she glosses this view with a footnote:

Hamilton’s Letters of a Hindoo Rajah and the Making of a Professional Woman Writer 41

“The English reader may, perhaps, object to the account of the Rajah, as being very different from that tale of horrors, which had been so generously received. Which account comes nearest to the truth, those, who have been eye witnesses of the scene described can best determine” (H, 157). Hamilton’s gloss here opens the text to the contemporary debates about the British presence in India, played out in the Hastings impeachment trial, in the newspapers, and in myriad pamphlets and publications. Though her comment may be pointedly addressing Burke who had never been to India (as Perkins and Russell suggest), it also presents the reader with the dilemma of deciding which of the many tales of India offered the most credible or authoritative account. By suggesting that the reader privilege the eye witness, Hamilton elevates the firstperson account, most immediately represented here in the form of the letter.56 But her letters are fictions, and she has also already established that eye-witness accounts may be unreliable or biased as with the early letters of the Brahmin Sheermaal. The pointed satire of the novel also depends upon the reader actively reconstructing Zāārmilla’s defamiliarized observations in order to see the hypocrisy of the culture he observes. Hamilton’s earliest reviewers focused upon her chosen genre and aligned her letters with the fictional oriental letters of Montesquieu, Lyttelton, and Addison.57 However, I would suggest that the particular historical context in which Hamilton wrote made her choice of genre politically charged and brought into question the “horrid odium” passing itself off as truth. In the clash of mediations, letters were primary. For Hamilton to choose to write an epistolary novel seems to be to work within a sanctioned feminine form, but the genre of the letter was a far from neutral choice in which to detail the exploits of the British in India. In her discussion of archives and records in her Reading the East India Company, 1720–1840, Betty Joseph quotes from an 1819 letter written by James Mill in London’s India Office: “‘The Government of India,’ says Mill, ‘is carried on by correspondence . . . and . . . I am the only man whose business it is, or who has the time to make himself the master of the facts scattered in a most voluminous correspondence, on which a just decision must rest.’”58 Mill suggests here that the entire government of India functions through correspondence; any “just” decision about British affairs in India hinges upon the information found in the letters. This fact could not possibly have escaped Hamilton during the 1780s because a large part of the Warren Hastings trial centered upon his correspondence—what was written to whom and what was promised or inferred in those letters. A document tracing The Debate on the Rohilla War, in the House of Commons, on the 1st and 2nd June, 1786 demonstrates the political valence associated with letters concerning India. The debate 56   Hamilton, of course, had in her possession first-hand accounts of India from her brother about which she wrote, “I preserve as carefully as a Catholic would the precious relic of some favourite saint” (Benger, 1: 85). 57  See The Critical Review, vol. 17 (July 1796): 241–9, and The Analytical Review, vol. 24 (October 1796): 429–31, both appended to the Broadview edition of Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (H, 309–10, 317–18). 58   Betty Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 1720–1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5.

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opens with the Committee requesting a series of letters written between Mr. Middleton and Mr. Hastings, with both individuals claiming that the other gentleman is in possession of those letters: “The letter from Mr. Middleton stated, that he had many years since delivered up every letter sent him by Mr. Hastings, and every copy of his own letters to Mr. Hastings, who had peremptorily demanded them of him.”59 A Mr. Francis finds this arrangement one in which Hastings, “thereby securing himself,” had left Mr. Middleton “at his mercy.”60 In a struggle worthy of pursuits after government evidence in our own time, forty pages later, “Major Scott [on behalf of Hastings] said that it was very extraordinary that some means or other could not be found out for getting at this correspondence.”61 What becomes clear as the debate progresses and the Committee attempts to determine the degree of complicity that the East India Company had in the extermination of the Rohillas is that the primary evidence will be entered in the form of letters. A letter from Hastings to a Colonel Champion seems particularly devastating: “Till we received your letter, we were ignorant that such people existed; we imagined the whole country to be in the power of the Rohillas; but as the shortest expedient, we direct you to conquer them too.”62 The correspondence consisted of letters between the officials of the East India Company, but there are also interchanges with Fyzoola Cawn [Faizullah Khan] as well as other Rohilla Afghans and Hindus. So several years before her own text was written, translations of the letters of Viziers and Rajahs had become part of the government record of the Rohilla war. Hamilton’s glosses to the letters, “Zāārmilla, Rajah of Almora, to Kisheen Neêay Māāndāāra, Zimeendar of Cumlore, in Rohilcund,” would have resonated with her audience in the same way that the official documents did. When Hamilton begins her letters with the Rajah relating his own experiences in the Rohilla war, footnoted by long quotations from her brother’s An Historical Relation of the Origin, Progress, and Final Dissolution of the Government of the Rohilla Afgans (1787), she entered them into the public record as further evidence in the ever-evolving series of eye-witness accounts about the British conduct in India. Hamilton’s Letters of a Hindoo Rajah is one of the earliest of the Romantic period novels to make extensive use of editorial apparatuses. Her use of the naïve narrator in the service of social satire presages Maria Edgeworth’s native Irish narrator Thady in Castle Rackrent and Sydney Owenson’s Horatio in The Wild Irish Girl. In all three cases learned editorial paratexts surround the central narrative, and we see the political art of these novels most clearly when we examine their glosses. We understand that representations of the Indian and the Irish people partake of a selfconscious constructedness, that there is no single fixed perspective from which to view the Other.   The Debate on the Rohilla War, in the House of Commons, on the 1st and 2nd June, 1786 (London: John Stockdale, [1786]), 1. 60  Ibid., 2. 61  Ibid., 41. 62  Ibid., 57. The “people” that Hastings refers to here are people who had “successfully resisted the arms of the Rohillas, and who lived independent within the district” (57). 59

Chapter 2

Maria Edgeworth in Blackface: Castle Rackrent and the Irish Rebellion of 1798

In the waning years of the eighteenth century, Ireland, following the American and French examples, attempted its own revolution between May and September of 1798. As many as 30,000 people were killed in the Irish rebellion—more than in the French Reign of Terror. Though insurgent forces had some success, briefly establishing a republican government in Wexford, French reinforcements arrived too late and the British troops decisively put down the rebellion. Soon afterward, the British reading public was introduced to a chillingly brutal Irish character by writers loyal to the British King. An excerpt from Charles Jackson’s A Narrative of the Sufferings and Escape of Charles Jackson, Late Resident of Wexford, in Ireland. Including an Account by Way of Journal of Several Barbarous Atrocities Committed in June, 1798, by the Irish Rebels provides a representative sample: We were accordingly marched to the bridge; and when we came in sight of the people assembled there to witness the execution, they almost rent the air with shouts and exultations, which with a violent storm of wind that had suddenly risen, a sky that appeared the blackest of colour, and a continual firing of guns by the undisciplined mob, altogether produced an effect the most horrible that the imagination can form. . . . When we arrived at the fatal spot on the bridge, I and my sixteen fellow-prisoners knelt down in a row. The blood of those who had already been executed on this spot (eighty-one in number) had more than stained, it streamed upon, the ground about us. They first began the bloody tragedy by taking out Mr. Daniell, who, the moment he was touched with their pikes, sprung over the battlements of the bridge into the water, where he was instantly shot. Mr. Robinson was the next: he was piked to death.—The manner of piking, was, by two of the rebels putting their pikes into the front of the   See Thomas Packenham, The Year of Liberty: The Bloody Story of the Great Irish Rebellion of 1798 (1969; repr., London: Panther Books, 1972), 17. Kevin Whelan also calculates the losses at 30,000 with ninety percent being on the rebel side, and he makes the comparison to the French Reign of Terror in Fellowship of Freedom: The United Irishmen and 1798 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998), 119.    After September insurgent activities continued, particularly in Wicklow and Wexford counties. Another French expedition was defeated off the coast in October 1798 and guerilla-style groups continued night raids, but major activity ceased until Emmet’s Rebellion in 1803. 

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victim, while two others pushed pikes into his back, and in this state (writhing with torture) he was suspended aloft on the pikes, till dead. He was then thrown over the bridge into the water.—They ripped open the belly of poor Mr. Atkins; and, in that condition, he ran several yards; when falling on the side of the bridge, he was piked.

Jackson’s Narrative, published in Dublin and London in 1798, in “expectation” that he should “derive some advantage from the sale of this little book,” having “lost at Wexford all the property” he possessed, sold well, already issued in an eighth edition in Dublin by 1799 and reprinted in a fifth edition in England in 1803. His narrative was one of the many published accounts relating the horrors of the 1798 rebellion, seen almost exclusively from loyalist perspectives. In fact, in the two years following the rebellion, there was a proliferation of such texts, ranging from The Last Speech and Dying Words of Martin M’Loughlin: Who Was Taken Prisoner after the Defeat of the French and Rebels, at the Battle of Ballinamuck, in the County of Longford, published in 1798, to Sir Richard Musgrave’s blatantly biased and controversial A Concise Account of the Material Events and Atrocities which Occurred in the Late Rebellion, with the Causes which Produced Them, published in 1799. So when Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Maria’s father, reported in 1800 that   Charles Jackson, A Narrative of the Sufferings and Escape of Charles Jackson (1798; repr., Glasgow: R. Hutchison, 1801), 16–17.    Jackson, ii.   Martin M’Loughlin, The Last Speech and Dying Words of Martin M’Loughlin (Cork: R. Cole, 1798). Longford was Maria Edgeworth’s home county. Sir Richard Musgrave, A Concise Account of the Material Events and Atrocities which Occurred in the Late Rebellion, 3rd ed. (Dublin: J. Milliken, and London: J. Wright, 1799). More than twenty rebellion narratives or accounts were published in the years immediately following the rebellion. Almost all of these narratives were published in Dublin and London and went quickly through several editions. The title page of the London edition of M’Loughlin’s narrative gives some idea of the wide dissemination as it is sold by J. Evans, J. Hatchard, “and all Booksellers, Newsmen and Hawkers in town and country,” with “Great Allowance made to Shopkeepers and Hawkers.” Other notable narratives published in the years immediately following the rebellion would be those by John Jones, An Impartial Narrative of the Most Important Engagements which Took Place between His Majesty’s Forces and the Rebels, during the Irish Rebellion, 1798 (Dublin: J. Jones, 1799); James Gordon, History of the Rebellion in Ireland, in the Year 1798 (Dublin: William Porter, 1801); John Burk, History of the Late War in Ireland, with an Account of the United Irish Association (Philadelphia: Francis and Robert Bailey, 1799); Joseph Stock, A Narrative of What Passed at Killalla . . . during the French Invasion in the Summer of 1798 (London: J. Stockdale, 1800); Edward Hay, History of the Insurrection of the County of Wexford, A.D. 1798 (Dublin: J. Stockdale, 1803); and James Caulfield, The Reply of the Right Rev. Doctor Caulfield, Roman Catholic Bishop, and of the Roman Catholic Clergy of Wexford, to the Misrepresentations of Sir Richard Musgrave, Bart. (Dublin: H. Fitzpatrick, 1801). Rebellion narratives were published throughout the nineteenth century, with several tracts by United Irish men, such 

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King George “was much pleased with Castle Rack Rent—he rubbed his hands & said what what—I know something now of my Irish subjects,” the monarch and the British people undoubtedly already knew a great deal more about the Irish than they wanted to remember; the king’s apparent pleasure surely derived from Edgeworth’s humorous depiction of the Irish people, who had recently appeared in much more horrific narratives. Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, an Hibernian Tale. Taken from Facts, and from the Manners of the Irish Squires, before the Year 1782, published anonymously by Joseph Johnson in 1800, is a tale told principally by an “illiterate old steward,” Thady Quirk, who chronicles “the history of the Rackrent family in his vernacular idiom, and in the full confidence that Sir Patrick, Sir Murtagh, Sir Kit, and Sir Condy Rackrent’s affairs will be as interesting to all the world as they [are] to himself.” The editorial Preface to Castle Rackrent attempts to introduce to the still evolving form of the novel the literary innovation of a complete narrative in dialect, promising the reader a “plain unvarnished tale” (C, 62). Despite the fictional Editor’s claims of authenticity, Maria Edgeworth in fact appropriates the voice of the native Irish Thady, and thus performs linguistic blackface for her English and Anglo-Irish readers. Her performance is exposed most clearly when we examine Castle Rackrent’s glosses. Thady’s narrative, read in the context of the many works published contemporaneously with Castle Rackrent detailing the “barbarous atrocities” and horrors committed by the native Irish in the rebellion of 1798, reveals Edgeworth attempting to mitigate these horrors by performing as the foolishly loyal servant. Edgeworth as Editor claims the “partiality” of Thady to “the family” (C, 62) and casts him as naive and superstitious, yet her novel teems with unstated political sentiments, warning of the tenacity of a poor people who feel that they have “little to lose, and much to gain” in “staking [their] own wit or cunning against [their] neighbour’s property” (C, 133). Neither Thady’s narrative nor the editorial glosses mention the 1798 rebellion explicitly, yet, as I intend to show, both constitute as Miles Byrne, coming out years after the rebellion. For the centennial and bicentennial, anniversary editions of narratives were produced. Rebellion narratives continue to be published, including such fine editions as John D. Beatty’s Protestant Women’s Narratives of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001).   Richard Lovell Edgeworth to Daniel Beaufort, 26 April 1800, quoted in Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 359. The British Critic (1800) likewise reviewed Castle Rackrent as a “very pleasant, goodhumoured and successful representation of the eccentricities of our Irish neighbours . . . The character of ‘honest Thady’ is remarkably comic, and well delineated; and we are not at all surprised that the publication should, in so short a time, have passed through two editions” (quoted in Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 338).   Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, in “Castle Rackrent” and “Ennui”, ed. Marilyn Butler (London: Penguin, 1992), 62. Hereafter abbreviated C and cited parenthetically by page number.

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Edgeworth’s means of allaying fears of the insurgent mob looming just beyond the margins of the text. The possibility of Thady’s connection to subversive politics has been the subject of some debate in Edgeworth criticism, though the more recent trend has been to cast him as much less innocent than he at first appears. The comic style of Castle Rackrent, of course, disarms readers. Marilyn Butler, positing in her 1972 biography that the Edgeworths had strong political motivation for including the Glossary they appended to the novel, argues that “the light entertainment Maria was about to produce, which presented the Irish as comic and irresponsible, was anything but timely.” However, more recently, Butler has reassessed Edgeworth’s use of the editorial texts as more Swiftian: “Edgeworth supplies it all, but over and over, with everything ironicized—Thady’s narration, the Preface, the overthe-top Spenserian footnote and certainly the Glossary. Castle Rackrent, read as a philosophical tale, becomes virtually parodic, an absurd example of intellectuals (the antiquaries of the Glossary?) slumming among the children of nature.”10 I would add that Edgeworth’s “light entertainment” was, in this Swiftian sense, quite timely. She undoubtedly knew about the wide dissemination in Ireland and England of rebellion narratives recounting the horrors of the recent uprising, and Castle Rackrent with its comic narrator serves to defuse the horror of these narratives, a feature that blackface minstrelsy performed in similar contexts in

  See James Newcomer, “The Disingenuous Thady Quirk,” Studies in Short Fiction 2 (1964): 44–50 and Maria Edgeworth the Novelist (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1967), and, more recently, Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (London: Verso, 1995); Robert Tracy, The Unappeasable Host: Studies in Irish Identities (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1998); and Michael Neill, “Mantles, Quirks, and Irish Bulls: Ironic Guise and Colonial Subjectivity in Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent,” The Review of English Studies 52, no. 205 (2001): 76–90, for discussions of Castle Rackrent’s narrator as “Disingenuous Thady.” See Susan Glover, “Glossing the Unvarnished Tale: Contra-dicting Possession in Castle Rackrent,” Studies in Philology 99, no. 3 (2002): 299– 300, for a succinct tracing of critics’ positions regarding Thady’s ingenuousness.    Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 355. 10   Butler, general introduction to The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth, ed. Marilyn Butler, 12 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999–2003), 1: vii–lxxx. 12 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999–2003. In this same introduction, Butler casts Edgeworth as much more politically involved with the United Irish agenda than has any previous assessment of Edgeworth. Butler hypothesizes that Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s Irish Bulls (1802) may be read as a continuation of the politically radical Northern Star newspaper—the voice for subversive activity in the 1790s (xxxv–vi). Butler expands upon this argument in “Edgeworth, the United Irishmen, and ‘More Intelligent Treason,’” in An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and Her Contexts, ed. Heidi Kaufman and Chris Fauske (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 33–61. 

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America. Edgeworth’s performance as the loyal servant, moreover, reveals hidden fears of a destabilizing force in the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy.11 Just as blackface minstrelsy had its moments of greatest popularity attempting to reinscribe the “myth of the benevolent plantation” during the period when American slavery was being exposed to mounting abolitionist criticism and when slave uprisings, such as that lead by Nat Turner, were evoking white fears, Edgeworth’s blackface performance as Thady attempts to reinscribe a system of benevolent patronage in Ireland.12 Her venture is laden with the tensions and revelations that accompany more literal blackface minstrelsy.13 As Eric Lott has pointed out, “It should . . . come as no surprise that minstrel comedy took great strides to tame the ‘black’ threat through laughter or ridicule, or that, on the contrary, the threat itself could sometimes escape complete neutralization.” Minstrelsy “simultaneously produced and muted” the “coded” threat of “insurrection and intermixture,” paradoxically presenting the “bodily power” of an “‘inferior’ people, played moreover by white men who could easily demarcate the ironic distance between themselves and their personae. Still, the power was made quite available, and could be provocative.”14 Though Thady’s body is physically absent from Edgeworth’s performative narrative, the Editor makes clear the power of the inferior Irish lies in their rhetorical dexterity.15 In their Essay on Irish Bulls (1802), Edgeworth and 11  Robert C. Toll argues that “[f]rom the beginning of minstrelsy, one of the functions of the blackface had been to give the minstrel a position similar to the classical fool. Set apart from society, believed to be mentally inferior and immature, black characters could express serious criticism without compelling the listener to take them seriously” in his Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 161. Tom Dunne has called Thady a representative of the “peasant jacquerie,” “a Caliban in the guise of a quaint stage-Irish Ariel, his devious and false servility a direct product of the colonial system, and destined, through his crucial aid for his son, to be its nemesis” (Dunne, quoted in Butler, introduction to “Castle Rackrent” and “Ennui,” 9). 12  See Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 132–34. See also Eric Lott, Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 9. 13   Michael Rogin notes that blackface can be manifested in diverse ways: “Like the Scots ballad and the clan tartan, blackface minstrelsy incorporated a subjugated people into an imperial state. In both blackface and Scots dress, the represented folk served the national identity of their conquerors. . . . Blackface, whatever desire lay buried in the form, assaulted the people through whose mouths it claimed to speak” (Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996], 48–49). 14  Lott, 150, 119. 15   Thady’s written narrative has a distinctive performative quality because his relation is oral. Edgeworth claimed that as she wrote Castle Rackrent, the family’s steward, John Langan, “seemed to stand beside me and dictate and I wrote as fast as my pen could go” (quoted in Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 241). Mitzi Myers notes that “Edgeworth’s mimicry of

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her father Richard Lovell Edgeworth conflate such oracular prowess with physical power. The Edgeworths describe the end of an impassioned and eloquent speech by an Irish laborer: “[S]triding suddenly with colossal firmness upon his sturdy legs, and raising to Heaven arms which looked like foreshortenings of the limbs of Hercules—‘What have I in this wide world but these four bones?’” The authors appraise the speaker by saying, “Demosthenes could not have used more striking action. The Irish are a nation of orators.”16 The almost absent body of Thady, representing the native Irish, is thus invigorated through such Herculean rhetorical display and the editorial gloss of Castle Rackrent is key to demarcating the “ironic distance” between the performing bodies of the novel. While blackface minstrelsy is most commonly associated with nineteenthcentury America, in Great Britain and Ireland blacking the face had been practiced for several previous centuries and in a range of entertainments. In Thomas Crofton Croker’s Researches in the South of Ireland (1824), he describes the revelry of the Irish wake: “Dancing, or rather running in a ring, round an individual, who performs various evolutions, is also a common amusement; and four or five young men will sometimes, for the diversion of the party, blacken their faces, and go through a regular series of gestures with sticks, not unlike those of the English morris dancers.”17 According to Michael Rogin, “The first white European in recorded history to black her face was Queen Anne, wife of James I. . . . Courtiers had masked themselves as Moors since the early sixteenth century, as had blackface players on the English stage,” “but before 1605, the year in which Queen Anne asked Ben Jonson to write a masque in which she and her ladies could play black, there had been no actual darkening of the skin.”18 Though blacking the face could indicate masking as a dark-skinned, usually African, person, as when Queen Anne blacked-up for Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness, in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century minstrel shows, the blacked-up minstrel could in a single evening perform several ethnic roles with dialect being the only distinguishing feature.19 In England’s oldest colony, Ireland, dialect and language were, of course, the markers of difference, and these become the means of Edgeworth’s performance in Castle Rackrent. Luke Gibbons describes a toy map of the world, “mounted on a wheel complete with small apertures which revealed all that was worth her father’s steward (the original Thady),” begun as an entertainment for her family, “occurs in her earliest letters from Ireland” (“‘Like Pictures in a Magic Lantern’: Gender, History, and Edgeworth’s Rebellion Narratives,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 19 (1996): 396. 16  Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Maria Edgeworth, Essay on Irish Bulls (London: J. Johnson, 1802), 180. 17   Thomas Crofton Croker, Researches in the South of Ireland (1824; repr., Shannon: Irish University Press, 1968), 171. 18  Rogin, 19. 19  See Joyce Flynn, “Melting Plots: Patterns of Racial and Ethnic Amalgamation in American Drama before Eugene O’Neill,” American Quarterly 38 (1986): 426.

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knowing about the most distant corners of the Empire. One of the apertures gave a breakdown of each colony in terms of its ‘white’ and ‘native’ population, as if both categories were mutually exclusive.” Gibbons notes the failure of this model when it came to Ireland, where the “subject population was both ‘native’ and ‘white’ at the same time.” Thus the case of Ireland presented particular difficulty because the “apparent ease with which colonial discourse establishes its legitimacy derives from the paradox that it locates discrimination in a primal act of visual recognition.”20 The British and Anglo-Irish sought to mark difference in visual representations of the native Irish with increasingly simianized features—recall James Gillray’s caricatures from the 1790s and George Cruickshank’s drawings and watercolors from 1845. However, as Claire Wills has shown, because the usual “visual marker of skin colour difference” used to “legitimate domination in other colonized societies” is absent, in Ireland difference is marked primarily through “language.” Wills notes, “Whether it is a patronizing approval of lyrical celticism, or horrified revulsion from the degenerate Irish accent, Irish men and women are marked by their voices, their (mis)use of the English language.”21 In Brian Hollingworth’s insightful treatment of Edgeworth’s attitudes toward the native Irish dialect, he argues convincingly that for Edgeworth the “vernacular was a recognized sign of moral inferiority. The vernacular speaker stopped short of civilized behaviour, and betrayed evidence of an undeveloped reasoning power.”22 In taking Thady’s voice, Edgeworth thus becomes a minstrel character, performing what Kenneth Lynn refers to as “a white imitation of a black imitation of a contented slave.”23 The reasons for Edgeworth’s appropriation are not hard to trace. As she wrote Castle Rackrent in the 1790s, Edgeworth felt quite anxious about her family’s relations with the native Irish and about the possibility of a peasant uprising: “Towards the end of the year 1794,” she wrote in her father’s memoir, “a rumor of a French invasion spread through the country, raising the hopes of the disaffected,

20

  Luke Gibbons, “Race Against Time: Racial Discourse and Irish History,” Oxford Literary Review 13 (1991): 95. Gibbons employs Homi Bhabha’s “Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism” here: “[C]olonial power produces the colonized as a fixed reality which is at once ‘other’ and yet entirely knowable and visible . . . one has to see the surveillance of colonial power as functioning in relation to the regime of the scopic drive” (Bhabha, quoted in Gibbons, 95). 21  Claire Wills, “Language Politics, Narrative, Political Violence,” Oxford Literary Review 13 (1991): 21. 22  Hollingworth, 20. Interested in preserving this difference through dialect, the Edgeworths, in their book Practical Education, warned parents against exposing their children to the dialects of servants. However, even their careful efforts at containment failed—Joanna Baillie writes to Walter Scott that some of the Edgeworth children have “a good deal of the Irish brogue” (Baillie, quoted in Hollingworth, 64). 23   Kenneth Lynn, quoted in Pieterse, 132.

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and creating terror in all, who had any thing to lose.”24 In 1796 she wrote her Aunt Ruxton “‘that whilst our terrified neighbors see nightly visions of massacres, we sleep with our doors and windows unbarred.’ I must observe, though, that it is only those doors and windows which have neither bolts nor bars that we leave unbarred, and these are more at present than we wish, even for the reputation of our valor.”25 Later in the same letter she comments, “All that I crave for my own part is, that if I am to have my throat cut, it may not be by a man with his face blackened with charcoal.” Although the mood of the letter lightens as Edgeworth jokes that she “shall look at every person that comes here very closely, to see if there be any marks of charcoal upon their visages” and that very clean hands and nails “ought to hang a man,” her fears of a potential uprising were justified (L, 1:44). Literal, as opposed to linguistic, blackface was no laughing matter. In June of 1798, during the height of the rebellion in Wexford, Edgeworth wrote to her cousin Sophy Ruxton, “I am going on in the old way, writing stories. I cannot be a captain of dragoons, and sitting with my hands before me would not make any of us one degree safer. . . . My father has made our little rooms so nice for us; they are all fresh painted and papered. Oh, rebels! oh, French! spare them! We have never injured you, and all we wish is to see everybody as happy as ourselves” (L, 1:56). Edgeworth’s childish and willful interpretation of events is quite striking here for she must have known that to see “everybody as happy as ourselves” would require a radical redistribution of property in Ireland and the loss of estates such as the one owned by the Edgeworths. Though their nicely papered rooms were spared, the Edgeworths were forced to flee their estate when threatened by a crowd of Defenders during the rebellion of 1798: “Yesterday we heard, about ten o’clock in the morning, that a large body of rebels, armed with pikes, were within a few miles of Edgeworthstown” (L, 1:58). The 300 rebel pikemen were dispersed by the militia, yet ironically Maria’s father was attacked by an angry mob of Orangemen in the town of Longford, who believed he was secretly allied with the rebels: “The mob had not contented themselves with the horrid yells that we had heard, but had been pelting them with hard turf, stones, and brick bats. From one of these my father received a blow on the side of his head, which came with such force as to stagger, and almost stun him.”26 Later in 1798, Maria penned a lovely description of their journey to a  Maria Edgeworth, in Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Maria Edgeworth, Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Esq., Begun by Himself and Concluded by His Daughter, Maria Edgeworth, 2 vols. (London: R. Hunter and Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1820), 2:154. 25   Maria Edgeworth to Mrs. Ruxton, January 1796, The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, ed. Augustus J.C. Hare, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895), 1:44. Hereafter abbreviated L and cited parenthetically by volume and page number. 26  Richard Edgeworth and Maria Edgeworth, Memoirs, 2:230. Orangemen were members of the Orange Order (lodges) who organized in response to the government easing some of the strictures of the Penal Laws on Roman Catholics during this period. The Orange Order likely grew out of the Peep-O-Day Boys, an earlier “Protestant paramilitary force” 24

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nearby British camp where the French army and the Irish rebels had just been put down by the English at the battle of Ballinamuck. In her discussion of the pastoral scene and the soldiers “gathering blackberries,” Edgeworth elides the 2000 Irish prisoners held there who would be executed within a couple of weeks; however, her idealized description’s final line, previously suppressed, is telling: “Don’t imagine that I am camp mad—I was only glad to see anything like order & civility after the horrors of Longford.”27 Clearly, the turmoil of the 1790s was frequently on her mind as she composed Castle Rackrent and the accompanying glosses; thus a reading of the novel is incomplete without considering these surrounding events, particularly as they were reported in print at the end of the eighteenth century.28 In order to appreciate fully the contemporary political meanings of Castle Rackrent, one must attend to not only Edgeworth’s blackface performance as Thady but also the competing narratives provided by her editorial commentary, which functions in a similar manner, to appropriate and control, albeit with only qualified success.29 In a lengthy Glossary note about the Irish peasants’ knowledge of legal terms, Maria Edgeworth presents a native Irish defendant petitioning the Justice of the Peace to acknowledge the falsity of the story his accuser has just related and the validity of the one he is about to present: “Please your honour, under favour, and saving your honour’s presence, there’s not a word of truth in all this man has been saying from beginning to end . . . For please your honour, I have a dependence upon your honour that you’ll do me justice, and not be listening to him or the like of him” (C, 134). After telling his version of the story, the defendant closes with, “I’ll leave it all to your honour” (C, 135). Fittingly, Edgeworth’s Justice of the Peace in the above anecdote delivers no verdict upon the two stories offered by the (Whelan, 44). Though the Orangemen were originally guided by sectarian animosity, their opposition quickly expanded to include the non-sectarian United Irishmen. 27  Maria Edgeworth, quoted in Hollingworth, 40–41. 28  Evidence suggests that Edgeworth began Castle Rackrent in the earlier part of the 1790s, though the Glossary and some of the notes were certainly written after 1798. See W. J. McCormack’s chronology in Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History from 1789–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 100. Though Castle Rackrent is frequently mentioned in the context of the political tension of the 1790s and the 1798 rebellion, the most extensive readings of Edgeworth’s fictional work within this political context concern Ennui; see Myers and Dunne, “Representations of Rebellion: 1798 in Literature,” in Ireland, England, and Australia: Essays in Honour of Oliver Mac Donagh, ed. F[rancis] B[arrymore] Smith (Cork: Cork University Press, 1990), 14–40. More recently, Elizabeth S. Kim compellingly argues that Edgeworth “uses the story of slave rebellion in a faraway British colony to rewrite peasant rebellion at home” (106); see her “Maria Edgeworth’s The Grateful Negro: A Site for Rewriting Rebellion,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 16, no. 1 (2003): 103–26. 29   Beth Kowaleski-Wallace posits that Edgeworth’s “transcription of Irish cultural life is simultaneously an appropriation and containment of volatile political tensions”; see her Their Father’s Daughters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 150. I would argue that the rational explanations of the Editor are unable finally to “contain” Thady’s perspective.

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Irish peasants; they destabilize one another’s veracity by their very juxtaposition. The reader, who, like the Justice, is left to decide what it “all” means, imagines that the truth of the matter must lie outside the confines of the two narratives. While the glosses on the central narrative of Castle Rackrent are not so bold as the defendant in claiming there is “not a word of truth” in all of Thady’s story, they do vie with him for narrative authority, and in both cases, Irish character is being judged. The reader, to do the novel “justice,” must listen to all of the competing versions which Edgeworth presents and discern what truth emerges from the shifts to alternative media. Tilottama Rajan’s work on the embedded narratives of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman (1798) offers insight applicable to the dynamics of competing narratives here: “Each of the characters’ stories negates itself as a historically limited (mis)representation, without thereby validating another story. The result is that the meaning of the text does not inhere anywhere in it but remains to be produced.”30 Mitzi Myers’s argument regarding the layered narratives of Ennui posits a strategy for reading that I would suggest might be fruitfully applied to Castle Rackrent: Edgeworth’s narrative fractures force readers to think, to work through in their own reading responses the processes of recuperation and assimilation which are her historical subject: war is the absent referent which produces powerful textual constructs. . . . As the carriers of ideological meaning, Edgeworth’s odd, layered, densely allusive forms repay closer attention than her seemingly transparent style and her reductive reputation as the improving landlord’s didactic daughter get her. With their transfers between texts and spaces, they uncover the fictions of history and the history buried in fictions.31

Castle Rackrent likewise demonstrates that its variant narratives are “historically limited” and that the reader must construct meaning beyond this complex and layered tale whose language is anything but “plain.” Maria Edgeworth has appropriated Thady’s illiterate and silenced voice and self-consciously juxtaposes it with her Editor’s creative commentary to produce a dynamic historical narrative. Thady’s text is represented as a straightforward tale; the Editor, a characternarrator like Mary Shelley’s Walton in Frankenstein, presents information in the editorial commentary to convince us of the central narrative’s simplicity and authenticity, while simultaneously presenting evidence which alerts us to the political tension in Ireland. The form of Castle Rackrent thus imitates the type of government the Edgeworths were advocating for the Irish—rational and fair Anglo-Irish land ownership, which would benevolently guide the native peasants and commercially manage the land, a policy that could only be effected via the constant interaction of the two classes. Although the Edgeworths consistently 30   Tilottama Rajan, “Wollstonecraft and Godwin: Reading the Secrets of the Political Novel,” Studies in Romanticism 27 (1988): 230. 31   Myers, “Like Pictures,” 380.

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supported education for all classes, Maria believed that the lower classes should not partake in governing. She maintained this belief well into her later life, writing to Rachael Mordecai Lazarus (11 July 1837) her response to Harriet Martineau’s valorization of government by the “will of the majority”: “But the point still to be proved, still to be enquired into, is whether the majority of numbers necessarily includes the majority of sense, judgment, moral feeling, and all that should form the legislative and governing preponderance in any nation.”32 Like Edgeworth’s government of “sense, judgment,” and “moral feeling,” the complete text of Castle Rackrent attempts to contain Irish Thady’s narrative not only through his comic dialect but also through the guiding and censoring Preface, notes, and Glossary of the presumably Anglo-Irish or British Editor. Lacking apparent political pretensions, the novel seeks to educate as it entertains. Many twentieth-century critics ignored the extensive editorial apparatus or found it to be “unfitting.” Though Anthony Cronin praises the novel, he faults the “artistically unfitting footnotes and afterwords,” and Gene W. Ruoff discusses Castle Rackrent as a narrative “wholly in dialect,” overlooking the fact that only Thady’s narrative is in dialect.33 One of the first critics to examine the importance of the auxiliary editorial texts—a Preface, as well as a Glossary (actually more of a commentary) and internal footnotes—was Butler, who posits that the Edgeworths had strong political motivation for including the Glossary, and that the “selfconscious intellectuality and Englishness of the Glossary” is an attempt by the Edgeworths to “dissociate themselves from [Thady’s] primitive attitudes.”34 It is not just disassociation that is sought, however. Castle Rackrent’s Editor claims “Thady’s idiom” has not been translated into “plain English” to avoid damaging the “authenticity of his story” and exposing it to “doubt.” By juxtaposing a scholarly voice with the “scarcely intelligible” voice of the steward (very little of Thady’s voice is actually unintelligible), the editorial mediation also seems to tame its radical energies while actually illuminating them (C, 63). Ultimately, Edgeworth preserves the “authenticity” of Thady’s narrative through her pervasive editorial presence in Castle Rackrent, which does not simply clarify, supplement, or verify

32  Maria Edgeworth to Rachel Mordecai Lazarus, 11 July 1837, in Lazarus and Edgeworth, The Education of the Heart, ed. Edgar E. MacDonald (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 298. 33   Anthony Cronin, Heritage Now: Irish Literature in the English Language (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 26. Gene W. Ruoff, “1800 and the Future of the Novel: WilliamWordsworth, Maria Edgeworth, and the Vagaries of Literary History,” in The Age of William Wordsworth: Critical Essays on the Romantic Tradition, ed. Kenneth R. Johnston and Gene W. Ruoff (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 297, emphasis mine. 34   Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 355. Butler uses the plural “themselves” here because Maria and her father would have negotiated the printing of the text and because Richard Lovell wrote at least one of the footnotes (Butler, general intro. to Novels and Selected Works, 1:xlii).

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the tale of Thady, but always interacts with it, engaging in a constant dialogue that destabilizes both narratives. By the early 1990s, critics began to insist on the importance of the auxiliary texts. Kowaleski-Wallace comments that while many readers “have chosen to repress the editorial rubric . . . to do so is to read only a portion of the text.” She also acknowledges that foregrounding the “authorial voices” of the editorial commentary allows us to “reconsider the larger social and political context in which the novel functions.”35 In her introduction to the Penguin edition “Castle Rackrent” and “Ennui” (1992), Butler substantially develops her ideas about the cultural and political importance of the Preface and Glossary. She focuses upon the “discourse of class” and historicizes Edgeworth’s attempt at a novel in dialect in terms of the debate over the authority of “literary language” as opposed to the “‘naturalness’ (and thus for some the legitimacy) of the vulgar spoken language, including dialect and slang” (19). Kathryn Kirkpatrick, in the first article devoted fully to considering the paratexts of Castle Rackrent, reads the “polyphonic narrative” as a “symbolic response to the contradictions of female authorship,” where Edgeworth adopts Thady’s voice as a way to “articulate her own condition as a woman writer” because of their shared marginalized status.36 By featuring Thady’s idiom, Edgeworth introduces an alternative discourse into the homogenous and controlled literary rhetoric of her age. Because she is a woman and Thady Quirk a common Irishman, both belong to a “muted” or voiceless group. As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has pointed out, class and gender play comparable roles in the writing of history: “Simultaneously, they constitute conceptual systems, organizing principles, that impose a fictive order upon the complexities of economic and social development. They constitute codes of behavior by which people are expected to structure their lives.” As SmithRosenberg also points out, “[d]ivergent, at times conflicting, narratives and imagery will proliferate as marginal social groups, speaking the ‘language’ of their experiences, challenge their culture’s ‘traditional’ discourse. At such times, the meaning of words will become problematic.”37 Maria Edgeworth, as the writer of moral tales for children, well understood the “codes of behavior by which people are expected to structure their lives.” She also observed first-hand the “disorder” of Ireland as two disparate cultures struggled for dominance. The marginal social group to which Thady belonged constituted a vast majority of the Irish populace and in 1782 became, at least nominally, the dominant social group. As Edgeworth writes her own social commentary of Ireland, she thus decides to introduce into traditional literature the “narratives and imagery” of the marginalized class, that is, 35

  Kowaleski-Wallace, 154.   Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick, “Putting Down the Rebellion: Notes and Glosses on Castle Rackrent, 1800,” Eire-Ireland 30 (Spring 1995): 78, 84. 37  Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Writing History: Language, Class, and Gender,” in Feminist Studies: Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 33, 36. 36

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Thady’s experience, and as she does so, she also positions herself in the role of the masculine Editor. It is thus Edgeworth, in the guise of a member of the male ruling class, who decides what is “problematic” in the language of Thady. Edgeworth empowers herself and critiques her society by taking on not only the voice of the illiterate Irish steward but the voice of his Editor as well. Both in and out of the game, she draws our attention to how it is played. Given Edgeworth’s concerns as an author, I would argue that the central subversions in Castle Rackrent are epistemological—the competing narratives challenge eighteenth-century ideas about the ways in which knowledge is circulated and validated. In her examination of the process whereby authors achieve “literary authority,” Ina Ferris suggests that Edgeworth indeed challenges the “authority of official discourses,” taking “official history” as her primary target, but that she “betrays an uneasiness in doing so that in effect leaves their authority in place.” Ferris pinpoints the phrase where the Editor claims that Thady’s “partiality” towards the Rackrents “must be obvious to the reader” (C, 62) as the weakness in Edgeworth’s challenge: “But the ‘must,’ hovering between indicative and imperative senses, betrays a certain anxiety about exactly how obvious it all is, and Castle Rackrent, notoriously, has yielded to contradictory readings: as a nostalgic lament for and as a devastating critique of the world it represents.”38 As I have shown above, the glosses to the novel self-consciously undermine the Preface, challenging “official discourse” in their purposeful ambiguity. Susan Glover’s recent study of the glosses also supports this reading. She finds a “sense of ambiguity, of unstable meaning” in both Thady’s and the Editor’s narratives: “[W]hat we are told does not always match what we are shown.”39 Clíona Ó Gallchoir writes, “Rather than make clear and unambiguous distinctions between reliable and unreliable speakers, as some critics have asserted, Castle Rackrent takes huge, and successful, risks by bringing readers face to face with the difficulty of establishing a reliable point of view.”40 If we read the central narrative and glosses of Castle Rackrent in these terms, then the aim of the novel becomes to replace a monolithic traditional history with a dialogic narrative whose meaning the reader constructs—history as a process of interpretation. The footnotes and Glossary to the novel are, I believe, the work of a rhetorical trickster, a woman who attended closely to the way people spoke. The editorial commentary in Castle Rackrent certainly describes native customs and beliefs, but it principally concerns two issues—language and land, and in certain cases, the way language controls that land. The footnotes frequently alert the reader to particular rhetorical devices prominent in Irish speech; these devices often then appear in Thady’s narrative  Ferris, Achievement of Literary Authority, 112, 114.  Glover, 298, 300. Glover adds, “The controlling, authoritative voice, which began so confidently, grows more hesitant, suggesting that ‘probably’ we shall be able to verify his observations and that Ireland will contemplate with amusement the stories of the old squires when she ‘loses her identity by an union with Great Britain’” (298). 40   Ó Gallchoir, 65. 38 39

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unmarked, but the careful reader has been cued and, I think, is expected to notice the rhetorical skill of the narrative. In an early footnote, Edgeworth’s Editor gives a scathing critique of the middleman in Ireland, which is also a warning about the craftiness of the native Irish. He comments that the “poor detested this race of beings” and continues with a discussion of the mode of discourse between the peasant and the hated middleman: “. . . they [the peasants] always used the most abject language, and the most humble tone and posture.—‘Please your honour; and please your honour’s honour,’ they knew must be repeated as a charm at the beginning and end of every equivocating, exculpatory, or supplicatory sentence” (C, 73). Four pages later, the faithful Thady addresses Sir Kit as “your honour’s honour” (C, 77), alerting the reader to the possibility that Thady may well be feigning his high regard for the Rackrent family.41 In other words, the juxtaposition of the narrative proper and the editorial apparatus gives us access to a truth not found in either. Edgeworth validates this reading in one of her editorial glosses to Mary Leadbeater’s Cottage Dialogues among the Irish Peasantry (1811). In encouraging “[a]ll true friends of the British empire” to encourage independence in the Irish peasant, Edgeworth adds, “This just spirit of independence is far, very far different from a discontented, disaffected temper; far more safe to trust, as well as more pleasant to see, than the sneaking, cringing, ‘As your honour plases.’— ‘Sure whatever your honour decrees me.’—‘I’ll leave it all to your honour.’”42 Edgeworth here links such servility to a “discontented, disaffected temper”—to be “disaffected” in the 1790s was to be in sympathy with the insurgency. Perhaps the most subtle example of this narrative technique appears in the following Glossary entry, where the Editor pays specific attention to Thady’s rhetoric, glossing the phrase “Out of forty-nine suits which he had, he never lost one but seventeen” (C, 70), from the central narrative: “Thady’s language in this instance is a specimen of a mode of rhetoric common in Ireland. An astonishing assertion is made in the beginning of a sentence, which ceases to be in the least surprising, when you hear the qualifying explanation that follows” (C, 129). Within his narrative, Thady does exactly this in his apt and far from innocent judgment on Sir Murtagh’s stingy wife: “However, my lady was very charitable in her own way. She had a charity school for poor children, where they were taught to read and write gratis, and where they were kept well to spinning gratis for my lady in return” (C, 69). Thady allows she set up a school for “charity,” but then undercuts the meaning of “charity” by casually mentioning in a parallel form that the enforced child labor was “gratis” as well. Here Thady’s “partiality” for the family indeed seems disingenuous. As Thady continues with a discussion of “my lady” requiring a constant supply of 41

 Glover also attends to this note on the middleman, commenting that we should generally be skeptical of such asides, which have “[t]oo often been taken as literal expressions of Thady’s devotion” (302). 42  Maria Edgeworth, notes and preface to Cottage Dialogues among the Irish Peasantry, by Mary Leadbeater (Philadelphia: Johnson & Warner, 1811), 234.

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“duty fowls, and duty turkies, and duty geese” (C, 69), his admiration for her being able to keep her table plentifully supplied for “next to nothing” can only be read as ironic. An appended Glossary note supports Thady’s implicit critique of such exploitation: “In many leases in Ireland, tenants were formerly bound to supply an inordinate quantity of poultry to their landlords. The Editor knew of thirty turkies being reserved in one lease of a small farm” (C, 127). Though the emphasis on “formerly” echoes the Preface’s insistence that such practices no longer occur, the descriptor “inordinate” and the Editor’s authenticating example alert the reader to a Thady who has the very “sagacity to discriminate character,” which the Preface claims he lacks. James Gillray’s 1798 caricature of the United Irishmen in Training (Figure 2.1) portrays a tension similar to that working in the central narrative and notes of Castle Rackrent. The Irishmen in the caricature appear to be incompetent and comical as their weapons misfire and the balls roll ineffectually out of the musket; however, close examination of the image reveals a pile of swords in the foreground beside the hardworking blacksmith and several pikes looming in the background. The comical effect of the featured characters in training cannot quite mask the worrisome presence of so many weapons and men. When the glosses are read against the central narrative, Thady emerges as a much more discriminating narrator than the Preface gives him credit for being. The Editor, in defending the historicity of Thady’s mode of tale telling, claims a preference for those narrators “who, without sagacity to discriminate character, without elegance of style to relieve the tediousness of narrative, without enlargement of mind to draw any conclusions from the facts they relate, simply pour forth anecdotes, and retail conversations, with all the minute prolixity of a gossip in a country town” (C, 62). The very editorial glosses which alert us to Thady’s “elegance of style” simultaneously undermine the Editor’s authority; Thady’s narrative destabilizes the Preface only with the help of these glosses. The Editor actively subverts his opening treatise which privileges the “private anecdote” and eschews “literary manufacture” by flaunting the rhetorical skill of both Thady’s narrative and his own. Glimpses of Edgeworth’s political desires and fears occur in the interaction of the central narrative and the notes, yet it takes an alert reader to discern her cues. The apparently neutral intellectual voice of the Editor, while providing the reader with ethnographic details about the Irish, engages in the centuriesold controversy of demarcating boundaries between the native Irish and their colonizers. Edgeworth quotes Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596) in her opening footnote on the “great coat” (C, 65).43 The note immediately adds a literary dimension to Thady’s narration by citing Spenser’s discussion of the cloak as antiquarian artifact, tracing its roots to the Chaldees, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans (C, 65). Edgeworth quotes further from Spenser to reassign 43

  This note has received by far the greatest attention of any of the editorial notes of Castle Rackrent. See Butler, introduction to “Castle Rackrent” and “Ennui”; Neill and Kirkpatrick, “Putting Down the Rebellion.”

Fig. 2.1

United Irishmen in Training (1798), by James Gillray.

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meaning to the cloak, which Spenser deems “a fit house for an outlaw, a meet bed for a rebel, and an apt cloak for a thief” (C, 65). The editorial comment diffuses traditional meanings and encourages the reader to connect the wearer of the cloak with classical as well as subversive values. By aligning the Irish cloak with artifacts from ancient cultures, Edgeworth locates Irish civilization in a far distant past—a nationalist strategy shared by the United Irishmen. However, linking the cloak with a distant past fails to contain it as a dynamic cultural artifact because the threat of the Irish “outlaw,” “rebel,” and “thief” retains a worrisome immediacy, encouraging the reader to connect the wearer of the cloak with subversive values. We should also consider her source, Spenser’s text that Edward Said describes as “boldly proposing that since the Irish were barbarian Scythians, most of them should be exterminated.”44 Spenser’s Irenius argues for violence and premeditated famine (through destruction of tillable lands and livestock) as means to put down the uncivilizable Irish. He predicts that the “end will . . . bee very short and much sooner then can be in so great a trouble” and envisions a “most populous and plentifull countrey suddainely left voyde of man and beast.”45 When Edgeworth quotes from Spenser’s View, she does not simply supply a literary source to Castle Rackrent but introduces into her text Spenser’s radical plan for the “reformation” of an Ireland over-run by “rebells.”46 As Spenser and Edgeworth both make clear, the great coat or mantle has a long association with the native Irish. Margaret Rose Jaster argues that “[e]arly modern English colonialist discourse consistently depends upon the figure of that ‘Wild Irishman’ attired in his mantle, sporting a long forelock or ‘glybb,’ to help define his near neighbor as Other.” She adds that the mantle or great coat “became a sartorial signifier for Irishness, and any attendant negative images in the minds of the early modern English public.”47 In Jonson’s Irish Masque at Court (1613), apparel and dialect work in tandem to establish Irishness. Jonson effects the assimilation of the play’s Irishmen into the British court through the loss of these markers of Irishness. As Elizabeth Fowler emphasizes, Jonson’s “Irish chieftains are instantly transformed into English earls, throwing off their heavy dialects and mantles, by the metamorphosing presence of [King] James.”48 By the end of the eighteenth century, the great coat was clothing so firmly associated with the  Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 222.  Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (1633; repr., Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 101, 102. 46  Spenser, 100 (“rebells”), 103 (“reformation”); for the details of Spenser’s plan see pages 100–105. 47  Margaret Rose Jaster, “Staging a Stereotype in Gaelic Garb: Ben Jonson’s Irish Masque, 1613,” New Hibernia Review 2, no. 4 (1998): 87. Though the mantle identified the Irish as “other,” within Ireland during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the “garment is comparatively egalitarian and nongendered” (89). 48   Elizabeth Fowler, “The Failure of Moral Philosophy in the Work of Edmund Spenser,” Representations 51 (Summer 1995): 55. 44

45

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subversion of the rebellion that the Irish Quaker author Mary Leadbeater notes in her private journal (kept from 1766–1826) that her friend, a loyalist officer, was able to safely travel by post in the midst of the revolution, “disguised in a round hat and great-coat over his regimentals.”49 In addition, in her novel Ennui (1809)—her only fictional work to directly depict events of the 1798 rebellion—Edgeworth has the rebel plot uncovered by the discovery of a great coat hiding a pike head and a list of United Irish men.50 Such a detail alerts us to the potential of Thady’s complicity in conspiracies to overthrow the Anglo-Irish landholders because the Castle Rackrent note about the potentially subversive great coat is, after all, about his great coat. Just as the political turmoil in Ireland arose from the dispossession of the native Irish, the most ominous signs of this turmoil in Castle Rackrent appear at those points where the narratives (Thady’s and the Editor’s) discuss property rights. Edgeworth recasts the physical threat of the native Irish in a linguistic light, for, in reality, all that separates the Anglo-Irish landowners from their tenants are special groups of words which form such documents as the Penal Laws. Thady clearly understands the connection between the law and the possession of the land: As for law, I believe no man, dead or alive, ever loved it so well as Sir Murtagh. He had once sixteen suits pending at a time, and I never saw him so much himself; roads, lanes, bogs, wells, ponds, eel-wires, orchards, trees, tithes, vagrants, gravelpits, sandpits, dunghills, and nuisances, every thing upon the face of the earth furnished him good matter for a suit. (C, 70)

The repetition in this passage of landscape features which are the subjects of lawsuits and the final line declaring “every thing upon the face of the earth” as negotiable in a court of law emphasize the pervasiveness of language in controlling the possession of land. Thady continues the discussion of Sir Murtagh’s many failed lawsuits by commenting disingenuously, “I . . . thanked my stars I was not born a gentleman to so much toil and trouble,” and “he was a very learned man in the law, and I know nothing of the matter” (C, 70). Both of these statements indicate that “law” is a matter for learned gentleman, a profession one must be born into or at least allowed, by law, to practice. However, the Glossary entry assures the reader that Thady and the native Irish “all love law. It is a kind of lottery, in which every man, staking his own wit or cunning against his neighbour’s property, feels that he has little to lose, and much to gain.” The Editor adds that “almost every poor man in Ireland, be he farmer, weaver, shopkeeper, or steward, 49  Mary Leadbeater, “The Account” (1862), in Protestant Women’s Narratives, 223. When John Beatty compiled his Protestant Women’s Narratives, he entitled each woman’s narrative “The Account.” Beatty’s “Accounts” are sometimes excerpts from longer journals and many were originally untitled, so he uses this generic title for each narrative. 50  Maria Edgeworth, Ennui, in “Castle Rackrent” and “Ennui”, 262. Hereafter abbreviated E and cited parenthetically by page number.

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is, beside his other occupations, occasionally a lawyer,” and he is as “familiar” with complicated legal terms as “any attorney” (C, 132–3). As Thomas Flanagan has observed, “Thady’s language is thick with the terms by which land is held and exploited—abatements, pounding, canting, replevying, tithes, duty-work, notes, bills of sale, rent-rolls.”51 Although Thady dissembles, undoubtedly he would be among the native Irish willing to participate in such a lottery. In her narrative account of the 1798 rebellion in Wexford, Jane Adams gives Edgeworth’s Glossary note contemporary political currency: “I shall ever have reason to love the poor Irish for the many proofs of heart they have shown during this distracted season; particularly as they were persuaded into a belief that they were all to possess the different estates of the gentlemen of the country; & that they were only to draw lots for their possessions.”52 As page after page of the novel discusses the exchange of Ireland’s land, the issue of the Irish-English Union, which is specifically forecast in the Preface, echoes throughout the central narrative, where it is not explicitly mentioned. The title, Castle Rackrent, designates not only a building but also an estate, and the story traces the history of the estate as it passes into a number of different hands, ending in the possession of Thady’s native Irish son Jason. A central question of the novel thus becomes, whose land is it and what right do they have to it? One Glossary note warns of the cunning rhetorical maneuvers the Irish employ to obtain their landlords’ property and the caution which must be exercised in yielding to even the smallest claim: “Thady calls it their whiskey; not that the whiskey is actually the property of the tenants, but that it becomes their right after it has been often given to them. In this general mode of reasoning respecting rights the lower Irish are not singular, but they are peculiarly quick and tenacious in claiming these rights” (C, 127). Such “claims” had particular resonance during the rebellion because supplies, houses, and towns like Wexford were reclaimed by the Irish.53 This Glossary note represents a case where the rhetoric of claiming property or privilege eventually guarantees the object or favor itself. In short, this “general mode of reasoning respecting rights” is the seminal form of what the British term law. The fear underlying this note, of course, is that the Irish may ultimately claim their right to the land which under Brehon law was theirs.54 In fact the landlords of   Thomas Flanagan, The Irish Novelists, 1800–1850 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 78. 52   Jane Adams, “The Account” (1823), in Protestant Women’s Narratives, 171. 53   The Wexford Republic, with a representative governing body, lasted a full 26 days before yeomanry and British troops regained control (Packenham, 297). 54  Under the Brehon laws the clan occupied the land. However, according to W.E.H. Lecky, “[t]he object of the Penal Laws, even in their worst period, was much less to produce a change of religion than to secure property and power by reducing to complete impotence those who had formerly possessed them” (Lecky, quoted in Flanagan, 12). The issues of property and dispossession pervade the Irish cultural narrative: “A mythology of land and loss of land provides the topos of popular Irish culture, especially Gaelic song, ballad, folk51

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Edgeworth’s novel are particularly vulnerable because none of the Rackrents, as Flanagan notes, “is really sure that the land is his—not even Condy.”55 Perhaps the most politically significant notes of Edgeworth’s Editor refer to the Irish superstitions concerning “fairy-mounts” and “Banshees” (C, 71). Two footnotes and a lengthy Glossary entry stem from Thady’s tale of Sir Murtagh’s downfall, attributed by Thady to the bad luck incurred by Sir Murtagh for disturbing a fairy-mount: He dug up a fairy-mount* against my advice, and had no luck afterwards. Though a learned man in the law, he was a little too incredulous in other matters. I warned him that I heard the very Banshee† that my grandfather heard under Sir Patrick’s window a few days before his death. But Sir Murtagh thought nothing of the Banshee, nor of his cough with a spitting of blood. (C, 71)

According to Thady, Sir Murtagh’s incredulity in “other matters” and his refusal to listen to the advice of one who understood how to read certain signs of native lore led to bad luck and ultimately to his death. Through the proof of historical events—Sir Murtagh dug up a fairy-mount, became ill and died—Thady urges the reader to believe in such portents of bad luck and in the wise rather than “learned” prognostications of the Irish peasant. The asterisk and dagger in the passage, however, send the reader to the authoritative footnote, where the learned voice of the Editor comments upon Irish superstition: The Banshee is a species of aristocratic fairy, who, in the shape of a little hideous old woman, has been known to appear, and heard to sing in a mournful supernatural voice under the windows of great houses, to warn the family that some of them are soon to die. In the last century every great family in Ireland had a Banshee, who attended regularly; but latterly their visits and songs have been discontinued. (C, 71)

This notation is typical of the editorial commentary, especially the footnotes, which are often anecdotal and related in a manner which implies a knowledge (such as, Banshees don’t really exist) that Thady does not have. Through their oppositional tone, they thus evoke questions such as, what has happened politically to Ireland in the last century to make the Banshee disappear? What changes in governing ideologies have occurred? Obviously, if Sir Murtagh is a representative example of the “Irish” aristocrat, one reason for the Banshee’s disappearance is that the great families neither hear nor heed the Banshee’s mournful songs. Only Thady and his grandfather before him listen to and interpret the signs of this system of beliefs.

history and memory, in the eighteenth century” (Butler, intro. to “Castle Rackrent” and “Ennui”, 11–12). 55  Flanagan, 78.

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Castle Rackrent both wistfully preserves these folk myths and debunks them as superstitious, while always engaging the reader in their fate. The footnote and Glossary entry on the “fairy-mounts” likewise complicate the relationship between the Irish peasant and expert opinion on these mounds of earth. The companion footnote to the above asterisk tells us that fairy-mounts are “held in high reverence by the common people in Ireland” (C, 71) and continues with an anecdote, which parallels Sir Murtagh’s story, about a “gentleman” who could not persuade his workers to level a mount, because they agreed “that the vengeance of the fairies would fall upon the head of the presumptuous mortal, who first disturbed them in their retreat” (C, 71). The gentleman is then forced to “attack” the hillock himself. However, while the “labourers” do hold the mount in reverence and do lighten their own labor by evoking superstition, there is no evidence in the note which indicates that the gentleman was visited by the wrath of the fairies. The accompanying Glossary entry begins by renaming the fairy-mounts by a more common term, “barrows” (C, 129). However, whether they are called “mounts,” “ant-hills,” “hillocks” (C, 71) or “barrows,” the objects in question are literally mounds of Irish soil, and as the following entry makes clear, the ownership of that soil has been contested for centuries: “It is said that these high mounts were of great service to the natives of Ireland when Ireland was invaded by the Danes. Watch was always kept on them, and upon the approach of an enemy a fire was lighted to give notice to the next watch, and thus the intelligence was quickly communicated through the country” (C, 129). With this new information, the original significance of the fairy-mounts suddenly shifts. The reverence in which the geographical features are held becomes two-fold, as does the idea of the avenging fairies.56 In fact Mary Leadbeater writes in her journal that in the months leading up to the rebellion of 1798, “[n]ow and then a person was missed, and this misfortune was unfeelingly accounted for by saying that ‘Brownie had eaten them.’ These mysterious disappearances were horrible, and no certainty of the fate of those victims of party rage was ever obtained.”57 Edgeworth writes to 56

 It is perhaps useful to recall that Irish fairies are not necessarily benevolent winged creatures perched atop flowers. As Edgeworth herself reminds us, “The country people in Ireland certainly had great admiration mixed with reverence, if not dread, of fairies . . . the good people, who must not on any account be disturbed” could do “evil” to the Irish and figured in “innumerable stories told of the friendly and unfriendly feats of these busy fairies” (C, 130). Tracy discusses Yeats’s poem about the “sidhe” or “people of the mounds” in a similar light: they “were menacing because sometimes they enticed children, or young men and women away to their dwelling places underground, in ancient burial mounds. At the same time they were fascinating, attractive . . . if they had to be mentioned, they were called ‘the good people’ or ‘the gentry’” (Tracy, 1). 57  Leadbeater, “The Account,” 197. Leadbeater does not specify the allegiance of the “person” missed, but her diaries detail abuses in the clandestine activities of both militia/ loyalist forces and insurgent groups.

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Mrs. Ruxton in August of 1794, “There have been lately several flying reports of Defenders, but we never thought the danger near till to-day. Last night a party of forty attacked the house of one Hoxey, about half a mile from us, and took, as usual, the arms . . . but it is supposed that the sight of two redcoats riding across the country together will keep the evil sprites from appearing to mortal eyes ‘this watch’” (L, 1:38). Leadbeater’s and Edgeworth’s observations clearly indicate that Irish folklore terms such as “fairies,” “sprites,” and “brownies” had entered into native parlance as terms loaded with the weight of insurgent and militia activity. To level a fairy-mount is not only to risk the displeasure of the “good people,” but also to destroy a potential lookout and warning station essential to protect the “natives of Ireland” from invaders (C, 129). As Edgeworth almost certainly knew, one need look no further back than 1798 to hear of this system of warning in active use. This military use of fairymounts opens onto a controversial sociohistorical landscape that resonates with contemporary fears of a native uprising or an invasion of Ireland by the French. In his Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland (1801), Musgrave observes that persons living on the outskirts of Dublin had seen fires in the “Wicklow mountains, whose luminous appearance by night, and whose smoke by day, served as signals to the disaffected in the metropolis”; viewing them “with a telescope,” he claimed that the “celerity” with which “they encreased or diminished,” “answered in some degree the purpose of a telegraph.”58 A government leaflet to all citizens from the Adjutant General’s Office, dated 4 June 1798, reads: “NOTICE. In Case of any Alarm during the dark Nights, the Inhabitants are hereby commanded immediately to place Lights in the Windows of the Middle Floors of their Houses. All Persons neglecting to comply with this Notice will be punished. By Order of Lieut. Gen. Lake.”59 Not coincidentally, Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s troubles in Longford arose from the impression that he was trying to signal the French with a candle from a window in the Longford gaol.60 58  Sir Richard Musgrave, Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Dublin: J. Millikin and J. Stockdale, 1801), 1:218. Though not mentioned explicitly as signal fires, several rebellion narratives note night fires as symbols of rebel and militia activity. Leadbeater writes: “Desolation threatened in various shapes—the darkness of the winter nights was illuminated by the fires of the houses burnt by the insurgents, and fatal was their vengeance” (226). James Alexander makes clear that torching houses was a merciless activity engaged in by both parties; see his Some Account of the First Apparent Symptoms of the Late Rebellion in the County of Kildare . . . with a Succinct Narrative of . . . the Rise and Progress of the Rebellion in the County of Wexford (Dublin: John Jones, 1800), 134–35. 59   Adjutant General’s Office, June 4th 1798 NOTICE (Dublin: George Grierson, Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, 1798). 60  See Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Maria Edgeworth, Memoirs, 2:226. Richard Lovell was not imprisoned but stationed with his yeomanry corps in the gaol to defend the town against French and rebel troops. This supposed signaling resulted in the loyalist mob’s attack on him cited earlier in this chapter.

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The need for some system of warning had immediate interest for Edgeworth, because in 1795 and again in 1796, her father presented to the government his idea for a telegraph system that would run between Dublin and various points along the coast. When rumors of French invasion circulated in September 1796, Richard Lovell was sure the government would adopt the plan, but in November 1796 they again rejected his assistance in the defense of Ireland.61 Ultimately, his response to Dublin Castle was to publish a pamphlet that Maria helped write, A Letter to the Right Hon. The Earl of Charlemont on the Tellograph, and on the Defence of Ireland (1797).62 The pamphlet makes clear that the telegraph system was also needed for internal threats, remarking several times that the telegraph stations would be “tenable against a mob.” Edgeworth emphasized that he was addressing his pamphlet “to the public—to those in Ireland, who have something to protect.”63 The threat of Danish invasion mentioned in the Castle Rackrent Glossary had abated more than 800 years earlier; watch was being kept in Edgeworth’s time for a different enemy, that is, Irish insurgents. The Glossary entry on fairy-mounts continues with, “Some years ago, the common people believed that these barrows were inhabited by fairies, or, as they called them, by the good people” (C, 129). The Editor’s emphasis on “some years ago” reiterates the claim made in the Preface that even the common people are no longer believers in such superstition and that these tales, like the foolish antics of Sir Kit and Sir Condy, took place in a far distant past and can only amuse in the enlightened present. To support this idea the Editor appeals to the authority of an “elderly man,” who proclaims to the “best of my belief” that “it was only the old people that had nothing to do, and got together, and were telling stories about them fairies, but to the best of my judgement there’s nothing in it” (C, 129). However, immediately after this dismissal, he himself tells two stories which he has on good authority about the activities of the fairies (C, 129). Thus though the elder frames his stories with disbelief, ending with “but it is my opinion it is all idle talk, and people are after being wiser now” (C, 130), he undercuts his position through his own behavior. The Editor attempts to disprove Thady’s talk of fairies by resorting to the authority of an elderly man, who can hardly be older than Thady. As with the case heard before the judge mentioned previously, these competing and layered narratives leave us no closer to any single truth, and they position the Editor several moves away from the lived experiences of the Irish. The Editor’s Glossary note on fairy-mounts likewise suggests an alternative truth, as it ends with a rational explanation, citing instances in which caves or hollows in fairy-mounts

 See Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 120–22.  Richard Lovell Edgeworth, A Letter to the Right Hon. The Earl of Charlemont on the Tellograph (Dublin: n.p., and London: J. Johnson, 1797). Butler argues for Maria’s participation in the authorship of the pamphlet; see Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 120–22. 63  Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Letter on the Tellograph, 16, 41. 61

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The Art of Political Fiction in Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson near the ancient churches . . . were formerly used as granaries or magazines by the ancient inhabitants, and as places to which they retreated in time of danger. . . . All these things show that there was a real foundation for the stories which were told of the appearance of lights, and of the sounds of voices near these places. The persons who had property concealed there very willingly countenanced every wonderful relation that tended to make these places objects of sacred awe or superstitious terror. (C, 131)

Although this entry purports to clarify the stories which surround the fairymounts, it further complicates our understanding of the fairy-mounts and allows a glimpse of a secret historical reality. While the term “magazine” refers to a warehouse or storage place, by the mid-seventeenth century it also denoted a place where weapons and gunpowder were stored. Whether or not the caves in the fairy-mounts were used as arsenals, they were, by the Editor’s own admission, employed as hiding places in “time of danger.” In fact, the mention of “persons” who so cleverly exploit the native folklore illuminates the possibility that peasants such as Thady who warn a landlord against the vengeance of the fairies might actually be protecting the secret underground of the Irish. Edgeworth makes this connection explicit in Ennui when Mr. Devereux questions Glenthorn “about a curious cavern, or subterraneous way, near Glenthorn Castle, which stretched from the sea-shore to a considerable distance under the rock, and communicated with an old abbey near the castle: Mr Devereux said that such subterraneous places had been formerly used in Ireland as granaries by the ancient inhabitants; but a gentleman of the neighbourhood who was present observed, that the caverns on this coast had, within his memory, been used as hiding-places by smugglers” (E, 218). Mr. Devereux, in fact, closely echoes the Castle Rackrent Glossary description of these caves. Most revealing, however, is that the United Irish rebels of Ennui use the cave near Glenthorn Castle discussed above as their base of operation (it is here that the great coat mentioned previously is found and here that the rebels are captured). The seemingly innocuous Castle Rackrent note thus clearly speaks to the threat posed by the members of the Irish underground during the 1790s. The covert subterranean activities discussed in Ennui may be read in terms of the May 1794 move by the Dublin United Irishmen to restructure their organization underground in response to the government crackdown on radical activity in Ireland as the war with France continued. The reconstructed group, according to R.F. Foster, “involved a sans-culotte element,” influenced by Defenderism.64 These secret societies especially took hold in the rural part of Ireland and were 64  R.F. Foster, “Ascendancy and Union,” in The Oxford History of Ireland, ed. R.F. Foster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 152. In a letter from Richard Lovell Edgeworth to Erasmus Darwin (7 September 1794), he writes: “We were lately in a sad state here—the sans culottes (literally so) took a very effectual way of obtaining power; they robbed of arms all the houses in the country; thus arming themselves, and disarming their opponents. . . . An insurrection of such people, who have been much oppressed,

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instrumental in fomenting the rebellion. An anecdote which Edgeworth wrote to her cousin Sophy Ruxton in February 1796 literally connects the Irish Defenders to the underground. The letter describes a search party sent to find a “certain Defender” at a “lone house”: The soldiers searched the house, but no man was to be found. Mr. Pallas . . . was certain the man was there; they searched again, in vain. They gave up the point, and were preparing to mount their horses, when one man . . . beheld a man’s arm come out of the ground. He ran towards the spot and called his companions, but the arm had disappeared. . . . They went to the house, and there stood the man they were in search of, in the middle of the kitchen. Upon examination, it was found that a secret passage had been practiced from the kitchen to the garden. (L, 1:47)65

This somewhat fantastic story illuminates the double meaning of the term “underground” within Edgeworth’s politically charged world of Irish peasants and Anglo-Irish landholders. We can look to Edgeworth’s later Irish novel Ennui to better understand her use of dialect along with physical markers to differentiate between these two groups. Edgeworth in Ennui again employs dialect as a feature of difference (for instance, in the characters of Paddy the coachman and Ellinor), but she also emphasizes visual markers.66 When the protagonist Lord Glenthorn returns to his Irish estate at the request of his Irish foster mother Ellinor, he meets his foster brother Christy O’Donoghoe, an Irish blacksmith.67 In addition to Christy’s marked dialect must be infinitely more horrid, than any thing that has happened in France” (quoted in his Memoirs, 2:155–56). 65  When Edgeworth quotes from this same letter in her father’s Memoirs, she prefaces the passage with “How ingeniously cunning the lower Irish are in contriving concealments and modes of escape is well known in Ireland, to every one who has been out on any of these rebel or defender hunts” (2:210). 66  In the pages where she is introduced, Ellinor’s dialect is emphasized by her turn of phrase and Edgeworth’s use of italics: “Little better, plase your honour; but I was always so about them childer that I nursed” (E, 158). The recovering Glenthorn comments, “the novelty of her dialect, and of her turn of thought, entertained me as much as a sick man could be entertained” (E, 160). 67   For Edgeworth to cast Christy as a blacksmith in a novel that intersects with the rebellion of 1798 was to give him a politically charged profession. Because the Irish had relatively few firearms, their most widely used weapon was the pike—a long shaft or pole with a pointed metal tip, particularly effective against mounted cavalry. Hillsides denuded of trees (the source for the shafts) warned of the imminent rebellion, and blacksmiths were often implicated in the manufacture of the pike heads. Thus the blacksmith is a dangerous and transgressive figure at the end of the 18th century in Ireland. Packenham writes in The Year of Liberty that the “first men to be arrested were the blacksmiths. Government believed—and with justification as it turned out in many parts of the country—that most

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features, Edgeworth repeatedly refers to his blackness. Ellinor describes Christy to Glenthorn as he who “lives, and has lived all his days, upon potatoes and salt . . . he who has the face and the hands so disguised with the smoke and the black, that you yourself asked him t’other day did he ever wash his face since he was born” (E, 272). Glenthorn’s question to Christy clearly implies that Christy’s blackness is less a vocational side effect and more an inherent trait, one marking him “since he was born.” Later in the novel, when Ellinor reveals that she switched Glenthorn (her actual biological son) with the sickly infant lord (known now as Christy), Glenthorn attempts to return his title and land to the “rightful” heir. To this news, Christy “stood astonished; and, his eyes opening wide, showed a great circle of white in his black face” (E, 281). When Glenthorn imparts this revelation to his tenants, he reports that “my auditors looked alternately at me and at my fosterbrother, seeming to think it impossible that a man, with face and hands so black as Christy’s usually were known to be, could become an earl” (E, 289). The Irish auditors are incredulous because Glenthorn’s assertion belies the evidence of the body, and, for Edgeworth, blackness seems incompatible with aristocracy. In a sort of parallel plot with the intentions of the 1798 rebellion, the colonized laborer with the blackened face takes possession of the estate, and the Anglo-Irish gentleman is ousted from his position of power. Glenthorn (now Christy) reports Mrs. Delamere’s comment that he “acted very generously, to be sure, but that few in my place would have thought themselves bound to give up possession of an estate, which I had so long been taught to believe was my own. To have and to hold, she observed, always went together in law” (E, 302). Edgeworth here pointedly summarizes the condition of Anglo-Irish landholders at the end of the eighteenth century. The land was theirs only by law, but they had been conditioned to believe that their claim was inherently just and that any move to redress this situation could dangerously upset the balance of power. For Edgeworth, racialized identities in Ireland possessed a disconcerting fluidity, which she dramatizes in Ennui. When Glenthorn first hears from Ellinor of the switched infants, he finds it incredible that he is not Lord Glenthorn, and he asks her for proof. Ellinor tells him of a serious cut the infant lord received before he came to her: “but if it will make you asy, sure I can give you proof—sure need you go farther than the scar on his head? If he was shaved to-morrow, I’d engage you’d see it fast enough. . . . God save the mark” (E, 276). Glenthorn buys Christy a new wig and then has the opportunity to examine his shaved head. In addition to the multitude of scars Christy had garnered “at fairs, fighting with the boys of Shrawd-na-scoob,” Glenthorn discovers that the “situation, size, and figure of the cicatrice, which the surgeon and Ellinor had described to me, were so visible and exact, that no doubt could remain in my mind of Christy’s blacksmiths were forging pike heads.” They also thought the “blacksmiths could lead them to the heart of the conspiracy” (83). Edgeworth, in fact, has Christy assaulted by the militia and unjustly accused of aiding the insurgents (E, 245–46). In her narrative, Adams notes that a neighbor found his estate’s smith at the forge “openly at work making pikes” (158–59).

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being the real son of the late Lord and Lady Glenthorn” (E, 278). Of course, this contradictory scopic sign, the cicatrice, proves disconcerting because it reveals that the man with the blackened face has the blood of an earl. Butler notes that the Edgeworths “followed Locke in their almost devout belief in the formative influence of acquired over innate characteristics,” yet here that belief is subjected to temporary uncertainty because the “innate characteristics” cannot be read.68 The conflicted designation of Glenthorn’s foster brother as either rebel or earl captures the problem of marking the disaffected during the 1798 rebellion. After the rebellion, Edgeworth commented regarding her father: “[T]hough he had trusted much, he had not in many instances trusted rashly. In some few cases he was deceived.—Who in Ireland at that time can boast, that he was not? Some few, very few indeed, of his tenantry, on a remote estate—alas too near Ballynamuck, did join the rebels!”69 It is precisely this inability to know who the enemy is that seems to alarm Edgeworth; she craves a marker of difference, an establishment of otherness. Ellinor’s “God save the mark” thus highlights a desire for a manifest sign of a person’s place. Because a number of those in Edgeworth’s Anglo-Irish class shared her anxieties about the native Irish, one might expect to find other instances of linguistic blackface surfacing within her contemporary culture, and such is the case. Though early accounts of the rebellion were almost exclusively told from loyalist perspectives, several narratives purportedly written by penitent rebels appeared in print.70 The account with the greatest possibility of authenticity is the last speech of James Beaghan, entitled An Authentic Account of the Behavior, Conduct and Confession of James Beaghan (1799); this account, taken down by the High Sheriff, also contains the fewest marked dialect features. Though only a broadside, the document includes prefatory remarks, attesting to the veracity of the speech, as well as authenticating footnotes and Beaghan’s “mark”; their   Butler, Intro. to “Castle Rackrent” and “Ennui”, 47. As the novel progresses, Christy’s stint as Lord Glenthorn proves disastrous, culminating with the death of Christy’s only son and destruction of Glenthorn Castle in a fire. Edgeworth allows the former Glenthorn to return in the role of lord after earning a law degree and the respect and love of the new heir to the estate, Cecilia Delamere. 69  Maria Edgeworth, “The Account,” Protestant Women’s Narratives, 254. 70   Audiences were likely primed for such linguistic masquerades as evidenced through Charles Kendal Bushe’s The Union. Cease Your Funning. Or, The Rebel Detected (Dublin: James Moore, 1798), where Bushe argues about a recently published pamphlet entitled Arguments For and Against an Union Considered: “Thus I have satisfactorily proved, in this instance, that a concealed United Irishman has jesuitically assumed the style and character of a loyal Englishman . . . for the basest and worst of purposes” (7). Bushe’s argument went through a seventh edition in Dublin and London within the year and prompted a reply. Such a flurry of publications undoubtedly alerted readers to the potential of the narrator taking on an oppositional voice in a political treatise. Bushe’s discovery of a rebel mimicking an Englishman appears to be the exception in these narrative masquerades. Most often, as in Castle Rackrent, the English or Anglo-Irish author performs as Irish. 68

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function is not unlike the editorial appendices to Castle Rackrent—they control as they attest and explain. The speech’s use of absolutes raises questions about its sincerity: “Before the Rebellion, I never heard there was any hatred between Roman Catholics and Protestants,” and “I never heard one of the Rebels express the least sorrow for what was done . . . they were sorry that whilst they had the Power they did not kill more.”71 Beaghan’s last speech follows a fairly standard pattern of gallows speeches from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and Ireland outlined by James Kelly, in that it expresses the deep regret of the transgressor, disparages his former lifestyle (Beaghan accuses the “accursed” “Popish Priests” of being the “Cause of my Eternal Damnation”), and reaffirms the authority of the current governing body.72 Perhaps closer to the tone of Castle Rackrent’s dialect account is The Last Speech and Dying Words of Martin M’Loughlin (1798) mentioned earlier, which blames the French rather than the priests for M’Loughlin’s involvement in the rebellion. It also departs significantly from traditional dying speeches in its use of humor, though other comic dying speeches, such as the 1797 American The Last Confession and Dying Speech of Peter Porcupine, with an Account of His Dissection, a political lampoon on William Cobbett, suggest that the genre was codified enough to sustain parodies.73 M’Loughlin reports that “[p]oor Billy Rourke, who had taken a hearty glass on the road, and was a little top-heavy, happened to drop his musket in shouldering, and when he stoopped [sic] to pick it up, the black villain [a West Indian Negro sergeant] gave him a terrible blow with the flat of his sword.” M’Loughlin ends the story of an altercation between his friend Billy and a French sergeant describing how “a French officer stepped up, and shot Billy through the head. I then began to suspect that poor Billy was a little mistaken when he said ‘that the French were his best friends.’”74 The   James Beaghan, An Authentic Account of the Behavior, Conduct and Confession of James Beaghan. Who Was Executed on Vinegar Hill, on Saturday the 24th Day of August, 1799 (broadside, n.d., n.p.), Boston Public Library (1798 Collection, Broadside No. 48). Though most of the United Irish founders and officers were from the land-owning classes and many of them were well-educated Presbyterians and Protestants, portrayals of the insurgents tended to cast them as poor, uneducated, and Catholic Irish. 72  See James Kelly, Gallows Speeches from Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), 48–52; and Beaghan. 73   The Last Confession and Dying Speech of Peter Porcupine, with an Account of His Dissection (Philadelphia: William T. Palmer, 1797). 74   M’Loughlin, 8. Reprints of leaflets distributed by the French were undoubtedly the source for this critique of their “friendship”: “Irishmen, You have not forgot Bantry Bay—you know what efforts France has made to assist you. . . . They [the French] come to support your courage, to share your dangers, to join their arms, and to mix their blood with yours in the sacred cause of liberty” (quoted in [Sir Herbert Taylor], Impartial Relation of the Military Operations which Took Place in Ireland, in Consequence of the Landing of a Body of French Troops, under General Humbert, in August, 1798 [Dublin: J. Milliken, 1799], 45). See also a government leaflet from Dublin Castle printed in 1798 by George 71

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rhetoric of M’Louglin’s narrative with its comic understatement is, in fact, quite like the rhetoric of Thady in Castle Rackrent, most clearly in his discussion of Sir Murtagh’s experiences with the Banshee and the fairy-mount, discussed earlier. In both instances the tragedy of death is undercut by the humorous cleverness of the telling. M’Loughlin’s conclusion reprises the more standard form of last speeches as he repents in the final lines: “But, alas! what a fate is mine!—I was happy and contented—I wanted for nothing—I had a wife that I loved, and children that I doated on—and yet the devil tempted me in the shape of avarice and ambition! I became a thief and a rebel . . . I shall suffer death to-morrow, as a small atonement for my guilt; and I hope God will have mercy on my poor soul.”75 Though now lost to us by the passage of time, familiarity with English and loyalist appropriation of the Irish voice for political purposes was widespread among Edgeworth’s contemporaries. James Alexander’s Some Account of the First Apparent Symptoms of the Late Rebellion in the County of Kildare (1800) includes an appendix entitled “A Curious Letter, Supposed to Be Written by a Penitent Rebel.” Alexander’s title indicates the general suspicion surrounding the authenticity of these narratives by rebel soldiers. The Advertisement to the piece then frankly admits, “It was written by a gentleman of Uniform loyalty,* under the character of a penitent rebel peasant. The sentiments contained in this whimsical, but keenly-pointed production, may serve to amuse even those loyalists who cannot wholly subscribe to them.” The asterisk identifies Alexander himself as the author. Alexander’s masking dialect is so marked as to be difficult to read, and the style evinces buffoonish humor throughout: “There is three ways for making of rubbles, and I will tell you four or five out of the tree, for the good of the guntree,” but, like the blackface minstrel in the role of the fool, Alexander offers a fairly scathing critique of the burning of Irish houses by the government and the practice’s certainty of creating more rebels: “Aff you wood make three or four duzzen rubbles out of won (growing duzzens I mane) visit the shins of the fathers ‘pon the childher and famly: burn his howis, my dear! . . . Then you know, fwin he cums hoam and finds the deer wife of his hart, and the childher of his gizzard and sowl . . . under the blazing sun [or] the cowld, blowing, rainy, freezing shky—fwhat so you think he vwill do? . . . By my sowle he wood be for thinking of revinge!”76 Thus the genre of the last speech and the codified rhetoric of the “Penitent Rebel,” usually propaganda tools employed to reassert the authority of the ruling class, can partially subvert that authority. Alexander’s foolish rebel, whose dialect is much less intelligible than Thady’s, becomes a voice of reason amidst the many narratives of the rebellion.

Grierson, Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, which proclaims: “DELUDED UNITED IRISHMEN!!! You have been driven by your deceivers to the verge of destruction. . . . Where are now the boasted promises of the men who misled you?” 75  M’Loughlin, 15–16. 76   Alexander, 129, 134–35.

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I would argue that these publications all, and particularly the final one, perform linguistic blackface similar to Edgeworth’s. Like blackface minstrelsy, they simultaneously attempt to contain the power of the muted group and allow glimpses of that group’s suppressed power. Most certainly, these publications are politically charged, and Castle Rackrent should be understood as a narrative with like energy. Despite the Editor’s claims, Maria Edgeworth has constructed a highly complex and negotiable history that emerges from the tension between Thady’s narrative and the editorial Preface, notes, and Glossary. Situated within its immediate sociohistorical context, Castle Rackrent reveals the curious attraction and repulsion, desire and fear that characterize the relation between the colonizer and the colonized. Ultimately, her narrative technique in this work might accurately be described, as Lott describes blackface minstrelsy, as “less a sign of absolute white power and control, than of panic, anxiety, terror and pleasure.”77 My reading of Thady’s narrative in relation to the glosses unmasks his stage persona of the “foolishly loyal” servant to reveal him as a destabilizing force in the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. The great danger of such a character lies in the fact that he indeed has “little to lose and much to gain” in pitting his wits against those of the landowners. Thus the novel, read in this historical context, reveals the unsettled tensions of the insurgency. And, as the Editor prophetically remarks in a footnote on the Irish and their vows, “Sometimes they swear they will be revenged on some of their neighbours; this is an oath that they are never known to break” (C, 90). Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent negotiates the complicated terrain of postrebellion Ireland. As will be seen in the examination of Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl, both authors address the possibility of insurgency from the margins of their texts; however, the anxiety regarding rebellious potential in Edgeworth becomes a more glorified possibility for asserting Irish nationalism in Owenson’s early novel. The final chapter of this book treats Owenson’s The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys, the third of the Irish novels engaged with the 1798 rebellion; however, as an examination of the novel’s glosses reveals, by 1827, Owenson’s enthusiasm for violent political action had shifted noticeably.

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 Lott, 6.

Chapter 3

Edgeworth’s Belinda: An Artful Composition

Very early in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801; rev. 1802, 1810), in a chapter entitled “Masks,” the novel’s hero, Clarence Hervey, having been accused of courting Belinda, exclaims, “Do you think I don’t see as plainly as any of you, that Belinda Portman’s a composition of art and affectation?” (B, 26). What Clarence fails to see is that Belinda herself stands within his conversational circle dressed as the tragic muse, and his failure ironically supports his claim. Clarence’s blunder so wounds Belinda that she repeats the insult to herself ruefully at the end of the same chapter. This chapter intertitle, “Masks,” acts as a framing gloss for the repeated statement about “art and affectation,” for affectation can be considered a mask of sorts, a form of display which depends upon being seen, but not seen through. Belinda is a novel about character (in the double sense which Edgeworth employs—literary and moral) and about attempting to discern a person’s true character. Both Belinda and Belinda are indeed artful compositions, adept at masquerade, and they require a discerning eye to identify and appreciate them. Belinda in particular adopts a range of narrative modes foreign to the traditional novel and displays the generic playfulness and burgeoning talent of its young author. Examining the art of Belinda, specifically the intertitles and the portraits   Citations from Belinda will be to the 1994 Oxford World Classics edition, edited and introduced by Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick, which reprints the second edition of the 1802 text. Hereafter abbreviated B and cited parenthetically by page number. For discussions on the substantial revisions between the 1801 and 1810 editions, see Kirkpatrick’s “Note on the Text” in Belinda, by Maria Edgeworth (1802; repr., Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s introduction to Belinda, by Maria Edgeworth, ed. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (1801; repr., London: Everyman, 1993), and Marilyn Butler’s appendix, “The Post-Publication History of Belinda and Patronage,” in her Maria Edgeworth.    Patricia Comitini, in her discussion of Belinda, argues that the “shifting genres [of the novel] position the reader within different discourses, teaching the reader how to extricate herself from the emotive responses to each genre” (124). Comitini sees Belinda as the character who reads “correctly” and who will direct the readers who identify with her to the truth that the “domestic sphere portrayed” in Belinda is “desirable as well as ‘natural’” (116). While I see the reader’s negotiation of the various glosses of the novel as serving a similar function, as will be seen, my interpretation of the novel’s lesson is less conservative than Comitini’s. See her Vocational Philanthropy and British Women’s Writing, 1790–1810. (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2005).

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of Virginia St. Pierre and Lady Anne Percival with children, reveals Edgeworth’s self-conscious attention to the generic form of the novel and her concern about the role of women in late eighteenth-century Britain. Through its glosses, the novel addresses the issue of interpreting feminine possibilities and challenges its readers to discover the role of gender identity in national progress. In Belinda, Edgeworth relies heavily upon theatrical metaphor, including the masquerade with tragic and comic muses (Lady Delacour plays the latter), repeated descriptions of Lady Delacour as an actress performing a part, and a problematic, staged ending which shifts the prose narrative to drama. While Belinda contains only a handful of brief footnotes and a slender authorial Advertisement, it still conveys the multivocal quality which pervades Letters of a Hindoo Rajah and Castle Rackrent. Edgeworth manages this through a series of embedded narratives, including “Lady Delacour’s History,” “The same continued,” and Clarence Hervey’s “packet,” which occupies a full two chapters (“Virginia” and “A Discovery”) but is narrated in the third person “to save our hero from the charge of egotism” (B, 329). The novel also employs the epistolary mode unobtrusively, with the character of Belinda’s Aunt Stanhope, the “catch-match maker,” being known only through her amusing instructive letters to her niece. In addition to these conventional narrative techniques are several media shifts which allow for the presence of other less familiar narratives. Unlike the literal glosses of Letters of a Hindoo Rajah and Castle Rackrent, the glosses in Belinda rupture the central narrative not by their typographical form but by their move from the verbal to the iconic. The discussion in this chapter will focus upon three principal iconic glosses, the Virginia St. Pierre portrait, the Lady Anne Percival and children portrait, and the staged tableau of the major characters that ends the novel. The narrator or her fictional counterpart, Lady Delacour, frequently comments on genre and critiques narration. When Belinda responds reassuringly to Mr. Vincent regarding the false charges that she loves Clarence Hervey sent to   Terry Castle, in her Masquerade and Civilization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), gives only passing notice to Belinda as one of the latest eighteenth-century novels to include an extended masquerade scene; however, her comment on the general treatment of the masquerade in fiction is applicable here: “All the contradictions surrounding the masquerade in eighteenth-century culture, where it was seen as both delightful and pernicious, are replicated in contemporary fiction. Indeed, the intense cultural ambivalence regarding the carnivalesque is displayed perhaps more prominently here than anywhere else” (115). I believe this is the same type of ambivalence generated by Lady Delacour’s “acting” as well as the Virginia St. Pierre portrait.    Belinda is replete with cultural glosses. Jeffrey Cass, in his “Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: Satan’s First Address to Eve as a Source for Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” explores an allusion to Clarence’s costume, “perform[ing] the part of the serpent, such as he is seen in Fuseli’s well known picture” (B, 23) and finds that “[c]ontextualizing Edgeworth’s obscure reference to Fuseli’s ‘well known picture’ provides clues to the symbolic import of the miscues and misdirections of Hervey and Lady Delacour, as well as the final triumph of Belinda’s complacent gentility over Hervey’s imposing charm” (ANQ 14, no. 2 (2001): 15). 

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Mr. Vincent in an anonymous letter, the narrative voice intervenes where Mr. Vincent might be expected to reply: “Vincent’s answer must be supposed: the enraptured acknowledgments of a lover are scarcely interesting upon the stage, where action and the theatre support the sympathy of the audience. Narration feebly supports enthusiasm, without these advantages” (B, 334–5). This interplay of genre and audience remains foregrounded throughout the novel. In a role similar to Velazquez’s in Las Meninas, Lady Delacour functions as an arbiter of literary taste. Heather MacFadyen suggests that Lady Delacour is made to suspect that she functions within a novel, making self-reflexive remarks on the art of the story-teller and far more literary allusions than any other character. As the narrator describes the variations of Lady Delacour’s personality “[a]broad, and at home,” Edgeworth adds in a tongue-in-cheek manner that she was “exhausted by the exertions of supporting a fictitious character” (B, 10–11). Before Lady Delacour launches into the narrative of her life story, she cautions Belinda, “My dear, you will be woefully disappointed, if in my story you expect anything like a novel. I once heard a general say, that nothing was less like a review than a battle; and I can tell you, that nothing is more unlike a novel than real life” (B, 35–6). In spite of her claims that her relation will be nothing like a novel, she begins the following chapter that continues her life history, “I left off with the true skill of a good storyteller, at the most interesting part—a duel” (B, 52). Just as she is conscious of literary manufacture within her own story, she quickly critiques the narratives of other characters. When Belinda attempts to relate a conversation she had with Clarence (and this will be discussed in greater detail later in the chapter), Lady Delacour chastises Belinda for wasting time discussing people not “essential” to the story: “Bad policy! Never whilst you live, when you have a story to tell, bring in a parcel of people who have nothing to do with the beginning, the middle, or the end of it” (B, 195). Later in the novel, Lady Delacour harangues her maid Marriott in a similar fashion when Marriott’s narrative detours: “Then, for mercy’s sake, or mine, . . . go on to something that is worth mentioning” (B, 325). The explicit attention to the constructedness of the narrative thus focuses our attention on Edgeworth’s employment of cultural glosses that themselves merit close reading. Because Lady Delacour emphasizes a narrative “policy” of never bringing a “parcel of people” into a story unless they are “essential,” then, as readers, we should return to those characters—in this case, Lady Percival and her children—to understand what work they do for Edgeworth in her narrative. The use of the two portraits and the final tableau in Belinda allows Edgeworth to skillfully juxtapose an external reality with her fiction, reproducing Edgeworth’s self-conscious flaunting of the novelistic conventions and directing the reader’s attention to the problem of constructing women characters that can both amuse and instruct within nineteenth-century life and art. In his study of the presence of portraits, especially miniatures, in eighteenth-century French fiction, Malcolm   Heather MacFadyen, “Lady Delacour’s Library: Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda and Fashionable Reading,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 48 (1994): 425.

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Cook argues that the characters in those texts are “trying to understand the nature of imitation.” While the portraiture simultaneously enhances the “‘real’ status” of the characters for the reader, the layers of representation suggested by the portrait within the novel also highlight the artists’ struggles to define the “representational power of fiction”. Because Belinda is a novel about character in the double sense, Edgeworth wishes to impress upon the reader the difficulty of establishing both. In fact, as Belinda’s characters critique the visual representations and assign generic labels—fancy piece, history piece, family history piece, portrait—they engage in the project of constructing narratives dependent on context. The portraits yield new sets of messages as new discourse situations are generated, both within the novel and within the context of eighteenth-century conventions for painting. In this sense they possess what Barthes has called the “polysemic” character of the photographic image, that is, a “floating chain of significance, underlying the signifier.” The gloss of the portrait with its mutable generic status echoes the Advertisement to Belinda, and like the Virginia portrait, the shift in designation indicates a shift in the way the subject is read, a shift in the reader’s expectations, and in the moral evaluation of the text or subject. Like Belinda itself, and the Thomas Day story masked as fiction, the portraits defy easy categorization and even flaunt the novel’s generic playfulness, revealing the potentially disruptive politics of the Virginia character and the constraints of the idealized Percival marriage. Consistently classified as a novel of manners or courtship novel, Belinda is frequently compared to novels by Fanny Burney and Jane Austen10 (Edgeworth    Cook, Malcolm. “Portraits in Eighteenth-Century French Fiction.” Australian Journal of French Studies 35 no. 2 (1998): 143.   Ibid., 144, 152.    Quoted in Allan Sekula, Photography against the Grain (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984), 7. As Sekula points out, “[t]he photograph, as it stands alone, presents merely the possibility of meaning. Only by its embeddedness in a concrete discourse situation can the photograph yield a clear semantic outcome. Any given photograph is conceivably open to appropriation by a range of ‘texts,’ each new discourse situation generating its own set of messages” (7).    The Thomas Day story, upon which the Virginia St. Pierre story draws, receives a footnote in Fraser’s Magazine (November 1832) almost as long as the treatment of Belinda in the review, which indicates that there was still popular interest in Day’s decision to raise two orphan girls, christened Sabrina and Lucretia, in Avignon according to the principles of Rousseau. The idea was that Day would “educate” the girls free from the polluting influences of society, forming them as ideal companions. Lucretia was dismissed while Day still lived in France, but he returned to England with the “natural” and engaging Sabrina, age thirteen. Ultimately, Day found women of more cultivated and worldly understanding, such as Honora Sneyd, to be more interesting than his young ward, and the experiment ended in failure (quoted in Belinda, ed. Ní Chuilleanáin, 464–7). 10  However, Julie Shaffer argues that “Belinda’s perceptiveness about marital relationships,” along with Clarence Hervey’s failure in educating a proper wife for himself,

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praises Miss Burney in the Advertisement and Austen later compliments Edgeworth in Northanger Abbey) and lauded for attempting to tackle broader social issues, while at the same time, and for the same reason, criticized as stylistically inferior. An 1832 reviewer of Edgeworth’s collected tales and novels in Fraser’s Magazine found that Edgeworth “anticipated” the central criticism of Belinda in noting that her “attempt to join truth and fiction did not succeed.”11 The reviewer concentrates on Edgeworth’s incorporation of the “real life” story of Thomas Day’s experiment with Sabrina Sydney in the guise of the Clarence Hervey-Virginia story, finding that with the introduction of such an uncommon event into fiction, the reader stops to question the truth or probability of the narrative— the illusion and the dramatic effect are destroyed; and as to the moral, no safe conclusion for conduct can be drawn from any circumstances which have not frequently happened, and which are not likely often to recur . . . In short, it is dangerous to put a patch of truth into fiction, for the truth is too strong for the fiction, and on all sides pulls it asunder.12 This particular criticism of the dangers of conflating truth and fiction within the female novel had notable precursors. In a discussion of responses to Mme de Lafayette’s seventeenth-century La Princesse de Clèves, Nancy Miller quotes Bussy-Rabutin’s comment on the novel: “Mme de Clèves’s confession to her husband . . . is extravagant, and can only happen [se dire] in a true story; but when one is inventing a story for its own sake [à plaisir] it is ridiculous to ascribe such extraordinary feelings to one’s heroine. The author in so doing was more concerned about not resembling other novels than obeying common sense.” Miller argues that even by the seventeenth century, clear expectations had been established concerning the relation of historical reality and literary fiction: “art should not imitate life but reinscribe received ideas about the representation of life in art” or “risk exclusion from the canon.”13 The fact that the Fraser’s reviewer echoes the complaint of Bussy-Rabutin indicates that well into the nineteenth century readers were resistant to this “dangerous” patching of truth into fiction, especially through experimental means. Even in the twentieth century, Edgeworth’s work, particularly Belinda, continues to be criticized for the mixture of genres it displays. Eva Figes asserts “burlesques the usual form of the lover-mentor convention to suggest that rather than being subordinate to and dependent upon men, desirable women—truly desirable women—know more about some elements of life than men do” (“Not Subordinate: Empowering Women in the Marriage-Plot—The Novels of Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen,” Criticism 34 [Winter 1992]: 63). 11   Quoted in Ní Chuilleanáin, 465. 12   Quoted in Ní Chuilleanáin, 465–66. 13  Nancy K. Miller, “Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women’s Fiction,” PMLA 26 (1981): 36.

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that Belinda “is arguably the most flawed novel [Edgeworth] wrote” because it marked a turning point where Edgeworth’s “natural genius was certainly tamed to serve a moral purpose.”14 While Figes blames the Edgeworth family and “social influences” for distorting Edgeworth’s talents, in part the generic confusion is rooted in the claims of Edgeworth’s Advertisement, which reads, “The following work is offered to the public as a Moral Tale—the author not wishing to acknowledge a novel . . . so much folly, error, and vice are disseminated in books classed under this denomination, that it is hoped the wish to assume another title will be attributed to feelings that are laudable, and not fastidious.”15 Instead of taking Edgeworth’s claim here at face value (after all, three volumes are rather long for a “tale” of any sort), I suggest that we understand the gloss of the Advertisement as an example of the generic irony that marks Belinda. As Miller has astutely pointed out, “the plots of women’s literature are not about ‘life,’” but about “the plots of literature itself, about the constraints the maxim [of plausibility] places on rendering a female life in fiction.”16 Undoubtedly, there is some anxiety on Edgeworth’s part that her novel will be classed among those books which disseminate “folly, error, and vice,” but the very boldness of dubbing a lengthy three-volume work a “Moral Tale” informs the reader that the author intends to manipulate traditional literary “denominations.” The glosses in Belinda allow Edgeworth to bring a number of “truths” into the novel, but rather than “pull[ing] it asunder,” the glosses show the craft of and lend coherence to a work which has been unfairly judged uneven and flawed. The plot of Belinda is somewhat complicated, but let me offer a brief summary here so that the reader may have fresh in mind a context for the discussion to follow regarding media shifts within the novel. Belinda Portman, the title character, is the seventh niece of Mrs. Stanhope, a woman skilled in commodifying her nieces’ various talents and virtues and conveying them to the highest bidder. Mrs. Stanhope contrives to have Belinda placed in London for the season at the home of the fashionable Lady Delacour. Belinda soon discovers that Lady Delacour’s renowned wit and gaiety are staged for the benefit of her admirers and enemies alike and that Lady Delacour is suffering from what she believes to be breast cancer, due to a wound suffered when her “rantipole” friend Harriet Freke encouraged her to fight a duel against the “odious Mrs. Luttridge.” The Delacour marriage thrives on verbal antagonism and unchecked extravagance, which has led husband and wife to the brink of financial ruin. Belinda and Clarence Hervey, Lady Delacour’s leading admirer, develop a mutual attraction but are prevented from declaring affection for one another by Belinda’s famed “prudence” and Clarence’s responsibility to Virginia St. Pierre, the young ward he is attempting to raise according to Rousseau’s ideas on education. Lord Delacour’s nasty valet, Champfort, circulates rumors that Belinda, who has been promoting domestic  Eva Figes, introduction to Belinda, by Maria Edgeworth (London: Pandora, 1986), x.  Edgeworth, Belinda (1801), ed. Ní Chuilleanáin, n.p. 16  Miller, 46. 14 15

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reconciliation in the Delacour household (including the return of their abandoned daughter Helena), wishes to be the next Lady Delacour, which results in a falling out between the young heroine and the Lady. Belinda retreats to the domestic bliss of the Percival family at Oakly-park where candor, education, mutual respect and affection govern personal interaction. The Percivals present their ward Mr. Vincent, from the West Indies, as a prudent alternative for Belinda’s affections. Just as the Percivals have convinced Belinda that pining for “first loves” leads to unhappiness and Belinda has begun to accept Mr. Vincent’s attentions, Lady Delacour, now quite ill, sends for Belinda. Belinda finally convinces Lady Delacour to explain her illness to her husband and to consult the wise Dr. X instead of the quack who has been treating her. Dr. X determines that Lady Delacour need not undergo the “Amazonian” operation because her breast is not cancerous, but only injured by the treatments of the quack. As Lady Delacour’s health returns, Belinda finds that Clarence is indeed responsible for Virginia, whom he agrees to marry because he believes she expects him to; Virginia is actually in love with a painting of a naval officer, whom she envisions as the hero in all of the romances she reads. Belinda determines to accept Mr. Vincent’s proposal, although the marriage plans are aborted when Belinda discovers him to be a gambler. The contrite Mr. Vincent leaves for Germany where Lady Delacour imagines he will find “some heroine in the Kotzebue taste” (B, 451), and Virginia, exposed to a portrait of the naval officer about whom she had fantasized by Lady Delacour, confesses that she feels romantic love for this image, whereas she has only filial love for Clarence. Clarence has, in fact, discovered Virginia’s real father, and Lady Delacour manages to present Captain Sunderland, the “original” of the image of the naval officer. This frees Clarence to declare his passion for Belinda, attentions she seemingly accepts. The novel ends with Lady Delacour arranging all of the principal characters into proper stage “attitudes” (B, 478). Edgeworth’s intended playfulness with the conventions of fiction begins with her opening chapter title or intertitle, “Characters.” This title purposefully echoes Edgeworth’s “Original Sketch of Belinda,” which begins “Characters” and proceeds to describe the major characters of the novel with a brief plot summary.17 This extratextual reference conflates the genres of novel and drama and reflects Edgeworth’s own process of composition; on the first page, she writes of Belinda, “Her character, however, was yet to be developed by circumstances” (B, 7). She thus puns with the term “character,” which refers to Belinda’s moral character and Belinda as literary character, who must be developed by circumstances created by the author. The prospects of Belinda the character are thus linked with Belinda the novel as both attempt to make their debut in society. Mrs. Stanhope, who is said to have “advertised” Belinda as well as “Packwood’s razor strops,” gives Belinda the following advice on successful commodification, which we might also read as advice to the young novel writer: 17   This sketch of Belinda was published by Mrs. Frances Edgeworth in A Memoir of Maria Edgeworth (1867) and is reprinted in the Everyman Belinda, ed. Ní Chuilleanáin.

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I used to see multitudes of silly girls, seemingly all cut out upon the same pattern, who frequented public places day after day, and year after year, without any idea further than that of diverting themselves, or of obtaining transient admiration . . . I have often asked myself, what is to become of such girls when they grow old or ugly, or when the public eye grows tired of them? (B, 8)

Obviously, the charms of Belinda/Belinda are intended to obtain more than “transient admiration” and are formed from a different “pattern” than that dictated by novelistic convention. Perhaps the novel is more successful than its title character for even Edgeworth commented in a letter to her cousin Miss Ruxton (Dec. 1809), “I was obliged to go from Inchbald’s Simple Story to correct ‘Belinda’ for Mrs. Barbauld, who is going to insert it in her collection of novels, with a preface; and I really was so provoked with the cold tameness of that stick or stone Belinda, that I could have torn the pages to pieces; and really, I have not the heart or the patience to correct her” (L, 1: 178). Though Edgeworth here denigrates Belinda, the character in her novel who most closely approximates Inchbald’s heroine Miss Milner and who met with the greatest critical success is the witty Lady Delacour. The Monthly Review (April 1802) noted, “The character of the heroine herself creates so little interest, that she appears to have usurped the superior right of Lady Delacour to give the title to the work: for it is to the character and agency of the latter, in our opinion, that the tale owes its principal attractions.”18 The reviewer then quotes at length from the novel the episode of the female duel told by and featuring Lady Delacour. Despite such praise, critics, both Edgeworth’s contemporaries and modern ones, have balked at the morality imposed upon Lady Delacour in the secondhalf of the novel. The Monthly Review found that “Lady Delacour reformed, (however favourable to the moral effect of the work this reformation may be), and unexpectedly rescued from bodily pain, is a comparatively flat and vapid creature.”19 Walter Allen in The English Novel (1954) calls Lady Delacour “one of the great achievements in English fiction,” but laments that “Miss Edgeworth’s Belinda gets to work on her, and though her brilliance is never wholly dimmed she ends as the incarnation of the domestic virtues.” Butler comments that in the “first half” of the novel (the part before Lady Delacour’s reformation), Edgeworth “pioneered some of the most successful features of Jane Austen’s novels.” And Kowaleski-Wallace finds that Edgeworth “privileg[es] (inadvertently, perhaps) Lady Delacour’s narrative,” because Lady Delacour is the character who “grows” in the novel. By contrast, Kowaleski-Wallace cites the “complacency” of Belinda as “one of the novel’s major flaws,” “for such complacency leaves little room for tension.”20  Review of Belinda (1801), Monthly Review (April 1802), 368.  Review of Belinda, 368–9. 20  Walter Allen, The English Novel (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1954), 113; Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 327; Kowaleski-Wallace, 110, 109. 18

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Although reviewers lamented Lady Delacour’s reform and generally found Belinda “insipid,” the novel had already gone into a second edition by 1802, and as noted above, was included in Mrs. Barbauld’s “British Novelists” series. Certainly, a large part of Belinda’s success is due to the performance of Lady Delacour, but I wish to argue that whatever tension that may be lacking in the presentation of Belinda can be found in the novel’s central media shifts. Though the Virginia St. Pierre story has often been overlooked or dismissed as an unfitting section of Belinda21, more recent criticism concerned with miscegenation, colonialism and the commodification of women has revealed the extent to which the Virginia plot is well-integrated with the rest of the novel.22 As those familiar with the novel know, Clarence discovered Virginia living in a secluded cabin with her grandmother in the New Forest. When Clarence happens upon their cottage one day and sees the beautiful young girl, he is “struck with the idea that she resembled the description of Virginia in M. de St Pierre’s celebrated Romance” (B, 370). In his first encounter with her, Virginia, then Rachel, “with a sweet innocent smile” holds up a basket of roses to Clarence and “offer[s] him one of the roses” (B, 364). The grandmother cries out to object and sends Rachel into the cabin. Not trusting Clarence’s motives, the old woman, on her deathbed, bids him to see Virginia no more. However, after the grandmother’s death Clarence convinces Virginia’s new guardian that he and Mrs. Ormond, a respectable matron, should raise the girl, to which the woman acquiesces. Clarence keeps Virginia secluded from all society, attempting to raise her according to Rousseau’s philosophies of child-rearing, and the above story is revealed only in the third volume of the novel. Previous to Clarence’s revelation, hints and rumors of Virginia’s existence circulate, which, in contrast to her innocence, cast her as Clarence’s mistress. Sir Philip Baddely introduces the first story of Clarence’s mistress and in later attempting to divine its worth, Lady Delacour reasons thusly to Belinda, “After all, my dear, the whole may be a quizzification of sir Philip’s—and yet he gave me such a minute description of her person!—I am sure the man has not invention or taste enough to produce such a fancy piece” (B, 149). In choosing to compare Sir Philip’s story to a “fancy piece,” Lady Delacour employs terminology used to describe a certain genre of painting (from the imagination) usually opposed to the more realistic portraiture. Edgeworth here fuses the verbal and the visual. The term “fancy piece” functions as the more 21

  Kowaleski-Wallace refers to the Virginia story as the “third plot,” “based on the life experiment of the eccentric Thomas Day” (109); James Newcomer, in Maria Edgeworth, calls the Virginia story “balderdash” and claims that it “blights the whole of the novel” (72). 22   See Susan Greenfield, “‘Abroad and at Home’: Sexual Ambiguity, Miscegenation, and Colonial Boundaries in Edgeworth’s Belinda,” PMLA 112 (1997): 214–28; Andrew McCann, “Conjugal Love and the Enlightenment Subject: The Colonial Contest of NonIdentity in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” Novel: A Forum in Fiction 30, no. 1 (1996): 56– 77; and Julia Douthwaite, “Experimental Child-Rearing after Rousseau: Maria Edgeworth, Practical Education, and Belinda,” Irish Journal of Feminist Studies 2 (1997): 35–56.

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familiar sketch and portrait in the ekphrastic sense of a verbal representation of a visual representation. The painted fancy piece developed in the eighteenth century as a more “democratic” form of painting than portraiture and included “anonymous children, pretty street vendors, domestic servants, musicians and courtesans.”23 One type of this genre featured young women with baskets full of their wares and their “offering” was fantasized as a commodification of themselves. According to Martin Postle, “[E]ven at the more refined level of the fancy picture, the impression that these women are engaged in ‘cunning’ dialogue is quite evident. Both Zoffany’s The Flower Girl (engraved 1785, but probably painted earlier) and its pendant or companion piece, The Watercress Girl (1780), display the “pouting open lips” which Postle sees as a “crucial aspect of [their] intended allure” (Figure 3.1).24 Further, “Mercier’s oyster sellers and Morland’s laundry maids were conceived as figures of male fantasy and objects of covert desire, a point which emerges more clearly in France where the images were termed ‘figures de fantaisie.’”25 This desire becomes more overt in the engraving of Mercier’s Oyster Girl (c. 1750–55), Richard Houston’s The Fair Oysterinda (c. 1756), where part of the accompanying verse reads, “Who would not wish to taste her Ware?” and in Francesco Bartolozzi’s Shrimps! (1782), an engraving of Hogarth’s The Shrimp Girl (after 1740), where Bartolozzi “carefully crafted [the] addition of an exposed nipple” (Figure 3.2).26 It is important to note that Edgeworth’s Virginia and her grandmother tended bees and made rose water to sell (B, 368), and Clarence twice contemplates the “charming image of Virginia, as it first struck his fancy; the smile, the innocent affectionate smile, with which she offered him the finest rose in her basket” (B, 399, emphasis mine), aligning her with these female figures of desire. The scene itself generates additional erotic tension because Rachel/Virginia’s grandmother is immediately wary of the threat that Clarence poses to Virginia’s innocence. When the grandmother yells at Virginia to go inside in a “loud and severe tone,” “both Rachel and Mr Hervey started; the basket was overturned, and the roses scattered upon the grass” (B, 364). With the overturned basket, Edgeworth presents a metaphorical deflowering of Virginia, and increases Clarence’s desire; for as soon “as it was in his power, he returned . . . to the spot, which appeared to him a terrestrial paradise” (B, 364). Clearly, Clarence’s decision to have Rachel/Virginia painted as St. Pierre’s Virginia engages in a projection of his own desire. In the chapter entitled “The Exhibition,” Clarence’s private fantasy goes on public display. In the eighteenth century there was a certain “elision between portraiture and genre or fancy painting,” especially in paintings of women 23  Martin Postle, Angels & Urchins: The Fancy Picture in 18th-Century British Art (London: Djanogly Art Gallery and Lund Humphries, 1998), 5. 24  Ibid., 18. 25  Ibid., 7–8. 26  Ibid., 79.

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The Watercress Girl (1780), by John Raphael Smith after Johan Zoffany.

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Fig. 3.2

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Shrimps! (1782), by Francesco Bartolozzi after William Hogarth.

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and children.27 The descriptions of Virginia St. Pierre and her portrait in Belinda draw upon this intermingling of truth and artifice, and, most importantly, upon the confusion of genre the portrait suggests. When the characters of the novel first encounter the portrait in the Somerset-house exhibition hall, the following discussion ensues:



‘Oh, damme! ‘tis not amongst the history pieces,’ cried sir Philip; ‘’Tis a portrait.’ ‘And a history piece, too, ‘pon honour?’ said Rochfort, ‘a family history piece, I take it, ‘pon honour! it will turn out . . .’ (B, 190) ... ‘But this seems to be a foreign beauty,’ continued lady Delacour, ‘if one may judge by her air, her dress, and the scenery about her—cocoa-trees, plantains— miss Portman, what think you?’ ‘I think,’ said Belinda (but her voice faltered so much that she could hardly speak), ‘that it is a scene from Paul and Virginia. I think the figure is St Pierre’s Virginia.’ (B, 190)

These different generic classifications for the painting—the history piece, the portrait, the family history piece, and the genre painting—by their contemporary nature indicate the type of information they are able to give the reader and also denote the real or fictional status of the subject. While Rochfort puns on Virginia’s relationship to Clarence by calling the portrait a “family history piece,” he also blurs the boundary between private and public histories. As Marcia Pointon notes, “all portraiture is public”.28 Ironically, though Clarence keeps Virginia sequestered from society, he displays her portrait publicly, leaving the question of her history open to the interpretation of those who gaze at her image.29 Although Sir Philip whispers to Lady Delacour that the painting is a “devilish good likeness” and a “portrait” of Clarence’s mistress, when Clarence arrives at the gallery, he proclaims the picture to be “A heavenly countenance indeed!—the painter has done justice to the poet” (B, 192). Clarence, by deeming the painting a fancy piece (as does Belinda), denies the existence of a “real” person who might have a history beyond that offered by M. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, one that implicates him in any way. Later in the novel Clarence alters his assessment of the painting because the genre of the Virginia portrait becomes crucial when Mr. Hartley, Virginia’s 27  Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 181. 28  Ibid., 164. 29   Greenfield exposes further the hypocrisy of Clarence’s decision to “advertise” Virginia through the exhibition of her portrait. He hopes to locate her father and establish her as an heiress, thus increasing her “marketability” with new suitors. The full irony of Clarence’s plan is apparent when one recalls his early statement that Belinda was “as well advertised, as Packwood’s razor strops” (Greenfield, 222).

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biological father, desires information about his lost daughter. Hartley asks Dr. X to compare a childhood miniature of his daughter to the portrait, and Dr. X marks some resemblance but assumes the painting is a “fancy piece.” To which Mr. Hartley responds, “A fancy piece! . . . Why then did you bring me here? A fancy piece!” (B, 406). And Clarence answers, “No, sir; it is a portrait . . . and if you will be calm, I will tell you more” (B, 406). Eager to find Virginia’s father, Clarence alters her status in the painting from imaginary to real. The portrait in this case acts also as a key family history piece because it restores the father to the abandoned daughter via comparison with another representation, the painted miniature. The generic fluidity of the Virginia St. Pierre portrait has narrative implications, for genre establishes the credibility of the painting’s story and limits the truth it can reveal. Because Clarence has Virginia painted in a fancy piece, “during the time of his passion for her” (B, 391), he problematizes her status as a real character—she is represented as a character from another fictional piece—and emphasizes the extent to which young women are objects for manipulation. This complication calls attention to Edgeworth’s self-conscious shifting of the boundaries between the actual and imaginary sources of representation. In response to Clarence’s claim that the painting portrays St. Pierre’s Virginia, Lady Delacour exclaims, “O, I know who it is, Clarence, as well as you do . . . These cocoa-trees, this fountain, and the words ‘Fontaine de Virginie,’ inscribed on the rock—I must have been stupidity itself, if I had not found it out. I absolutely can read, Clarence, and spell, and put together” (B, 192). Lady Delacour intends a double meaning in her response; even as she points to the tell-tale cocoa trees, fountain, and inscription which signify a genre painting, Lady Delacour intimates that she has found out the real identity of the subject. But her last line suggests that interpretation does not come from reading alone, but involves attention to the process of construction (how things are “put together”) as well. When Edgeworth introduces the cultural gloss of the portrait of Virginia/ Rachel painted as Virginia of Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul and Virginia (1788), she shifts the reader’s attention to one of the most popular icons of the eighteenth century. Bernardin’s widely-read pastoral romance had quickly been adapted to a variety of media, especially visual ones: Paul and Virginia inspired songs and poems, plays, ballets, operas, and musical entertainments. One of the most richly and variously illustrated of novels, it also provided the material for numerous sets of engravings and lithographs produced independently of the text, as well as paintings . . . Favourite scenes from the life of its hero and heroine regularly appeared on china, articles of clothing and miscellaneous decorative objects throughout the nineteenth century.30

30   John Donovan, introduction to Paul and Virginia, by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, trans. John Donovan (1788; repr., London: Penguin, 1989), 9.

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Essentially, Paul and Virginia took on an iconic status in the eighteenth and nineteenth century comparable perhaps to the Disney figures of this century.31 The novel not only initiated the sheer commodification of Saint-Pierre’s hero and heroine but also shaped British culture: “It functioned, evidently, as a referencepoint and imaginative node for ideas of primativism, childhood love, natural education and sexual innocence, and, as such, exercised an unusually rich and varied influence on literary creation.”32 For the benefit of the modern reader unfamiliar with the details of this sentimental novel, a brief summary may be helpful. Paul and Virginia was originally published in the third edition of Saint-Pierre’s Studies of Nature, which contained discourses on natural history and philosophy and argued for the beneficence of Nature as a manifestation of Divine Providence. The novel itself consists of an embedded narrative chiefly related by an “old man” to a European traveler visiting the remote Ile de France. The story chronicles the lives of two women ostracized by relatives on the Continent and left to fend for themselves and their infant children on a colonial island. Paul and Virginia are raised together from infancy in the idyllic valley that the families cultivate with the help of two slaves. Bernardin’s naturalist interests are evident in the endless descriptions of topography and native flora and fauna. The families and their friend the old man exist in harmony with one another and Nature, until Virginia begins to feel erotic passion for Paul, and the mothers decide to separate the two children until they are old enough to be married. The outside world impinges upon the valley paradise and, although the children protest, Virginia, clothed as a proper French girl, is shipped off to her wealthy but unkind great aunt. Paul pines for Virginia, and she finally returns, but her ship is unluckily struck by a hurricane within sight of the island. Paul attempts to swim out to save Virginia but is rebuffed by the rough sea, and, before the eyes of the islanders, Virginia perishes (in part because she refuses to disrobe and jump into the sea). Unable to survive her loss, Paul, the dog Fidele, both mothers, and soon after, the two slaves all die, leaving two ruined cabins and the old man to attest to their former existence. As late as the 1965 edition of Paul and Virginia, Mousieur Etiemble remarked in the Preface that the novel was “fodder unwisely offered to so many girls.”33 The novel straddles the chasm between virtuous love and uncontrolled passion, a theme imaged in the valley’s cultivated gardens surrounded by vast wilderness. The mothers of Paul and Virginia live on the island alone with their children because as young women they were governed by passion rather than reason in the connections they made with men from classes other than their own. Virginia’s innocence and goodness is continually reasserted, but the emphasis on the fecundity of the  For more information on the iconography of Paul and Virginia, see Paul Toinet, Paul et Virginie, Repertoire Bibliographique et Iconographique (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1963). 32  Donovan, 10. 33   Quoted in Donovan, 18. 31

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tropical vegetation, the sensuousness of the landscape—the Three Paps mountains are “rounded in the shape of breasts”34—and of the African and Malabar women, and the cycles of planting and harvest threaten this innocence with the impulses of nature. Edgeworth employs a similar intermixing of eroticism and innocence in her descriptions of Virginia. When Marriot meets Virginia St. Pierre, believing her to be Clarence’s mistress, she expects a woman of “affectation and fashion,” but she finds Virginia to be “all nature” (B 329). Lady Delacour, who earlier terms Virginia Clarence’s “mistress of the wood” (B 148), twice repeats her description of the exotic flora which surrounds Virginia St. Pierre in her portrait (the “cocoa trees” are the “united palms” which represent Paul and Virginia), and I would argue that the background of Virginia’s painting threatens her innocence as it exalts her potential to fulfill her desires. The representation of young women in genre paintings, as Marcia Pointon argues, reveals the tension between their characters as virtuous/virginal and the cultural implications of the roles they portray within the paintings: “it was a contradiction between iconographical elements in the image and the sets of associations that contextually these set in train that produced meanings for an eighteenth-century audience.” 35 Pointon’s study of portraits of young females begins with the premise that “[t]he girl sitter is, presumably, as innocent as ideology in the eighteenth century (in contrast to the seventeenth-century stress on original sin) insisted she should be. But what makes paintings of young girls exciting and visually significant is the contrast between that presumed innocence and something that is not shown and that might generally be understood to endanger it.”36 Pointon explores this contrast in famous portraits, such as Sir Joshua Reynolds’s The Age of Innocence (1788) and Lady Caroline Howard (c. 1778), where aspects of the composition of the painting, such as the stormy sky or the rough landscape, threaten the assumed innocence of the young girl, who is usually dressed in a contrasting white or pink (Figure 3.3). Reynolds emphasizes the erotic and sexual aspect of this threat by portraying Caroline Howard in the process of plucking a rose bud: “The wild, gashed landscape, the thorny rose bush, the about-to-be-plucked flower, all speak of the ambivalence toward the very idyll of childish innocence that the painting’s iconography strives to convey.”37 While Belinda’s Virginia St. Pierre is older (seventeen) than the sitters in the paintings discussed above, she retains a childlike attitude because of her seclusion from the rest of the world. Repeatedly, Mrs. Ormond, Virginia’s chaperon, reminds Clarence that Virginia is “[q]uite a child” (B, 373) and Marriott describes her as “like a child” (B, 329), assessments born out in Virginia’s innocent and naive actions. But Virginia’s position as a kept woman, in training to become a wife,   Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul and Virginia, trans. John Donovan (1788; repr., London: Penguin, 1989), 139. 35   Pointon, 181. 36  Ibid., 181–2. 37  Ibid., 190. 34

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Lady Caroline Howard (1778), by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

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indicates how tenuous her hold upon childhood is. She spends most of her days reading romantic novels, for which her appetite is “insatiable” (B, 380), and finds Paul and Virginia to be a favorite. To emphasize the importance of the portrait gloss, Edgeworth quotes the following passage from Saint-Pierre’s novel as one that makes Virginia St. Pierre “afraid” of herself, while simultaneously making her wish “to realize the illusion”: She thought of Paul’s friendship, more pure than the waters of the fountain, stronger than the united palms, and sweeter than the perfume of flowers; and these images, in night and in solitude, gave double force to the passion, which she nourished in her heart. She suddenly left the dangerous shades, and went to her mother, to seek protection against herself.38 She wished to reveal her distress to her; she pressed her hands, and the name of Paul was on her lips; but the oppression of her heart took away all utterance, and, laying her head upon her mother’s bosom, she only wept. (B, 381)

This particular incident in Bernardin’s novel takes place when Virginia goes to the pool of her fountain in an attempt to soothe her “malady.” Employing the same location in the Virginia St. Pierre portrait, Edgeworth has placed her Virginia within the “dangerous shades” which enforce Bernardin’s experience of sexual desire. Further, the cabin in the New Forest where Clarence first encounters Virginia reminds both of them of the cabins in Paul and Virginia: “This cultivated spot was strikingly contrasted with the wildness of the surrounding scenery” (B, 363). Although Edgeworth’s Virginia is native to England, she is connected to more tropical regions by her father who has been in Jamaica since he left her39 and by descriptions of her personality. Addressing Virginia’s inability to write, Mrs. Ormond comments, “I rather think it is from indolence, that she does not learn,” to which Clarence agrees (B, 374). Earlier in the novel Mr. Vincent praises the women of his native West Indies for their “softness, grace, delicacy,” and “indolence,” an “amiable defect; it keeps them out of mischief, and it attaches them to domestic life” (B, 233). As Joanne Cordon suggests, “[i]n almost perfect fidelity to Rousseau’s ideal,” Virginia “accepts her restraint unquestioningly.”40 However, Mr. Percival warns Mr. Vincent that indolence, leads to ignorance which remains juxtaposed to the “savage” state (B, 233–4). Virginia is thus linked 38

  The Donovan translation gives these lines even more erotic force: “. . . suddenly she is possessed with a consuming fire. Filled with fear by these dangerous shadows and by these waters that burn hotter than the sun in the torrid zone, she leaves the pool and hurries to her mother’s side to seek support in this struggle with herself” (Paul and Virginia, by SaintPierre, trans. Donovan, 74). 39   This connection has also been noted and explored by Greenfield and McCann. 40   Joanne Cordon, “Revising Stereotypes of Nationality and Gender: Why Maria Edgeworth Did Not Write Castle Belinda,” in New Essays on Maria Edgeworth, ed. Julie Nash (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006), 152.

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by temperament to the colonial Others—recall that Lady Delacour terms her a “foreign beauty” upon viewing the portrait. Like Juba, Mr. Vincent’s slave, and the indolent creoles, Virginia responds to passion in a primitive manner. Her manner lacks the self-control of the civilized and intellectual mind that Belinda clearly possesses. The danger of Virginia’s indolence is that she is not roused from it by education or intellectual activity but by the romantic novels she reads—her indolence is unseated only when she becomes passionately aroused. Her upbringing in the wilderness has not equipped her with a “protection against herself” that a proper education would have. Thus Virginia St. Pierre becomes a most dangerous character because she represents an unchecked eroticism that threatens established and proper society. Her example is perhaps more treacherous than even Harriet Freke’s because Virginia’s violation of social mores is unthinking and unselfconscious, whereas Harriet’s “frekes” are calculated forays into the illicit and improper.41 In reading Virginia’s portrait as a gloss, Edgeworth’s concern about the role of women in late eighteenth-century Britain becomes clear, for Virginia, like Harriet Freke, is a disruptive feminine force.42 She hovers at the edge of propriety and brings to the novel the exoticism of the colonial island and the “indolence” of the creoles. In fact, so tenuous is Virginia’s claim on proper society that even after the return of her wealthy father and Clarence’s marriage proposal, the joined forces of Mrs. Delacour, Lady Delacour, and Belinda are all required to validate Virginia’s respectability. The Virginia St. Pierre gloss works in tandem with the gloss of the conversation piece painting of Lady Anne Percival and her children to heighten the central thematic tension of the novel—feminine sexuality and its containment. The term “conversation piece” is used to define a popular eighteenth- and early-nineteenthcentury genre of paintings in which “two or more persons,” usually “members of the same family,” are represented in a “state of dramatic or psychological relation to each other.”43 The groups are “nearly always depicted in surroundings 41  Mr. Percival sees Harriet’s “frolics” as pernicious to social stability because “[t]hese are trifles; but women who love to set the world at defiance in trifles, seldom respect it’s [sic] opinion in matters of consequence” (B, 252), and “It is difficult in society, . . . especially for women, to do harm to themselves, without doing harm to others” (B, 253). 42   Lisa Moore, in her work on female homosexuality’s role in the “cultural imaginary” of the early nineteenth century, “‘Something More Tender Still than Friendship’: Romantic Friendship in Early-Nineteenth-Century England,” Feminist Studies 18 (1992): 499–520, sees Harriet Freke’s appearances in the novel functioning “to expose the political and moral ruin threatening young ladies who trust too much to intimacy with other women and the grave consequences for society of such relationships” (504). Harriet Freke, for Moore, represents not only unchecked female desire, but the possibility of female desire fulfilled by other women. See also the Belinda chapter in Moore’s Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). 43  Dr. G.C. Williamson, English Conversation Pictures of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1975), 1.

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familiar to the sitters . . . in the library of the country house in which they live, or in some favorite part of its grounds, with a familiar view of landscape or river in the back ground.”44 Edgeworth introduces the mother and children portrait immediately after the discussion of the Virginia portrait. Helena, Lady Delacour’s daughter, leads Belinda away from the first portrait and “into a little room, where Westal’s [sic] drawings were hung,45 to show her a group of lady Anne Percival and her children” (B, 193). The young daughter who has only recently regained her mother’s attentions thus enforces the domestic ideal by directing Belinda’s attention from the “dangerous shades” of the passionate romantic figure to scenes of mother and children. Westall’s drawings are not hung in the main gallery but in a “little room,” which reinforces the idea of the domestic and private space. However, to read these drawings as private family moments of domestic bliss is to miss the ideology that informs the eighteenth-century conversation piece. Renate Brosch postulates that the “emotional involvement acted out in an enclosed and contained sphere circumscribed by the ideology of natural dependence on the patriarch’s power would seem to call for a pictorialism structured on” what Michael Fried terms the “supreme fiction” that “there is no one to look at it, and clearly many conversation pieces uphold that fiction. But the very impulse for the conversation piece was of course the display of that which was supposed to be private and intimate.”46 The Lady Anne Percival and children painting engages in representing a “concept of the family that combined private sensibilities with public concerns.”47 The painting functions, like much of the narrative concerning the Percivals, to represent an ideal or model family that appears quite natural but is highly constructed. Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Lady Cockburn and her Three Eldest Sons (1773) provides just such an example (Figure 3.4). For this intimate family grouping, where only the child peering over her left shoulder breaks the plane between the sitters and the viewers, Reynolds arranged the family based

44

 Ibid., 1. One function of the conversation piece is the conspicuous display of material possessions. The background of the family’s home or property strengthens the sense of the stability of the familial construct. This background is readily contrasted with the foreign and fictional background of the Virginia St. Pierre painting. 45   In 1792 Richard Westall (1765–1836), best known in this century for his portrait of Byron (engraved in mezzotint by Charles Turner), exhibited “Portraits of a lady and her children (Mrs. Monro)” (Algernon Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts: A Complete Dictionary, vol. viii [New York: Brut Franklin, n.d.] 225). Maria Edgeworth visited her friend Fanny Robinson Hoare in London in 1792, so it is likely that she saw Westall’s drawings first-hand, which indicates this early trip to London may have given her more details for her writing than Butler assumes. Butler finds little evidence that the 1792 and 1799 visits to London contributed to Edgeworth’s later writing (Maria Edgeworth, 141). 46  Renate Brosch, “The Conversation Piece: A Model for the Representation of the Family,” Journal for the Study of British Cultures 9, no. 2 (2002): 200. 47  Ibid., 197.

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upon “Charity by Van Dyck” and “[f]or the older boy he used the cupid from Velázquez’s Toilet of Venus.”48 The gloss of the Lord Lyttelton epigraph to Belinda from his “Monody on his Wife” functions in tandem with the Westall gloss, by offering another seemingly private, but actually quite public, representation of a domestic scene. The epigraph reads, “A prudence undeceiving, undeceived, / That nor too little, nor too much believed; / That scorned unjust Suspicion’s coward fear, / And without weakness knew to be sincere.” I suggest that the “Monody” serves as a model for young women, but carries with it some of the same complications as the Westall portrait of Lady Percival and her children discussed below. Lyttelton presents his wife as an almost mythic ideal, more happy in nature and with her family than in society:



O shades of Hagley! where is now your boast? Your bright inhabitant is lost. You she preferr’d to all the gay resorts Where female vanity might wish to shine, The pomp of cities and the pride of courts: Her modest beauties shunn’d the public eye: To your sequester’d dales And flow’r-embroider’d vales From an admiring world she chose to fly; With Nature there retir’d and Nature’s God The silent paths of wisdom trod, And banish’d ev’ry passion from her breast But those, the gentlest and the best, Whose holy flames with energy divine The virtuous heart enliven and improve, The conjugal and the maternal love.49

The description of Lady Lyttelton aligns her with Lady Anne and presents a figure very unlike that of the much-admired and much seen Lady Delacour. Lyttelton’s descriptions of Lady Lyttelton and her children in scenic Hagley Park echo the domestic happiness of the Percivals at Oakly-park: “Sweet Babes! who like the little playful fawns / Were wont to trip along these verdant lawns / By your delighted mother’s side.”50 48

  The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London, . Accessed 27 May 2007. 49  Lord Lyttelton, “To the Memory of Lady Lyttelton, A Monody” (n.d.) in Poems by George Lyttelton ([Ludlow]: George Nicholson, 1800), verse V. 50   Ibid., verse VI. Lyttelton’s other major poem was “Advice to a Lady” (even titled in a later collection, “Advice to Belinda”). It begins, “The Counsels of a Friend, Belinda, hear, / Too roughly kind to please a Lady’s Ear, / Unlike the Flatt’ries of a Lover’s Pen, / Such Truths as Women seldom learn from Men” (lines 1–4). The poem urges Belinda to concern herself with traits more important than beauty, such as modesty and virtue.

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Fig. 3.4

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Lady Cockburn and her Three Eldest Sons (1773), by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

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In the chapter aptly titled “Domestic Happiness,” Edgeworth renders a similar scene, observed by Belinda: She found herself in the midst of a large and cheerful family, with whose domestic happiness she could not forbear to sympathize. There was an affectionate confidence, and unconstrained gayety in this house . . . She perceived, that between Mr Percival and lady Anne there was a union of interests, occupations, taste, and affection. She was at first astonished by the openness with which they talked of their affairs in her presence; that there were no family secrets, nor any of those petty mysteries which arise from a discordance of temper or struggle for power. In conversation, every person expressed without constraint their wishes and opinions; and wherever these differed, reason and the general good were the standards to which they appealed. (B, 215)

As though still displayed in the painting, the Percivals model Enlightenment ideals of sociability and education; for Edgeworth they become what Brosch would term a representation of a “spectacle family,” that is, “it involves an awareness that a crucial function of the family is the display of its own operating conditions.”51 As Kowaleski-Wallace argues, “the novel insists on the inevitable appeal, indeed, the very ‘naturalness,’ of a particular domestic arrangement in which supreme satisfaction is to be garnered from the intimate relationship of a biological mother to her children.”52 But, this “naturalness” comes at a price: The “selflessness” required in the mother’s fulfillment of her role forces the narrative to “deny important female desires” which are at odds with the ideal maternalism that the narrative valorizes.53 As Belinda admires the Westall drawings, Clarence approaches her to have a private exchange (Helena discretely leaves), and he relates to Belinda rumors he has heard which are “most injurious” to her: “It is whispered, that if lady Delacour should die . . . miss Portman would become the mother of Helena!” (B, 193). Indeed, Belinda, like Virginia, finds herself the victim of “calumny” because her surroundings threaten her claim to innocence. Ironically, for Belinda, there is no refuge in the domestic position because it would only confirm the loss of her virtue. So she stands in the gallery between two representations of women in roles equally unfavorable to her in that moment. Lady Delacour expects that Clarence has declared himself to Belinda at the gallery and she “long[s] to hear how Clarence Hervey likes Westal’s drawings” (B, 194). Belinda, confused about the information she has learned from Clarence, begins, “Helena was showing me Westal’s drawings of lady Anne Percival and her children—.” Which Lady Delacour interupts with,

51

  Brosch, 205.   Kowaleski-Wallace, 110–11. 53   Kowaleski-Wallace, 111. 52

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And Mr Hervey wished that he was the father of such a charming group of children, and you the mother? Hey! was not that it? It was not put in such plain terms, but that was the purport, I presume? No, not at all; he said nothing about lady Anne Percival’s children, but— But—why then did you bring in her ladyship and her children? To gain time? Bad policy! Never whilst you live, when you have a story to tell, bring in a parcel of people who have nothing to do with the beginning, the middle, or the end of it. How could I suspect you of such false taste? I really imagined these children were essential to the business; but I beg pardon for giving you these elements of criticism . . . But come, my dear, dash into the middle of things at once, in the true epic style. (B, 195)

Lady Delacour’s reading of the Westall drawings is that they must represent a feminine ideal, a fulfillment of courtship, and she attempts to make Clarence’s proposal cast himself and Belinda in relation to the children portrayed. However, as discussed earlier, when Belinda admits that Clarence said nothing of the children, Lady Delacour criticizes the story-teller in a manner which, like the genre discussion of the Virginia portrait, self-consciously draws attention to the construction of the story Edgeworth is telling. Though perhaps not meant to be read in conventional ways, Edgeworth’s “parcel of people,” including her ladyship and children, are indeed “essential to the business” of her novel. The Westall portraits become essential by revealing key features of eighteenth-century society that gentlemen like Mr. Percival, ostensibly the novel’s model husband, are interested in preserving. Family portraits composed of women and children without the husband/father figure act as a “deliberate narrative device that sharpens our perception of the patriarchal,” as Pointon has argued.54 The absent father, expected to return, confirms our notion of the real outside of the portrait; the father’s material presence is felt in the commissioning of the very artifact that represents him and his political power even in his absence.55 The mother’s role in these portraits without a husband/father is both central and marginal because, though she literally holds the central ground of the portrait, her position in the family narrative expressed by the portrait marks, but does not partake of, “inheritance and succession” among the males.56 In the iconography of portraiture, the scene of the children draped around the mother is interpreted as “Charity.”57 The mother takes on the characteristics of benevolence and attention to those in need, while the absent father is characterized by the display of his resources represented in and by the portrait. In the eighteenth century the European family was a “shifting concept” rather than a “fixed formulation,” and “one of portraiture’s functions” was “to enable the psychic and mythic security of family 54

  Pointon, 160.  Ibid., 173–4. 56  Ibid., 172, 166. 57  Mario Praz, Conversation Pieces (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971), 152. 55

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status and continuity to be sustained.”58 Thus the gloss of the Westall drawings of Lady Anne Percival and her children complicates Belinda’s narrative by putting it in tension with a very conservative art form, which receives further development through Mr. Percival’s conservative philosophy. Mr. Percival, who argues with Harriet Freke in the chapter entitled “Rights of Woman,” embodies the absent husband/father whose position is sustained by the submission of his wife to his material authority. When Harriet cries, “I hate slavery! Vive la liberté! . . . I’m a champion for the Rights of Women,” Mr. Percival responds, “I am an advocate for their happiness . . . and for their delicacy, as I think it conduces to their happiness” (B, 229). Although Mr. Percival and Lady Anne’s marriage is praised as the partnership of companions, Mr. Percival clearly has expectations that his wife will attend to the feminine traits of “delicacy” and “prudence,” which, in turn, ensure the status quo. Harriet espouses several types of radicalism in her statement, including those of the French revolutionaries and Wollstonecraft’s tract for women’s rights.59 However, because Harriet’s sentiments threaten the “natural” order which Mr. Percival enjoys, his sense of fairness and “happiness” does not include the type of revolution Harriet advocates. When Harriet equates delicacy with hypocrisy and argues that people should say what they mean, Percival warns of the dangers of societal upheaval for such a cause: “This would doubtless be a great improvement, . . . but you would not overturn society to attain it? would you? Should we find things much improved by tearing away what has been called the decent drapery of life?” (B, 230).60 Edgeworth herself was particularly aware of the way the “decent drapery of life” insured the stability of a natural family order. On 4 November 1831, she wrote an uncharacteristically polemical letter to her long-time correspondent Rachael Mordecai Lazarus: “I am surprised to find that I have written so much of what I scarcely ever write—Politics. But though I feel it is not a woman’s department and that as she can do nothing, she had better say nothing; yet all 58

  Pointon, 162, 172.   Colin B. Atkinson and Jo Atkinson, “Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, and Women’s Rights,” Eire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies 19 (1984): 94–118, provide a historical context for Edgeworth’s “Rights of Woman” chapter, discussing the eighteenth-century “masculine woman” or “dasher,” as well as the sources, including Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Bernard de Mandeville, and Shaftesbury, for the debate between Harriet Freke and Mr. Percival. About Edgeworth and women rights, they conclude that she “was not—with regard to women’s rights—a liberal, but a paternalist, believing in ‘social duty and function, not in individual and unalienable rights’” (115). 60   Mr. Percival here quotes from Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France: “All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of the moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion” (Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France [1790; repr., London: Penguin, 1986], 171). 59

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is so out of its place now that I have got out of mine.”61 The unsettling political context to which Edgeworth refers is the rioting in both England and Ireland at the refusal of the Reform Bill in the House of Lords. The social and political context of Belinda with the aftermath of the French Revolution (to which Harriet’s cry for liberty refers) and the Irish Rebellions was perhaps even more unsettling than that of the 1830’s. What such characters as Harriet Freke represent is this possibility of acting “out of place,” which is precipitated by any rent in the social fabric or “drapery.” Julie Nash argues that Edgeworth “actively engages in the same issues that inspired more overtly political writers such as Burke, Thomas Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft.” In making her argument, Nash enlists the work of Janet Egleson Dunleavy, who “asserts that Edgeworth used the ‘familiar forms and themes of the novels of manners in what some critics have called the novel of social purpose’ (56). Dunleavy writes that, ultimately, Edgeworth was most interested in ideas—ideas about gender, about nation, and about class. In novels such as Belinda that expose the corruptions of English society, Edgeworth depicts the English home in the same way that she characterizes the Irish estate: as a site for rebellion and resolution.”62 The family portrait, with all of its fine “drapery” and evidence of material affluence, serves as a visual affirmation of the stability of the institution of the family that such characters as Harriet Freke and Virginia St. Pierre, through their independent desire, endanger. Maria Edgeworth, as creator of Harriet and Virginia as well as the novel that contains them, both affirms and subverts conservative family values. She includes quotations from the enlightened father’s speeches in Letters for Literary Ladies (1795) in Mr. Percival’s dialogue in the “Rights of Woman” chapter,63 and she augments the family portraits of the Percivals with descriptions of their “domestic bliss”: “Those who unfortunately have never enjoyed domestic happiness, such as we have just described, will perhaps suppose the picture to be visionary and romantic; there are others—it is hoped many others—who will feel that it is drawn from truth and real life” (B, 216). The extent to which the Percivals are offered as a model family is emphasized when Belinda is discovered by Mr. Vincent “intently copying Westal’s sketch of the lady Anne Percival and her family” (B, 236). Mr. Vincent exclaims, “What a charming woman! and what a charming family!,” adding, “and how much more interesting is this picture of domestic happiness, than all the pictures of shepherds and shepherdesses, and gods and goddesses, that ever were drawn!” To which Belinda responds, “and how much more interesting this picture is to us, from our knowing that it is not a fancy-

61

 Edgeworth and Lazarus, 215.   Julie Nash, “‘Standing in Distress Between Tragedy and Comedy’: Servants in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” in New Essays on Maria Edgeworth, ed. Julie Nash (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006), 162–3. 63   See Atkinson and Atkinson, 110, n. 35. 62

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piece; that the happiness is real” (B, 236).64 Edgeworth takes pains to note that her picture of the Percivals is “drawn from truth and real life,” whereas the portrait of Virginia is often confused with a fancy (imaginative) piece, and there is some question about her actual existence. In many ways, Belinda thus appears to be a conservative portrait which encourages domesticity and refrains from critiquing the patriarchy, yet the tension of the competing glosses destabilizes this portrait and alerts us to its “art and affectation.” A key plot development underscores the idea that the perfection of the Percivals and their philosophies may not be as ideal as they seem. Lady Anne and Mr. Percival become as involved in match-making as Mrs. Stanhope and Lady Delacour. Their contender for Belinda’s hand is Mr. Percival’s wealthy creole ward, Mr. Vincent. Though Oakly-park has been touted for its openness in conversation and ideas, the Percivals work with great determination to convince Belinda to accept Mr. Vincent’s addresses. Lady Anne’s most sustained speeches are in the scene where she persuades Belinda that Mr. Vincent would be a good match. Though Belinda flatly answers that “it is not in my power to return his affection” (B, 241), Lady Anne follows with a torrent of objections and reasons to convince Belinda otherwise, including, “Is there anything disgusting to you in his person or manners?” (B, 242). Mr. Percival and Lady Anne also caution Belinda that “first loves” are unlikely to lead to happiness (B, 245). Though Mr. Percival has vouched for the character of his ward, Mr. Vincent is, of course, eventually exposed as a man addicted to gaming who hasn’t a farthing to his name. Mr. Vincent’s tragic character flaw is blamed upon his early upbringing with the natives of Jamaica, and the Percivals are appropriately shocked and appalled. Lady Anne writes Belinda a “kind and sensible letter,” hoping that “Belinda would still continue to think of her with affection and esteem; though she had been so rash in her advice, and though her friendship had been apparently so selfish” (B, 450). Most critics argue that any instability in the domestic order caused by Lady Delacour’s earlier antics and Harriet Freke’s disruptive presence has been contained and converted in the final chapters, especially “The Denouement” of the novel.65 Even Lady Delacour’s final performance is said to be “crucially

64   After looking at Belinda’s copy, Mr. Vincent spies “an engraving of lady Delacour in the character of the comic muse”: “‘What a contrast!’ said Mr Vincent, placing the print of lady Delacour beside the picture of lady Anne Percival. ‘What a contrast! Compare their pictures—compare their characters—compare—,’” Belinda interrupts Mr. Vincent to say that Lady Delacour was “once my friend,” but Mr. Vincent’s exclamations are certainly meant to insist that we as readers “compare” both their “pictures” and their “characters,” to emphasize the importance of the pictorial glosses to our reading of the novel (B, 236). 65   However Kirkpatrick, in her introduction to the Oxford Belinda, and Majorie Lightfoot, “‘Morals for Those that Like Them’: The Satire of Edgeworth’s Belinda, 1801,” Eire-Ireland 29 (1994): 117–31, both argue for Lady Delacour’s subversion of her supposed reformation.

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differentiated from her earlier theatricals by its domestic intent.”66 However, I want to argue here that the final gloss of the staged tableau works in concert with the previous two glosses to subvert the idealized domestic ending. Although Lady Delacour, in the original sketch for the novel, was to have died of her cancer,67 Edgeworth allows her to maintain a certain control over the narrative throughout, and, despite all evidence to the contrary, her advice on love turns out to be the best or at least that which determines the final matches of the novel. Lady Delacour repeatedly pokes fun at the Percivals’ enlightened philosophies, mentioning “lady Anne Percival’s doctrine,” (B, 338) and the “statutes of Oakly-park” (B, 321). What Lady Delacour finds missing in her young friend, “my calm philosopher of Oakly-park” (B, 357), are deliberations based on love. Fittingly, Lady Delacour employs a visual metaphor in her exasperation with Belinda’s appeals to reason: “Reason! O, I have done if you go to reason. . . . Cupid himself may strain his bow and exhaust his quiver upon you in vain. But have a care—you cannot live in armour all your life—lay it aside but for a moment, and the little bold urchin will make it his prize. Remember Raphael’s picture of Cupid creeping into the armour of the conqueror of the world” (B, 321). Though I have been unable to find the painting described here by Raphael, I would suggest that Lady Delacour refers to Botticelli’s Venus and Mars (c. 1485), where the warrior Mars, having succumbed to love, sleeps while Venus’s small satyrs don his helmet and armor (Figure 3.5). The satyr in the lower right-hand corner particularly fulfills Lady Delacour’s description of “creeping into the armour.” In Belinda, as Lady Delacour suggests here, it is reason that succumbs to love. In the final scene, Lady Delacour ruptures the fictional illusion, asking, “And now, my good friends, . . . shall I finish the novel for you?” (B, 477). Although other characters give advice on the possible endings, such as a letter, Lady Delacour chooses the following: Now I think of it, let me place you all in proper attitudes for stage effect. What signifies being happy, unless we appear so? Captain Sunderland—kneeling with Virginia, if you please, sir, at her father’s feet. You in the act of giving them your blessing, Mr Hartley. Mrs Ormond clasps her hands with joy—nothing can be better than that, madam—I give you infinite credit for the attitude. Clarence, you have a right to Belinda’s hand, and may kiss it too. Nay, miss Portman, it is the rule of the stage. Now, where’s my lord Delacour? He should be embracing me, to show we are reconciled. Ha! here he comes. Enter lord Delacour with little Helena in his hand. Very well! a good start of surprise, my lord. Stand still, pray, you cannot be better than you are. Helena, my love, do not let go your father’s hand. There! quite pretty and natural! Now, lady Delacour, to show that she is reformed, comes forward to address the audience with a moral—a moral!” (B, 478)

66

 MacFadyen, 437.   Belinda, ed. Ní Chuilleanáin, 461.

67

Fig. 3.5

Venus and Mars (c. 1485), by Sandro Botticelli.

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The ending is fitting because in shifting to the drama, Lady Delacour brings to a close the metaphor of her own life which has been to perform for the public. But the staging of “attitudes” also borrows from another important eighteenth-century art form: the conversation piece. The conversation piece, as previously discussed, “staged” the subjects in proper relation and attitude to one another; the gesture and position of each of the subjects revealed a narrative about the interpersonal relations of the subjects. These portraits had remarkable fluidity, as they could be altered to reflect the change in familial relations—a new child could be painted in or a disgraced son replaced with a gentleman’s top hat. Edgeworth’s tableau vivant plays off the characteristics of this popular art form with the couples being arranged to indicate their new intimacy.68 The grouping of Virginia, Captain Sunderland, and Mr. Hartley employs the popular painter’s triangle and reinforces the idea of the disruptive force reconfigured in domesticity with the patriarchal “blessing.” Lady Delacour herself, although she suggests that she and Lord Delacour should be embracing to show they are “reconciled,” leaves her lord with Helena in a reversal of the Lady Anne and children drawing, and takes herself to center-stage. In other words, Lady Delacour avoids the controlling domestic structure of the scene and unsettles the familial stability of this tableau vivant. To leave the final word to Lady Delacour was a departure for Edgeworth from earlier works where “a figure identifiable as [Richard Lovell] Edgeworth frequently appears in the children’s stories as the wise parent who at the climax bestows appropriate rewards and punishments.”69 Lady Delacour steps forward, professing that she is “reformed,” to offer not a moral but a riddle: “Our tale contains a moral, and, no doubt, / You all have wit enough to find it out” (B, 478). This ending foils the reader’s expectations and those of the novel’s proclaimed genre—moral tale—by turning the moral upon itself and gives no indication that Lady Delacour has reformed—she remains independent of the posed “family” signifier and beneath her mask remains much the same character as before. Earlier in the novel, Lady Delacour does tell us what to expect from her: “But I begin where I ought to end, with my moral . . . I never read or listened to a moral at the end of a story in my life—manners for me, and morals for those that like them” (B, 35). The final gloss, when read in conjunction with the previous two, attempts to evoke the “psychic and mythic security of family status,” but because Lady Delacour slips away from the group and through “art and affectation” teases the moral expectations of the reader, the disruptive feminine force still survives in the form of the witty story-teller. The glosses of Belinda demonstrate the extent to which the novel of manners was invested in the media shifts which are much more obvious in the Oriental and national tales discussed here. Edgeworth’s use of ekphrastic glosses foregrounds a 68   Douthwaite likens Edgeworth’s tableau to paintings by the artist Greuze, especially Village Betrothal (1761), 47. 69   Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 247.

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practice that Owenson employs extensively in her Wild Irish Girl and The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys. Edgeworth’s attention to aesthetic genres prefigures the pervasive presence of aesthetic theory in The Wild Irish Girl. Perhaps surprisingly, the novel in this study that functions most closely as a companion piece to Belinda is The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys. The authors craft both the characters and the plots of these novels through the skillful use of multiple dramatic glosses. I am quite certain that Owenson’s Lady Knocklofty possesses more than a coincidental resemblance to Lady Delacour, as will be seen in Chapter 6. As in Castle Rackrent, Edgeworth engages here with timely sociopolitical issues and constructs her commentary in the narrative ruptures effected by her artistic glosses. Her glosses with their particular attention to the ways in which eighteenth-century women might be represented cue her readers to the possibility of women like Lady Delacour (and Edgeworth herself) who might construct more powerful roles for women through the artful use of language.

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Chapter 4

Revolutionary Landscapes: Political Aesthetics and Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl

In describing the Irish landscape, Horatio M____________, later Mortimer, the hero of Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale (1806), asserts: To him who derives gratification from the embellished labours of art, rather than the simple but sublime operations of nature, Irish scenery will afford little interest; but the bold features of its varying landscape, the stupendous attitude of its ‘cloud-capt’ mountains, the impervious gloom of its deep embosomed glens, the savage desolation of its uncultivated heaths, and boundless bogs, with those rich veins of picturesque champagne, thrown at intervals into gay expansion by the hand of nature, awaken in the mind of the poetic or pictoral traveller, all the pleasures of tasteful enjoyment, all the sublime emotions of rapt imagination.

This passage is striking because even though the “embellished labours of art” appear to have been demoted at the beginning of the passage as the pleasures of persons with limited sensibility, Horatio’s description is greatly indebted to the discourse of art. Owenson’s hero participates in the practice encouraged by eighteenth-century guidebooks and authors such as William Gilpin, Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price of contemplating a landscape as if it were a landscape painting. Horatio makes this practice explicit as his description continues: “And if the glowing fancy of Claude Loraine [sic] would have dwelt enraptured on the paradisial charms of the English landscape, the superior genius of Salvator Rosa would have reposed its eagle wing amidst those scenes of mysterious sublimity, with which the wildly magnificent landscape of Ireland abounds. But the liberality of nature appears to me to be here but frugally assisted by the donations of art” (W, 18). Although the pages of The Wild Irish Girl are filled with descriptions of this untamed “natural” landscape, the descriptions themselves frequently draw upon rhetoric of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century aesthetics of landscape painting and gardening, thus familiarizing and codifying the wildness of Ireland for Owenson’s British readers. While the ruins and aestheticized landscapes of The Wild Irish Girl reassure British readers of native Irish impotence, of a civilization  Sydney Owenson, The Wild Irish Girl, ed. Kathryn Kirkpatrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 18. Hereafter abbreviated W and cited parenthetically by page number. 

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to be admired but not feared, the use of the Salvator Rosa gloss coupled with the nationalistic footnotes, I wish to argue, creates tension between imperial nostalgia and potential insurgency. Evidence from Owenson’s later writings, especially Patriotic Sketches of Ireland (1807) and The Life and Times of Salvator Rosa (1824), shows that Owenson drew upon picturesque conventions, handling them with subtle irony, and by means of Rosa, known to her as a revolutionary, created a subversive aesthetic subtext in The Wild Irish Girl. As Edgeworth does in Belinda, Owenson employs the ekphrastic gloss repeatedly in The Wild Irish Girl. However, the most pervasive glosses in Owenson’s novel are her copious footnotes. Like Zāārmilla and Thady in Chapters 1 and 2, Horatio’s naïve first-person narrative is enveloped by the learned glosses of the editor. The Wild Irish Girl was Owenson’s first attempt at the national tale and her effort, though popular, met with (and continues to meet with) mixed reviews. The Monthly Review could “not deny the mark of genius in the work” and noted that the “scenery is powerfully delineated, and Irish manners are interestingly described.” The review continues, “In narration, however, we are much interrupted by many intrusive subjects, which are forced on us, no doubt, because the tale is a national tale. We have a detail of antiquities not a little flattering to Ireland:—the character of the Irish peasantry is upheld with solicitude and affection:—superstitions are recounted in a gentle and forgiving tone.” For the reviewer the notes become impediments—“we are much interrupted by many intrusive subjects”—rather than facilitators in the reading of the central text. Owenson’s simultaneous narratives in the central romantic plot and in the scholarly notes have fared little better with modern critics. Owenson’s use of editorial glosses is far from subtle, and there are moments when the notes cow the central narrative completely into submission. Joep Leerssen suggests that the “remarkable heteroglossic and, to a twentieth-century reader, ‘un-novelistic’ aspect of The wild Irish girl is its explicit invocation of nonfictional sources. In a way, this novel which pretends to be about Ireland in fact is about other texts about Ireland; and the central narrative is really a unifying central junction from which references are thrown out to different discursive traditions



  Qtd. in Belanger, 92, 93.   Despite its awkward form, as Claire Connolly tells us in her study of the reception of the novel that, “like Pamela, Owenson’s novel became ‘an ambient, pervasive phenomenon’ . . . No longer just a novel that one might read or not, both The Wild Irish Girl itself and the nature of its reception in the Dublin papers of 1806–1807 became topics of widespread interest.” (“‘I accuse Miss Owenson’: The Wild Irish Girl as Media Event,” Colby Quarterly 36 (2000): 103.) The embedded quotation here is from William B. Warner. In Connolly’s more recent discussion of “Irish Romanticism, 1800–1830,” she finds that The Wild Irish Girl formula proved to have “instant marketability,” and spawned many successful progeny. In The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, ed. Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1: 415. 

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in the anchoring footnotes.” For Leerssen, to “find out the novel’s relationship with Ireland,” we must go through the footnotes. Jeanne Moskal presents one of the most positive critiques of Morgan’s extensive use of glosses; though she comments on Owenson’s travel narratives, I believe her argument applies here as well: “I will argue that Morgan, one of the first popular British women travel writers, defends herself against the charges of woman and patriot by embracing and utilizing the marginal.” In Moskal’s terms, “embracing and utilizing the marginal” become acts of political and gender empowerment. Morgan employs the glosses to soldify herself in the role of authority, but she is also working with the glosses to demonstrate national loyalty and insurgent potential. The ending of Owenson’s first “National Tale” has long posed a problem for critics because the marriage of the wild Irish girl, Glorvina, to Horatio, the son of the British family that usurped her family’s ancestral lands, seems to undercut the many pages of detailed discussion promoting the cultural glories of Ireland. At the novel’s end, Glorvina’s father, the ancient Irish chieftain and Prince of Inismore, dies, leaving his daughter, his people and his land presumably to be absorbed by Horatio’s British Ascendancy family. Unbeknownst to each other, Horatio and his father, Lord M________, have separately infiltrated the once mighty fortress of Inismore, which represents the last vestige of native Irish land in their extensive holdings. By taking on assumed identities, they are welcomed and quickly incorporated into the Inismore family; there is no resistance to their covert invasions. English father and son both become Glorvina’s suitors. Given Owenson’s contributions to the rise of Irish nationalism, critics have struggled to explain how the eventual union of Glorvina and Horatio supports an Irish nationalist agenda. Clearly Horatio must earn union with Glorvina through the loss of his initial prejudice and his new understanding of the rich Irish traditions of arts, letters and sciences. Horatio’s cultural reform mitigates the inherent disparities and inequalities of a union between colonizer and colonized. Robert Tracy reads the union, what he terms the “Glorvina solution” in this and other Irish novels, as the “intermarriage/assimilation of Irish and Anglo-Irish, of modern efficiency and ancient tradition, of legal right and traditional loyalty.” Katie Trumpener argues that the marriage of Horatio and Glorvina becomes a prototype for the early nineteenth-century national tale “with its allegorical presentation of the contrast, attraction, and union between disparate cultural worlds.” For Mary Jean    Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination (Cork: Cork University Press and Field Day, 1996), 60.   Ibid.    Jeanne Moskal, “Gender, Nationality, and Textual Authority in Lady Morgan’s Travel Books,” in Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices, eds Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England), 171.    Tracy, 31.    Katie Trumpener, “National Character, Nationalist Plots: National Tale and Historical Novel in the Age of Waverley, 1806–1830,” ELH 60 (1993): 697.

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Corbett, this “union of disparate cultural worlds” does the “intercultural work of imaginatively constituting the domestic stability considered so crucial to national and colonial security.” I would argue that the “domestic stability” represented by the union of Horatio and Glorvina coexists uneasily with the iconography of the wild and picturesque Irish coast.10 A fruitful approach to understanding the political themes, including resistance to colonial appropriation, of The Wild Irish Girl is a closer examination of the novel’s literal and aesthetic glosses. Owenson came of age amidst a proliferation of essays attentive to the aesthetics of landscape. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful was first published in 1757 and released in new editions well into the 1790s. Gilpin’s Observations relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty series began with his Observations on the River Wye . . . made in the Summer of 1770 (1782) and continued through several tours of Great Britain. Gilpin focused upon the relationship of the picturesque traveler to the landscape, providing detailed suggestions for the viewing of particular prospects, and for capturing a scene through sketching. Uvedale Price first formulated his An Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful in 1794, eventually expanding it to a three-volume work filled with practical advice for “improving real landscape” based in the study of pictures; he included such helpful tips as “sheep are the best gardeners” because the “bite of sheep” produces the desirable “slight inequalities” in the turf “which the scythe cannot imitate.”11 In much the same fashion that Gilpin’s and Price’s work had taken on Burke’s early treatise, Richard Payne Knight addressed his 1794 “The Landscape, a didactic poem” to Price; Price obliged Knight with a response. The premises and rebuttals expressed in these writings ensured that even the most casual reader would be familiar with descriptions of the landscape posed in terms of the sublime and the picturesque. Owenson was an attentive reader of this new discourse, as evidenced by her use of the prominent theorists of the picturesque in her descriptions of Connaught scenery in Patriotic Sketches, published the year following The Wild Irish Girl. 

 Corbett, 53.  For two recent critics who also argue that the allegorical union may be less than harmonious, see Marie-Noelle Zeender, “Resistance in The Wild Irish Girl,” Cycnos 19, no. 1, (2002): 65–75; and Heather Braun, “The Seductive Masquerade of the Wild Irish Girl: Disguising Political Fear in Sydney Owenson’s National Tale,” Irish Studies Review 13, no. 1 (2005): 33–43. Zeender argues that the novel is a “challenge to the authorities” (65), and reads the behavior of Glorvina and the Prince as “seditious” because “it reflects the absolute contempt of the Irish for the colonial order imposed upon them” (69). Braun maintains that “Glorvina’s hybrid character reveals crucial ways in which an actual political moment can be fortified and obscured through the literary imagining of the appeals and dangers of a united Ireland” (33). 11  Uvedale Price, Essays on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful, 3 vols. (London: J. Mawman, 1810), 3: 171. 10

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In her trek up the scenic mount Alt-bo, Owenson worked through her ideas of the Burkean sublime: “if the source of the true sublime consists in that which excites ideas of pain and danger, and operates on the mind in a manner analogous to terror, the sublimest object I have ever beheld is the abyss at Coradun.”12 Another hike produced the following vignette, where Owenson’s description rehearses the characteristic elements of the beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque: As we descended the mountain’s brow, a little vally [sic] gradually opened between its steep acclivities, which still ascending with the elevation of the mountains, was still embosomed by its irregular and overhanging projections, while the streams which serpentined through it, seemed to expand as we proceeded along its banks, sometimes dashing wildly over those pieces of rock it had torn away in its steep descent, sometimes stealing its thin pellucid wave over broad flags of marble . . . We frequently paused in the course of our ramble from the weariness of the continued ascent; but more frequently to contemplate such scenes as included within a coup-d’œil, much of the beautiful and sublime of picturesque creation. The boundless ocean, the Alpine rock, the dreary heath, the luxurious vale, and many landscape traits incongruous to each other, seemed here happily united in one harmonious combination; while many a ruin which time had ‘mouldered into beauty,’ many a hut which necessity had hung upon the virid point of some tall cliff, charmed the fairy gaze of fancy, and awakened in the musing mind a train of associated ideas which shed an extraneous interest over every object on which the eye reposed.13

Here Owenson is obviously providing a visual pleasure for her readers using painting as both analogue and source. She surveys the “irregular” outcroppings, the changeable water feature (which “serpentined”), the scenic view, the ruin and the peasant huts, surmising that the variety and incongruity of these features form a picturesque whole. Though Owenson writes in Patriotic Sketches that she beheld “numerous” such picturesque scenes in her “native country,” she also claims that these scenes were “frequently concealed in those remote places which national observation has never visited, and to which foreign curiosity has never been pointed.”14 As Owenson no doubt knew, however, the romantic ideal of the intrepid traveler was rapidly changing in Ireland with attention to both the urban and rural picturesque in such collections as James Malton’s A Picturesque and Descriptive View of the City of Dublin (1799) and Thomas Sautell Roberts’s Illustrations of the Chief Cities, Rivers, and Picturesque Scenery of the Kingdom of Ireland, a

12  Owenson, Patriotic Sketches of Ireland, Written in Connaught, 2 vols. (London: Phillips, 1807), 2: 177–8. 13  Ibid., 2: 190–92. 14  Ibid., 2: 192.

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series of “scenes” “engraved in aquatint and published, between 1795 and 1799.”15 Fiona Stafford notes that scenes published by Thomas Milton “[b]etween 1783 and 1793” “represent[ed] Ireland as a land of great natural beauty adorned with fine mansions and occasional picturesque ruins” that “advertis[ed]” the “Irish landscape itself.”16 The romantic and sublime landscapes of Wicklow also figured prominently in theatrical productions, such as A Trip to the Dargil (1762), in the second-half of the eighteenth century. Finola O’Kane suggests that a stage set portraying the Powerscourt waterfall “promoted a particular landscaping style to the Dublin theatre audience. The theatre became an early travel guide or agent, and tourism was a close indicator of the movement of contemporary taste.”17 While painted landscapes appeared as theatrical back-drops, suburban gardens were also designed as sets for dramatic productions, thus theatricality and fiction “influenced the design and theory” of landscape in eighteenth-century Ireland.18 O’Kane further argues that self-conscious staging of Irish landscapes evolved into the incorporation of revolutionary iconography into landscape design. Lady and Lord Edward Fitzgerald designated the Curragh at Kildare Lodge as the “ideal environment for an Irish revolutionary festival. Contemporary paintings indicate that the French revolutionary iconography of gardens and flowers was understood in Ireland, and this suggests that Edward intended his gardening activities to be interpreted in that manner. Images of gardens were used by Irish artists to make political statements.”19 Owenson similarly introduces the political into her landscape descriptions in both her fiction and non-fiction. Robert C. Sha notes that Morgan uses strategies that make her “seem appropriately demure”; however, “[o]nce alerted to this strategy, readers understand that one project of her Sketches was to convert the Irish landscape into the ne plus ultra of the picturesque and sublime in an effort to convince her audience that these ‘scenes are never to be viewed with indifference.’”20 Sha continues in this vein to argue that Owenson

15   Brian P. Kennedy, “The Traditional Irish Thatched House: Image and Reality, 1793–1993,” in Visualizing Ireland: National Identity and the Pictorial Tradition, ed. Adele M. Dalsimer (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1993), 166–7. 16   Fiona Stafford, “Striking Resemblances: National Identity and the EighteenthCentury Portrait,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland 18 (2004): 157. 17  Finola O’Kane, Landscape Design in Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Mixing Foreign Trees with the Natives (Cork: Cork University Press, 2004), 150. 18  Ibid., 152. 19  Ibid., 160. Lord Edward Fitzgerald, one of the leaders of the United Irishmen, was an avid gardener, and O’Kane make a compelling case for his incorporation of Republican philosophies into his landscape design at Frescati and Kildare Lodge, see pp. 153–65. 20   Robert C. Sha, “Expanding the Limits of Feminine Writing: The Prose Sketches of Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) and Helen Maria Williams,” in Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England), 201.

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“exploit[s] a form that is to a great extent historically marked as feminine and apolitical—the sketch—to the end of excoriating England.”21 The seemingly neutral glosses of her novel work in a like fashion. The Wild Irish Girl’s initial gloss is the epigraph taken from Fazio Delli Uberti’s “Travels through Ireland in the 14th Century”: “This race of men, tho’ savage they may seem, / This country, too, with many a mountain rough, / Yet are they sweet to him who tries and tastes them.” This gloss sets up the trope, noted by Leerssen, where the “focalizer (i.e., the character through whose eyes scenes are represented, with whose perspective the narrative identifies) is almost invariably non-Irish, tracing an approach towards Ireland from the outside (rather than describing Ireland from within).”22 Owenson thus invites her audience to read the unknown Irish people by reading the terrain. Her topographical descriptions function to augment the ethnographic ones, and in this sense they follow conventions of imperial travel writing. Arthur Young’s A Tour of Ireland, 1776–1779 (1780), deemed the most judicious account of Irish life and culture by Owenson, and such prominent families as the Edgeworths, focuses explicitly on agriculture, landscape, and land use. Though Gilpin suggests that “[f]rom scenes indeed of the picturesque kind we exclude the appendages of tillage, and in general the works of men,”23 descriptions of colonial landscapes rely heavily on an ethnographic reading of the state of a land’s cultivation, or potential for improvement. In his study of the creation of the romance of the Scottish Highlands, Peter Womack argues: “From Pope to Austen and Peacock, what happens to the appearance of the landowner’s physical environment can function as the literary measure of his taste, wisdom and even mortality, because of an underlying consensus which refers all cultural values back, in the last analysis, to that of the land itself.”24 Owenson makes this connection explicit in Patriotic Sketches when she shifts from the picturesque scene, quoted at length above, to the following observation: “Notwithstanding the rough acclivities of which these mountains are composed, we found them cultivated to their summits.”25 In a note, she adds, “A cultivation so constantly formed on the summits of the highest mountains in Ireland, proves that native taste for agriculture, which to the modern Irish has been so unjustly denied, and of which the ancient left such irrefragable proofs.”26 For Owenson, observing the landscape provides not only pleasure but insight, and such readings depend upon infusing the aesthetic scene with political sensibility.

21

 Ibid., 202.  Leerssen, 35. 23  William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching Landscape, 2nd ed. (London: Blamire, 1794), iii. 24   Peter Womack, Improvement and Romance: Constructing the Myth of the Highlands (London: MacMillan, 1989), 61. 25  Owenson, Patriotic Sketches, 2: 193. 26  Ibid., 2: 194. 22

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The epistolary Wild Irish Girl begins with an exchange of letters between the prodigal Horatio and his father, the Earl of M__________, but the rest of the novel (excepting the odd third-person conclusion) consists of a series of letters from Horatio to his friend J.D. Esquire, an Englishman who seems never to have set foot in Ireland.27 When Horatio writes, in his opening letters of the novel, of his banishment from society and the pleasures of England to the “savage” and “semibarbarous, semi-civilized” country of Ireland (W, 10), he recollects a passage from the “travels of Moryson through Ireland” where Moryson asserts that “so late as the days of Elizabeth, an Irish chieftain and his family were frequently seen seated round their domestic fire in a state of perfect nudity” (W, 13). Horatio confesses that after encountering this detail in his boyhood reading, “whenever the Irish were mentioned in my presence, an Esquimaux group circling round the fire which was to dress a dinner, or broil an enemy, was the image which presented itself to my mind” (W, 13). Rather than portraying Ireland as the sister nation to England that she had nominally become with the Union of 1800, such comparisons remove Ireland halfway around the world with images of canabalistic natives akin to sixteenth-century reports from the New World. Owenson imbues her young protagonist with such broad prejudices against the native Irish so as to quickly dispel them in the letters that follow from Ireland. Horatio’s seeming conversion is shown to owe as much to his visual pleasure as to the plethora of cultural and historical information presented to him by the residents of Inismore. As Horatio’s “packet” arrives in Ireland, he describes the bay of Dublin as “one of the most splendid spectacles in the scene of picturesque creation I had ever beheld, or indeed ever conceived.” He notes that a “foreigner on board the packet, compared the view to that which the bay of Naples affords,” adding, “I cannot judge of the justness of the comparison, though I am told one very general and common-place” (W, 14). Such a comparison had likely become “commonplace” because of the widely available images of the Bay of Naples. Owenson, in fact, lists a Salvator Rosa View of the Bay of Naples in her pictures by Rosa. The Italian overlay for her Irish tale that Owenson constructs here runs throughout the novel, with Horatio requesting a “box of Italian crayons” as one of the few provisions that he will take into exile, the aforementioned references to the painters of the Italian school, and Horatio calling the Lodge his father’s “Tusculum” and the ancient caretaker there his “Cicerone” rather than guide (W, 11, 36). This is all part of Owenson’s relentless effort in the novel, realized particularly in the footnotes, to connect the scenery and customs of Ireland to ancient Greek and

27   Ina Ferris suggests that the national tale as developed by Owenson expands upon the “proto-ethnographic discourse of travel” to relocate the “scene of cultural encounter, confounding the distinction between ‘over here’ and ‘over there’ in order to move the modern metropolitan subject/reader into a potentially transformative relation of proximity,” in her “Narrating Cultural Encounter: Lady Morgan and the Irish National Tale,” NineteenthCentury Literature 51, no. 3 (1996): 288.

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Roman civilization, to a classical past; the Italian references particularly mark Horatio’s narrative. Horatio augments his frequent classical references with repeated observations indebted to contemporary aesthetic discourse. After finding Dublin to be much more cosmopolitan than he had expected, Horatio sets out for the northwest coast of Connaught where the native Irish “were separated by a provincial barrier from an intercourse with the rest of Ireland” and where Horatio supposes he will have the opportunity to observe the “Irish character in all its primeval ferocity” (W, 17). Such ferocity is, however, repeatedly contained in the aestheticized descriptions of Connaught and of the Castle of Inismore, where the primary action of the novel transpires: near the end of a peninsula, “wildly romantic beyond all description,” Horatio writes, “arose a vast and grotesque pile of rocks, which at once formed the scite [sic] and fortifications of the noblest mass of ruins on which my eye ever rested” (W, 44). When Horatio moves closer to the Castle, he finds the half-ruined chapel “strikingly picturesque,” and after hearing and seeing mass, he exclaims, “What a religion is this! . . . What a captivating, what a picturesque faith!” (W, 46, 50). Carried away by his aesthetic pleasure, Horatio seems ready to deem anything he encounters “picturesque,” but his application of the term to the Catholic faith merits some analysis. To term “faith” picturesque is to make it static, to remove it from a world of active practice, to cast it as neutral. Horatio, clearly a Protestant, elides centuries of sectarian violence by neutralizing any real power that the faith might have. Michael Charlesworth has explored just such an attitude in relation to religious ruins, particularly Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire. In examining various paintings and poems that cast the ruins as picturesque, he notes that this “nostalgic attitude would not have been possible without the decline in the Jacobite threat.”28 Such representations of the Abbey come into being, then, only after the decisive suppression of the Jacobite rebellion in the mid-eighteenth century. Likewise, Horatio’s joy at discovering the half-ruined chapel at Inismore partakes of his certainty that this faith offers no threat to the Ascendancy. As he traverses the Irish countryside, Horatio’s venture in Ireland seems directed by Gilpin’s suggestions “On Picturesque Travel”: “The first source of amusement to the picturesque traveller, is the pursuit of his object—the expectation of new scenes continually opening, and arising to his view. We suppose the country to have been unexplored.”29 The picturesque traveler as original explorer easily employs the rhetoric of the colonial enterprise; Horatio reports his purpose for visiting Ireland as being “to take views, and seize some of the finest features of its landscapes” (W, 56, my emphasis). Horatio not only literally stands to inherit the land; he also enacts his colonial status through aesthetic appropriation. As Stephen Copley and Peter Garside argue, the “discourse of the Picturesque intersects with  Michael Charlesworth, “The Ruined Abbey: Picturesque and Gothic Values,” in The Politics of the Picturesque, ed. Stephen Copley and Peter Garside (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 69. 29  Gilpin, Three Essays, 47. 28

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and is shaped by the discourses of colonialism.”30 And, as Anne Fogarty notes specifically about The Wild Irish Girl, “The Gothic sublimity of the Castle of Inismore has as its absent cause the depredations of colonialism.”31 The beautiful ruins that Horatio begins to covet here have their origin in the Cromwellian wars; the Lodge’s caretaker tells Horatio that the Prince’s “family flourished . . . until the Cromwellian wars broke out, and those same cold-hearted Presbyterians battered the fine old ancient castle of Inismore, and left it in the condition it now stands” (W, 38). We should not miss the irony, nor the diminutive, as Horatio muses: “I raised my eyes to the Castle of Inismore, and sighed, and almost wished I had been born the Lord of these beautiful ruins, the Prince of this isolated little territory” (W, 52, my emphasis). Horatio’s family holds the title to most of the surrounding land, except this “little” peninsula still occupied by the Prince. Owenson endows Horatio with a sense of colonial entitlement that he affects through the metaphorical appropriation of the picturesque scenes, which quickly come to include the Lady Glorvina as well as the ruin. As Horatio scales the unstable ruins and secretly watches the Princess Glorvina playing her harp, he wishes that he could “but realize the vivid tints of this enchanting picture.” And though perched precariously outside the window, he takes time to notice that “at the back of her chair stood the grotesque figure of her antiquated nurse. O! the precious contrast. And yet it heightened, it finished the picture” (W, 53). Horatio’s descriptions are readily seen to be taking part in contemporary aesthetic discussions of the picturesque. Indeed, Owenson’s descriptions of Horatio’s views of Ireland, whether landscapes or this intimate interior scene, specifically demonstrate his (and her) understanding of picturesque composition in terms of Gilpin’s “roughness” and “contrast”; the nurse’s form must be “grotesque” in order to offer the contrast to Glorvina’s perfect and smooth beauty. Gilpin writes that “[p]icturesque composition consists in uniting in one whole a variety of parts; and these parts can only be obtained from rough objects”; “variety” and “contrast” are “equally necessary” in the artist’s composition.32 We are reminded that Gilpin observed that the “regularity” of the “gabel-ends” at Tintern Abbey “hurt the eye” and “disgust it by the vulgarity of their shape”; he suggested a “mallet judiciously used (but who durst use it?) might be of service in fracturing some of them.”33 Though Horatio does not carry a Claude-glass, the device popular among picturesque tourists for its ability to transform a landscape by reflecting a contained scene, Owenson 30  Stephen Copley and Peter Garside, introduction to The Politics of the Picturesque, ed. Stephen Copley and Peter Garside (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 6. 31   Anne Fogarty, “Imperfect Concord: Spectres of History in the Irish Novels of Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan,” in Gender Perspectives in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Public and Private Spheres, ed. Margaret Kelleher and James Murphy (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1997), 126. 32  Gilpin, Three Essays, 19–20. 33  Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, &c. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, 2nd ed. (London: Blamire, 1789), 47.

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portrays him as an individual who likewise self-consciously imagines his lived Irish experiences as framed pictures. Moments after Horatio’s aesthetic critique of the interior scene of the castle, he loses his footing, so “entranced” is he with the picture, and plummets to the rocks below (W, 53). Horatio’s severe injuries from the fall necessitate his convalescence at the Castle of Inismore, though he is a stranger. Because his father and all of his ancestors are the enemies of the Prince of Inismore, Horatio assumes an alternative identity, fixing, not surprisingly, on “that of an itinerant artist” (W, 55). Horatio’s primary occupation as he recovers is to sketch the ruins of the Castle and tutor the Lady Glorvina in drawing. As he and the Prince discuss “various views” and prospects that he should capture, the earlier mention of the landscape artists Lorrain and Rosa comes readily to mind (W, 64). By invoking these two artists and making her main character into a landscape painter, Owenson easily exploits the British enthusiasm for landscape in the fashion of seventeenth-century paintings, making the wildest regions of Ireland seem familiar.34 In his discussion of Georgian gardens, David C. Stuart stresses that the Italian landscape painters Nicolas Poussin, Caspar Dughet, Claude Lorrain, and Salvator Rosa were “constantly invoked in discussions on landscape design until well into the nineteenth century.” Stuart adds that it “became fashionable to allude to any landscape, whether Thames-side meadow or Alpine cliff, in terms of one or other of the painters.”35 As has been well-documented, the fundamental relationship between the seventeenth-century Italian landscape painters and the English landscape was not simply one of recognition of forms, but of creation of those forms. Claude Lorrain’s vision of Arcadia with pastoral landscapes and neoclassical structures was recreated in gardens throughout England by landscape architects such as Capability Brown and Sir Humphrey Repton. Lorrain’s View of Crescenza (Figure 4.1) provides a classic example of his work, displaying the gently rolling hills, the full, towering trees, the shepherd (barely visible here) beneath the left central tree, and the placid cattle seen in the shade of the right middle-ground. The shepherd and the carefully constructed view of Crescenza give the impression of tended and controlled nature. The romantic landscape 34

 Owenson’s use of the Italian landscape painters may be found in contemporary women novelists’ works. Jayne Lewis describes Ann Radcliffe’s verbal landscapes: “ostensibly natural scenes whose extreme detail and even more extreme conventionality stamp Radcliffe as a pictorialist in the manner of the great landscape artists of her century and the one preceding. Though these artists—conventionally listed as Rosa, Poussin, and Claude Lorrain—diverged rather dramatically in style, Radcliffe appears to have mediated effortlessly among them. In the words of a contemporary, ‘to the wild landscape of Salvator Rosa’ she ‘added the softer graces of a Claude.’” (“‘No Colour of Language’: Radcliffe’s Aesthetic Unbound,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 39 (2006): 378). I would say that Owenson is much more deliberate in distinguishing the styles and politics of the painters as she incorporates them into her novel. 35  David C. Stuart, Georgian Gardens (London: Robert Hale, 1979), 28.

Fig. 4.1

View of Crescenza (1648–50), by Claude Lorrain. 

Fig. 4.2

Bandits on a Rocky Coast (c. 1656), by Salvator Rosa.

Fig. 4.3

Dunluce Castle (c. 1841), by William Bartlett.

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gardens in homage to Salvator Rosa followed those patterned after Lorrain (though there is much blurring in this chronology) with attention to cascades, grottos, hermitages, and ruins. Rose Macaulay describes Rosa, the “fierce, ruin-minded, banditti-haunted Salvator,” as the artist “who brought the savage world of rocks, ruins and brigandage into the general artistic consciousness.”36 Rosa’s Bandits on a Rocky Coast (Figure 4.2) illuminates the stark contrast between his work and Lorrain’s. The bandits represented here are quite literally outliers from society. Rosa emphasizes their vulnerable status by marginalizing them in the lower lefthand corner of the canvas, but he also empowers them as fearless and aligned with the impending storm and threatening cliffs. Owenson explicitly connects such forbidding scenery with her novel. The ruin, of course, features prominently in The Wild Irish Girl, and Owenson both exploits and complicates the idea of the ruin as an aesthetic object. When she first mentions the Castle of Inismore, for example, she includes a footnote suggesting that “[t]hose who have visited the Castle of Dunluce, near the Giants’ Causeway, may, perhaps, have some of its striking features in this rude draught of the Castle of Inismore” (W, 45). This gloss invites the reader to consider an actual scenic view. Bartlett’s engraving of Dunluce Castle (Figure 4.3) emphasizes the precariousness of the ruin, and in connection with The Wild Irish Girl, of the fragile feudal lifestyle that has been recreated there. Like Rosa’s banditti, Dunluce castle is literally separated from the mainland—an arched bridge, similar to that described by Horatio as he approaches the castle of Inismore—is visible in the upper-left quadrant. Though the ruined castle appears ready to topple into the sea, it also retains the sense of awe at the audacity and skill of the native Irish who originally constructed such a fortress in these inhospitable environs. The ambiguous status of the ruin in Irish literature appears again in Charles Robert Maturin’s Milesian Chief (1812). His heroine Almida’s description of her first encounter with her new home evokes this image and its transformative potential: The character of the scene was grandeur—dark, desolate, and stormy grandeur. The sea, troubled with rains and winds, dashed its grey waves along a line of rocky coast with a violence that seemed even in the absence of a storm to announce perpetual war and unexhausted winter. The dark clouds, though they moved rapidly along, never left the horizon clear, and seemed too thick for rains to melt or storms to disperse. The country near the shore, brown, stony, and mountainous, looked as if the sun never shone on it, as if it lay for ever under the grey and watery sky: the shore itself, bold, high, and sweeping, had all the savage precipitateness, the naked solitude, the embattled rockiness, which nature seems to throw round her as a fortress, where she retires from the assaults of the elements, and the approach of man. Yet Armida could descry on one of the boldest promontories, that stood forth like a bulwark against the ocean, a pile of  Rose Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins (New York: Walker and Company, 1953), 18–19.

36

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The Art of Political Fiction in Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson buildings, which at first, from its dark grey hue and giant massiveness, seemed like a part of the rock it stood on. A solitary tower or two, perched on a bare rock, and a few islands near the shore, appeared to be contending for their existence amid the loud and restless war of waters. To Armida, accustomed only to the sunny regions of Italy, or the cultivated fields of England, the effect of such a scene was like that of a new world. She shuddered at the idea of becoming the inhabitant of such a country; and she thought she felt already the wild transforming effect of its scenery.37

The “striking features” of the ruined castle, the scenery with a potentially “wild transforming effect” that Owenson and Maturin both exploit here would have been quite familiar to Owenson’s readers through Rosa’s paintings, innumerable engravings of ruins, and the commodification of the ruin as a desired feature of the English garden. James Howley has traced the “earliest recorded proposal to use a ruined building as a garden ornament” to a 1709 letter from Sir John Vanbrugh to the Duchess of Marlborough: In this he urges her to retain the ruined shell of Woodstock Manor as an eye-catcher to close a vista in the new park at Blenheim. Vanbrugh argued that buildings from the past can convey a stronger sense of history through association with their past occupants and reflection on the remarkable things which have been transacted in them. He continued to expound on the aesthetic and picturesque qualities of the ruin and . . . suggests that the building would make, ‘one of the most agreeable objects that the best of landskip painters can invent.’38

Though the Duchess of Marlborough thwarted Vanbrugh’s plan by having the building demolished, existing ruins were successfully incorporated into garden schemes in England and Ireland in the decades immediately following. By the mid-eighteenth century, plans appear with drawing designs for newly constructed, that is, created, ruins. In 1751, Sanderson Miller designed a 37  Charles Robert Maturin, The Milesian Chief. 4 vols. (1812; repr., New York: Garland Publishing, 1979), 1: 53–5. As in the scene where Horatio slips and falls, the awe inspired by the sublime landscape in The Milesian Chief is not benign: Within moments of this description, an echoing cry, “the most bitter that ever pierced the human ear,” startles the horses and they begin “to gallop down the precipice with frightful fury” (1: 57). Fortuitously, the young Milesian has the agility and courage to pull Armida from the carriage, though she later sees “at a frightful distance below,” the “mangled horses wallowing amid the fragments of the carriage from which she had been snatched but a few moments before it was dragged down the precipice” (1: 59). 38   James Howley, The Follies and Garden Buildings of Ireland (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 106.

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mammoth ruin for the grounds of Wimpole Hall. Although Miller’s design was not constructed for twenty years, his folly at Wimpole Hall became one of the most famous of the created ruins. In the decades that followed, the created ruins that proliferated in England and Ireland severely undercut the association of the ruin with a particularized past. The ruin became an ornament, a fetishized collectable, as structure or image. Ann Bermingham discusses the irony of the “cult of the ruin,” where the theoretical resistance of the picturesque to codification breaks down as the ruin becomes a standard feature that “at once concedes the victory of nature over art and claims for art the power to transform waste into beauty.”39 In this schema, the ruin’s primary role is as aesthetic object, rather than as a historical signifier with a particularized past. In The Wild Irish Girl, Owenson draws upon the ruin as an aesthetic object yet restores its relation to historical consciousness, employing the Prince and Horatio as advocates for conflicting interpretations of the ruin within the Irish context. The Prince of Inismore “dwells with melancholy pleasure on the innumerable ruined palaces and abbeys which lie scattered amidst the richest scenes of this romantic province” (W, 63). Horatio, naively moved by the spectacle of the ruin, deems the Castle of Inismore, “Grand even in desolation, and magnificent in decay” (W, 44). However, the Prince understands such picturesque ruins to signify great loss, lamenting, “the splendid dwelling of princely grandeur, the awful asylum of monastic piety, are just mouldering into oblivion with the memory of those they once sheltered. The sons of little men triumph over those whose arm was strong in war, and whose voice breathed no impotent command; and the descendant of the mighty chieftain has nothing left to distinguish him from the son of a peasant, but the decaying ruins of his ancestors’ castle” (W, 63).40 The Prince’s comment reinvigorates the aestheticized ruins with political potency. Horatio’s and the Prince’s oppositional interpretations of Irish ruins foreground the contemporary critical debates regarding the aesthetic work that ruins perform. Anne Janowitz argues that the “ruin serves as the visible guarantor of the antiquity of the nation, but as ivy climbs up and claims the stonework, it also binds culture to nature, presenting the nation under the aspect of nature, and so suggesting national permanence.”41 In a process that solidified British ideals of nationhood, the poetry and paintings from the mid-eighteenth century onward that incorporated ruins engaged in an aestheticization whereby the “violent and divisive upheavals that accompanied the Reformation and the Civil War, and which led directly to physical ruin of 39   Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 84–5. 40  Stafford points out that the “sons of little men” phrase used by the Prince here comes from James Macpherson’s The Poems of Ossian: “The sons of little men were in the hall; and none remained of the heroes, but Ossian, king of spears,” 158. This gloss connects the Prince with a romanticized heroic past. 41   Anne Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 54.

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many abbeys, houses and castles, are seldom mentioned.”42 However, as Sean Ryder compellingly argues such a move to aestheticize the ruin in Ireland was complicated by the fact that Ireland’s history was still under negotiation: “As a consequence, the Irish ruin was not simply an aesthetic feature, integrated into the landscape as a tranquil sign of natural process and order. Instead it tended to serve as a site of continuing historical and ideological activity.”43 The disconnection Owenson features between Horatio and the Prince in their reading of the ruins reveals their differing perceptions of how negotiable the future of Ireland might be. Ina Ferris argues that the “scene of colonial ruin, abrasive and knotted, moves destruction rather than ‘calm decay’ into the foreground . . . reattaching the ruin to history and releasing more aggressive energies that impinge more heavily on the present.”44 Though the Prince does not realize it at the time, he is speaking to what he terms the “son of a little man.” Horatio’s family “earned” their Irish lands “by the sword” of their ancestor who murdered the Prince’s ancestor in the Cromwellian wars (W, 32). For Horatio and Owenson’s British readers, the ruins are most “magnificent in decay” because they embody the parallel decay of the power of the native Irish chieftains. Though Owenson sets the original conflict between the families in a far-distant past, the fierceness of the Irish chieftain, like the Prince of Inismore, might have been represented more recently in one of the horrifying images of the Irish rebellion of 1798, or in one of the more than twenty narratives published in the five years immediately following the rebellion. Narratives such as Sir Richard Musgrave’s A Concise Account of the Material Events and Atrocities Which Occurred in the Late Rebellion (1799) vividly recount what he terms the “many outrages and barbarities” committed by “sanguinary monsters.”45 However, in the novel, the horror of the recent rebellion (though mentioned in a footnote and alluded to in Horatio’s father’s story46) seems to be contained through the constant presence of the picturesque ruin. The Prince is not to be feared; his body shares the state of deterioration of his castle: he moves “with difficulty” and his “colossal, but infirm frame” needs the support of his daughter even to walk (W, 48). Owenson writes that he “like Milton’s ruined angel, ‘Above the rest, / In shape and feature 42

 Sean Ryder, “Ireland in Ruins: The Figure of the Ruin in Early Nineteenth-Century Irish Poetry,” in Landscape and Empire, 1770–2000, ed. Glenn Hooper (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2005), 80. 43  Ibid., 81. 44  Ferris, The Romantic National Tale, 110. 45  Sir Richard Musgrave, A Concise Account of the Material Events and Atrocities which Occurred in the Late Rebellion, 3rd edition (Dublin: J. Milliken, 1799), 35, 69. 46  In a lengthy footnote defending the charge of “barbarity” among the Irish, Owenson discusses the 1798 rebellion, particularly the “atrocities” at Wexford, where, she asserts, “scarcely any feature of the original Irish character, or any trace of the Irish language is to be found” (W, 176). In other words, the most barbaric Irishmen are of British descent. For Owenson’s discussion of Lord M______’s masquerade as Irish rebel, see W, 213–14.

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proudly eminent, / Stood like a tower’” (W, 50).47 Owenson’s Miltonic reference casts the Prince as having fallen from power, while simultaneously completing the metaphor of his body as the “ruined” “tower.” His adherence to ancient costume and customs make him a sort of endearing relic. Though Horatio’s first letter from the Castle of Inismore suggests he could be held there as “prisoner of war, or taken up on a suspicion of espionage, or to be offered as an appeasing sacrifice to the manes of the old Prince of Inismore,” no member of the Inismore household (or its surrounding environs) seems remotely to possess the potency to do him any injury (W, 44). There are no strong young men to mount resistance; not since the oarsmen in the Dublin harbour, described as “progeny of the once formidable race of Irish giants” (W, 14), has Horatio encountered any potentially dangerous masculine force. The rebels of the images in circulation at the time of the publication of The Wild Irish Girl appear nowhere in the novel. Horatio and his father are rivals to each other; there is no insurgent threat. However, the environs were one might locate an insurgent threat would be in the margins of Owenson’s novel. As suggested in the Introduction, the margins here function as “trenches” from which Owenson “lobs” her pointed critic of the oppressors of the native Irish. In an early footnote, Owenson, like Edgeworth, takes on the middleman agent: A horde of tyrants exist in Ireland, in a class of men that are unknown in England, in the multitude of agents of absentees, small proprietors, who are the pure Irish squires, middle men who take large farms, and squeeze out a forced kind of profit by letting them in small parcels; lastly, the little farmers themselves, who exercise the same insolence they receive from their superiors, on those unfortunate beings who are placed at the extremity of the scale of degradation— the Irish Peasantry! (W, 32).

Owenson takes this quotation from An Enquiry into the Causes of Popular Discontents in Ireland and juxtaposes it with the reader’s introduction to Mr. Clendinning, Horatio’s father’s steward. Clendinning’s opening conversation with Horatio delineates the “ferocity, cruelty, and uncivilized state” of the Irish, commenting that “he had never met an individual of the lower order who did not deserve an halter at least” (W, 31). The still naïve Horatio picks up on Clendinning’s “unprovoked accusations” and characterizes him as “this narrow-minded sordid steward” (W, 31). Owenson’s gloss then reinforces Horatio’s initial impression

47   As Owenson likely knew, Edmund Burke included this particular passage from Milton in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1757), 48, introducing it with “[w]e don’t any where meet a more sublime description than this justly celebrated one of Milton, wherein he gives the portrait of Satan with a dignity so suitable to the subject.”

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and also serves to emphasize Clendinning’s status as representative of the “whole horde of tyrants.” A similar note responding to the story of the ancient Prince of Inismore refusing, in the time of Queen Elizabeth, to “cut his glibbs, shave his upper lip, nor shorten his shirt” (W, 37–8) attacks the British sumptuary laws imposed on the Irish: “From the earliest settlement of the English in this country, an inquisitorial persecution had been carried on against the national costume. In the reign of Henry V, there was an act passed against even the English colonists wearing a whisker on the upper lip, like the Irish; and in 1616, the Lord Deputy . . . directed, that such as appeared in Irish robes or mantles, should be punished by fine and imprisonment” (W, 38). By choosing to describe the British intolerance as “inquisitorial,” Owenson pointedly summons the echo of unjust religious persecution. This gloss also works with the central narrative to assert that the traditional costumes of the Prince and Glorvina are not simply eccentric but also rebellious. Interestingly, the Prince wears a sheathed dagger or “skiene” as part of his ancient costume, but it is discussed as an “article of the dress” (W, 48). He reminisces about his “boyish days” when he would “contemplate these ruins” and “strange stories of the feats of my ancestors” and dream of “my arm wielding the spear in war”; he affirms, however, “it was only a dream!” (W, 64). The weapons of the novel consist of artifacts on display in the castle’s great-hall, what Horatio terms a “cabinet of national antiquities, and national curiosities” (W, 102). As the Prince schools Horatio on the ancient order of knights in Ireland, he displays the fine craftsmanship of the “collar,” the “salet” or helmet, the “gorget” (for protecting the throat), a shield and a coat of mail worn by the “ancestor who was murdered in this castle” (by Horatio’s ancestor), defensive weapons all. In contrapoint to the Prince’s displays, Horatio holds up a “sword of curious workmanship,” a “battleaxe,” and a “beautiful spear” (W, 104–6), all weapons of the aggressor. However, even though these weapons seem neutralized as artifacts for display and the inhabitants of Inismore can hardly be imagined as warriors, this scene functions in a similar fashion to the Gillray caricature in Chapter 2 (Figure 2.1). The weapons that Owenson has introduced into this violent landscape pose a veiled threat to the interlopers whom the footnote glosses have repeatedly identified. The lone insurgent appearing in the central narrative is Lord M__________, who employs that disguise to gain admittance to the Castle, requesting sanctuary from the Prince. The only bloodshed occurs when the “loose stones” of the ruin give way beneath Horatio’s feet, resulting in a “bleeding temple” and a “dreadfully bruised and fractured” arm (W, 53). The threat comes not from the inhabitants, therefore, but from the ruin itself, and Horatio recalls that it was the “contemplation” of those “interesting ruins” which “I had nearly purchased with my life”(W, 59). However, Horatio’s fall, occurring shortly after the Miltonic reference to Lucifer, should be read as more than a stumble. Owenson suggests that we read Horatio’s mediation of Ireland in terms of the picturesque with some irony, and she implies here some lurking danger in the ruins, in contemplating them as neutral aesthetic objects. Though insurgent violence seems muted and contained in the novel, the

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British role as aggressor and invader is remarkably present. The only death in the novel is the Prince’s, precipitated by the revelation of Horatio’s and his father’s true identities. Though the Prince is described as infirm from his first appearance, Glorvina sees his death as far from natural, shrieking at Horatio and Lord M____ ____, “Which of you murdered my father?” (W, 242). Sydney Owenson’s self-conscious manipulations of the discourse of art, coupled with her later writings, demonstrate that she does not intend to contain the underlying claims of the Irish. In the Preface to her 1827 novel, The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys, she writes, “To live in Ireland and to write for it, is to live and write poignard sur la gorge; for there is no country where it is less possible to be useful with impunity, or where the penalty on patriotism is levied with a more tyrannous exaction,” explicitly noting that her political writing began with The Wild Irish Girl, “under the banners” of which, she says, “I ‘fleshed my maiden sword.’”48 The Wild Irish Girl becomes politically subversive with her decision to employ the rhetoric of the picturesque with ironic difference, and to cast the Irish landscape as that most likely to be represented by a Salvator Rosa painting. As Owenson well knew, Rosa was a revolutionary and his paintings hinted at that which was dark and troubling in the sublime landscapes. According to her Preface to the first edition of her Life and Times of Salvator Rosa (1824), Owenson was motivated in part to write the biography of Rosa because of the “peculiar character of the man” rather than the “extraordinary merits of the artist.”49 In her 1855 Preface, however, Owenson is more explicit: Rosa “worked through his great vocation with a spirit of independence that never quailed, and with unflinching resistance to the persecutions of despotism . . . The story of Modern Italy writhing under foreign rule, he depicted in those groups of outlawed gentlemen and an outraged people, who, being denied all law, lived lawlessly.”50 Though her factual accuracy is questionable, Owenson highlights Rosa’s relations with banditti and his participation in the 1647 Neapolitan rebellion, an uprising lead by the young fisherman, Masaniello.51 She quotes an Italian source that praised Rosa as “one of Masaniello’s best soldiers.”52 Owenson stresses that Masaniello, a humble man 48  Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys: A National Tale (London: Pandora Press, 1988), xv. 49  Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), The Life and Times of Salvator Rosa (1824; repr., London: David Bryce, 1855), vii. 50  Ibid., iii–iv. 51  For contemporary scholarly accounts of Salvator Rosa see Jonathan Scott’s Salvator Rosa: His Life and Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) and James S. Patty’s Salvator Rosa in French Literature: From the Bizarre to the Sublime (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2005). Though his title is clearly an homage to Owenson, Scott finds much of her discussion of Rosa to be fanciful. Patty attends to Owenson’s influence on the nineteenth-century and contemporary reception of Rosa, with chapters entitled, “Enter Lady Morgan” and “Lady Morgan’s Legacy.” 52  Owenson, Life and Times, 156–57.

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of the people, effected a bloodless revolution, redressing the wrongs against the poor, and briefly establishing a republican government. Owenson clearly intends to draw a parallel between the Neapolitan political situation and the Irish one. Owenson terms Rosa the “poet of liberty” and imagines: “Did Salvator live now, one might fancy him joining the ranks of the gallant defenders of national independence and civilisation; standing out, like one of his own bold figures, upon the heights of Balaklava, pencil in hand and revolver in belt, realising for the homage of posterity the grand battle raging below, till, borne away by his kindling sympathies, he flings down his pencil, and, plunging into the mêlée, meets a glorious death or shares a not less glorious triumph.”53 In Rosa, I believe we have located a figure far more threatening than the aged Prince of Inismore. Though Owenson evokes the security of the aestheticized landscape, she destabilizes this seemingly neutralized landscape by introducing the painter who championed rebellion, thus suggesting the potential for Irish insurrection. Making the connection of Rosa to the Irish insurgency explicit in the “United Irishmen” chapter of The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys, Owenson has her hero Murrogh O’Brien describe the assembled United Irishmen as “ready grouped for the purpose of a well-sketched conspiracy . . . that recalled the ‘grande quadro’ of Salvator’s pride and glory.”54 In her own extended meditations on the picturesque landscape of Connaught in Patriotic Sketches, the same landscape where The Wild Irish Girl takes place, Owenson rarely loses sight of the humble individuals inhabiting the magnificent landscape. In her ninth sketch, she writes: I am at present residing in that part of Ireland where the association of thrashers first arose.55 I am consequently surrounded by those who formed that association: a peasantry poor, laborious, vehement, and enterprising; capable of good or ill; in the extremes of both; left to the devious impulse of either; but oftener impelled by the hardest necessity to the latter. . . . Punished with rigorous severity when acting wrong, but neglected, unnoticed, and unrecompensed when acting right; forming the last link in the chain of human society, and treated with contempt because unable to resist oppression.56

Owenson chooses to see these people; she understands the glorious and forbidding landscape of Connaught to be one of particular difficulty for the laborer. Owenson rereads the roofless peasant cabin (incorporated into the earlier picturesque sketch as part of the “fairy gaze of fancy”) and “shuddering groups of literally 53

 Ibid., iv.  Owenson (Lady Morgan), The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys, 312–13. 55   The thrashers were a rural insurgent group akin to the “white boys, hearts of steel, hearts of oak, break-of-day boys, right boys, defenders” (Owenson, Patriotic Sketches, 1: 90). Like the other insurgent groups, the thrashers revolted on a local level against tithes and rents. 56  Owenson. Patriotic Sketches, 1: 79. 54

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naked children,” as victims of deprivation. In much the same way that she applauds Rosa’s actions, Owenson praises the thrashers “who daringly seized in their own hands the power of summary retribution, proportioned and appropriate as they conceived to their real or fancied grievances.”57 For Owenson, then, the picturesque coast of western Ireland remains a point of negotiation, a place where the potential for insurgent activity lies unnoticed but radically present. Her political activism becomes apparent in the geographical and textual margins, that is, in the aesthetic descriptions of Connaught and in her glosses of the novel. As suggested at the end of Chapter 2, Owenson’s political and nationalistic positions that she valorizes here become far more ambivalent when she pens The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys in the 1820s. The unalloyed admiration for the feudal past represented by the Prince of Inismore is also substantially tempered in Owenson’s later work, as will be seen in the final chapter of this study.

57

 Ibid., 194.

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Chapter 5

“Domestic Rebellion”: Hamilton’s Cottagers of Glenburnie

One of the most memorable scenes of Elizabeth Hamilton’s 1808 Scottish novel The Cottagers of Glenburnie occurs when the reforming Mrs. Mason first encounters her rural Scottish cousins. As Hamilton’s lame but perennially capable heroine descends by carriage into the glen or valley of Glenburnie, the narrator captures this view or sketch in terms very like those employed by William Gilpin in his discourses on the picturesque: But little as it owed to nature, and still less as it was indebted to cultivation, it had clothed itself in many shades of verdure . . . The meadows and corn-fields, indeed, seemed very evidently to have been encroachments made by stealth on the sylvan reign: for none had their outlines marked with the mathematical precision, in which the modern improver so much delights. Not a straight line was to be seen in Glenburnie. The very ploughs moved in curves; and though much cannot be said of the richness of the crops, the ridges certainly waved with all the grace and pride of beauty.

In Mrs. Mason’s description, the improvements to the landscape are “encroachments made by stealth on the sylvan reign” quite akin to William Wordsworth’s “hedgerows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines / Of sportive wood run wild.” As Gilpin preferred in his writings on the picturesque, the obvious marks of productive agriculture appear in Glenburnie as if by accident with the more pleasing “curves” of the plough barely marring the picturesque scene. Though seeming to admire the conventions of the picturesque that gloss this passage, Mrs. Mason’s reformist   Elizabeth Hamilton, The Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808; repr., New York: Garland Publishing, 1974), 126–7. Hereafter abbreviated CG and cited parenthetically by page number.   William Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” in William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), lines 16–17.    According to Gilpin, “Furrowed-lands, and waving-corn, however charming in pastoral poetry, are ill-accommodated to painting. The painter never desires the hand of art to touch his grounds.—But if art must stray among them—if it must mark out the limits of property, and turn them to uses of agriculture; he wishes, that these limits may, as much as possible, be concealed.” William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye, 2nd ed. (London: R. Blamire, 1789), 44.

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gaze will soon shift from such scenes of “natural” beauty to the repellent conditions of the poor in need of human “improvements.” All of Hamilton’s glosses in the novel, especially her dedication, title-page epigraph, a footnote, discursive titles, and an appended letter in the second edition, open upon and promote practical efforts to reveal and improve actual Scottish national character. Mrs. Mason, though generally repulsed by the conditions of her cousins’ cottage, asks herself, “But may I not remedy this?” (CG, 148), and such a question echoes that of many a reforming lady in the late-eighteenth century and positions Hamilton’s heroine to negotiate the complicated practices of benevolence and charity. As I intend to show, Hamilton’s concept of benevolence has both liberating and oppressive social functions. Prudently applied, it becomes for Hamilton a tool whereby the lot of the poor may be altered for the better or fundamentally improved, but only in concert with industry. The glosses reveal the ways in which local educational reform, discussed in the first part of this chapter, is enmeshed with the issues of national identity and reform, discussed in the latter part. In the opening scene, Mrs. Mason, like Owenson’s Horatio, is “enchanted by the change of scenery, which was incessantly unfolding to their view” (CG, 127), yet this aesthetic pleasure is soon undercut by arrival at the village, where the “twenty or thirty thatched cottages,” with their dunghills at the door, “might have passed for so many stables or hog sties, so little had they to distinguish them as the abodes of man” (CG, 134). As Mrs. Mason approaches the particular abode of her cousin, where she has come to reside, her attention lingers about the cottage door with no hint of the familiar pastoral. Hamilton’s chapter entitled “Domestic Sketches—Picture of Glenburnie—View of a Scotch Cottage in the last century,” as relayed via Mrs. Mason, partakes of none of the romanticized images of peasant life proliferating in visual print culture, such as Thomas Gainsborough’s “Cottage Door” series (Figure 5.1) or the contemporary sketches and paintings of John Constable. The unstinting realism in her description of the cottages assaults the readers’ senses with the powerful smell of a “great dunghill” (CG, 137) on one side of the door and the “intolerable stench” (CG, 151) of a “squashy pool, formed by dirty water thrown from the house” (CG, 137) on the other side. As Mrs. Mason surveys the interior of the cottage, she spies shelves “filled with plates and dishes, which she supposed to be of pewter; but they had been so bedimmed by the quantities of flies that sat upon them, that she could not pronounce with certainty as to the metal” (CG, 143); she later notes milk for cheese being cooked in the “same iron pot in which the chickens had been feasting [earlier], and on which the hardened curd at which they had been picking, was still visible towards the rim” (CG, 202). The middle section of Hamilton’s novel teems with similar descriptions, completely eclipsing the romanticized view of the glen that opens the sketch, but contributing substantially to the novel’s central theme of the need for reform Hamilton’s Cottagers is a third-person narrative, divided into eighteen chapters; however, four of the early chapters, substantially devoted to the “History of Mrs. Mason,” are related in first-person by the heroine. Her history details her rise, through industry and righteous action, from serving girl to highly valued governess

Fig. 5.1

The Cottage Door (1777–8), by Thomas Gainsborough

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in the family of Lord Longlands. Her unwavering devotion to God and to the family, including risking her life to save the Lord’s children from a fire started by a careless maid, guides her through many years of the trials of her unreasonable first mistress and crafty maidservants. The action of the story proper begins with the untimely death of Lord Longlands and the succession of the selfish Lord Lintop, resulting in Mrs. Mason’s dismissal from service to her beloved family. Though Mrs. Mason has provided countless years of dedicated service to the Longlands family, when she applies to the new Lord for a place in an empty cottage “near Hill Castle,” her petition is “refused,” with the additional information that “Lord Longlands had resolved against having any cottages on his estate, and was to have them all destroyed” (CG, 111–12). Hamilton thus indicates that the cottagers in the area cannot hope for any benevolence from the person most financially suited to aid them. Hamilton here attests to a prevalent trend, illuminated by Beth Fowkes Tobin in her Superintending the Poor’s examination of “pamphlets and treatises” from the period, in which the upper classes are viewed as less fit to render aid to the poor than the middling classes. Tobin quotes from an article in the 1790 Lady’s Magazine where the author reasons that the “luxury and debauchery” of the upper classes leave them unfit to tend the poor: “These courses and habits have rendered them insensible to the wants of their fellow-creatures; corrupted their minds, hardened their hearts, and destroyed the sympathising tenderness of humanity.” Mrs. Mason’s humble origins and her willingness to live with the peasants, coupled with her superior education, make her especially suited to sympathize with the needs of the poor. Though homeless herself, she has been able to save a fair sum and has an allowance, thus enabling her to share her relative wealth among the cottagers as a boarder. Mrs. Mason’s interlude with the mostly progressive and principled Stewart family at Gowan-brae allows Hamilton to explore the strengths and weaknesses of human character through a cross-section of the classes. The Stewarts’ two daughters, the devoted Mary and the headstrong and superficial Bell, provide another forum for Hamilton’s lessons on education. Bell, like Lord Lintop, was indulged as a child by her grandmother and educated at a fashionable school, where she “acquired such a love of dress, and so many foolish notions about gentility, as have utterly destroyed all relish for domestic happiness” (CG, 122). While Mr. Stewart and Mary receive Mrs. Mason into their home as an honored guest, Bell disdains the idea of entertaining a former servant, choosing instead to pursue her fashionable friends. As with other characters in Cottagers who shun domestic duty, Bell gets her come-uppance when she elopes with the supposedly aristocratic Mr. Mollins who, near the end of the novel, Mrs. Mason identifies as the son of an honest shoemaker. At the heart of the novel are the cottagers of Glenburnie, and Hamilton’s vivid rendering of the MacClartys and their abode contains a fascinating mixture of    Beth Fowkes Tobin, Superintending the Poor: Charitable Ladies and Paternal Landlords in British Fiction, 1770–1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 2.

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virtues and vices, beauties and flaws, thus challenging romantic images of peasant life and arguing for needed change. The intertitle (that is, the chapter title) “Family Sketches” glosses a series of far from flattering portraits of the MacClartys as they go through their usual “gaits” (the Scottish term for “ways” that is used repeatedly in the novel). Mrs. Mason arrives in Glenburnie after her dismissal from the Longlands family, and she has arranged to board with the MacClartys on a trial basis for three months. Upon hearing this plan, Mary Stewart wonders if there might be “any place in Glenburnie fit” for Mrs. Mason, but the heroine gamely replies that she will be “useful” to her cousin’s family, both in supplementing their income as a boarder and through sharing her extensive wisdom on household economy and child rearing (CG, 114). The central narrative shows, with a good deal of humor and wit, Mrs. Mason’s attempts to reform the unclean and unconcerned MacClartys. Through Mrs. Mason, Hamilton links improvement in character to improvements in habits of cleanliness, especially intent that such habits be fostered in childhood. The heroine tells Mrs. MacClarty, “You cannot imagine what good it would do your young people, did they learn by times to attend to such matters; for believe me, cousin, habits of neatness, and of activity, and of attention, have a greater effect upon the temper and disposition than most people are aware of” (CG, 177). When the MacClarty children purposefully throw mud at Mrs. Mason’s freshly shined windows, Mrs. Mason is “greatly shocked” at such an instance of “unprovoked malignity in the youthful mind” as she had never before discovered in her more than “twenty years employed in studying the tempers and dispositions of children” (CG, 180). She is even more surprised by their mother’s response to the transgression: “Hoot, is that it a’? ane wou’d ha’ thought the window had been a’ to shivers, by the way you spoke” (CG, 181). For the MacClartys, a broken window matters, because it would be costly to repair. A dirty one does not, because they fail to acknowledge the connection between cleanliness and economic prosperity that Mrs. Mason attempts to instill. Although Hamilton describes the filthiness of the cottagers in unstinting detail, she also represents the Scottish peasants as unfailingly generous, accommodating and hospitable. Her critique focuses mainly upon their lack of efficient industry and their refusal to act in ways that will benefit the community or bring later benefit upon themselves. In the very humorous scene where the initial trip into Glenburnie is delayed due to a broken bridge, Mr. Stewart becomes exasperated with the local peasants’ refusal to maintain their roads: “There are enough of idle boys in the Glen to effect all this, by working at it for one hour a week during the summer. But then their fathers must unite in setting them to work; and there is not one in the Glen, who would not sooner have his horses lamed, and his carts torn to pieces, than have his son employed in a work that would benefit his neighbours as much as himself!” (CG, 128) When he chides the farmer directly for his carelessness, the farmer merely grins and responds, “we cou’dna be fashed” (CG, 133) (i.e., “bothered”). Similarly, though Mrs. MacClarty, in her initial encounter with Mrs. Mason and the Stewarts, is subjected to chidings and abuses about her

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housewifery, she bears it with relatively good cheer. Moreover, much of the humor that follows is directed at Mrs. Mason. As Hamilton wrote the novel, she surely kept in mind that her didactic work would prove more effective if it amused. At the “threshold” of the door to the MacClarty’s cottage, the aforementioned “squashy” pool with ducklings, “who always found it a plentiful supply of water, in which they could swim without danger” (CG, 137), bars Mrs. Mason’s passage: Happily Mr Stewart was provided with boots, so that he could take a firm step in it, while he lifted Mrs Mason, and set her down in safety within the threshold. But there an unforeseen danger awaited her, for there the great whey pot had stood since morning, that the cheese had been made; and was at the present moment filled with chickens, who were busily picking at the bits of curd, which had hardened on the sides, and vainly mocked their wishes. Over this Mr Stewart and Mrs Mason unfortunately stumbled. The pot was overturned, and the chickens cackling with hideous din, flew about in all directions. (CG, 138)

The earnestness and self-righteousness of the heroine and Mr. Stewart are seriously undercut in this moment of indignity, complete with airborne fowls. The caution and preparedness that both characters have exhibited previously is no match for the carelessness of the MacClartys. The stumble is a fall from the grace of the upstanding middle-class values to which they both subscribe. Within the cottage, Hamilton critiques the housekeeping skills of Mrs. MacClarty using realistic descriptions of oatcakes spread with fresh butter made from unstrained milk, the “numerous hairs which, as the butter was spread, bristled upon the surface” (CG, 147–8) and of a pillow that had been stuffed with feathers “before they had been properly dried,” and “consequently full of animal oil, which, when it becomes rancid, sends forth an intolerable effluvia” (CG, 162). However, she skillfully juxtaposes her devastating exposé with more humor as she describes Mrs. Mason’s battle with the various vermin in her bed: “The assault was made by such numbers in all quarters, and carried on with such dexterity by the merciless and agile foe, that after a few ineffectual attempts at offensive and defensive warfare, she at length resigned herself to absolute despair” (163). The use of the terms of warfare here, of course, anticipates Hamilton’s intertitle gloss for Chapter IX: “Domestic Rebellion”; the foes of the lower classes are not the monarchy or the government but bedbugs allowed to thrive and prosper through the slovenly habits of the cottagers. Her intertitle gloss for Chapter XII    Hamilton sets the novel in the “fine summer of the year 1788” and the major action ends in the following spring, meaning that Mrs. Mason’s rebellion is effected before the French Revolution begins. This time shift even means that Hamilton has to provide a strange accommodation in her footnote: “At the period Mr Gourlay delivered this harangue, the improvements made by Mr Joseph Lancaster, in the method of instruction, were unknown. Had Mr Lancaster’s book then been published, it would doubtless have been referred to, as

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makes her redefinition of rebellion even clearer: “The doctrine of Liberty and Equality stripped of all seditious import” (CG, 248), which refers to the burial of Mr. MacClarty and the observation that death is the great leveler and Paradise open to all. “Why then should those of lowly station envy the trappings of vanity,” Mrs. Mason wonders, “when, by piety and virtue, they may attain a distinction so much more lasting and glorious?” (CG, 253). Though Hamilton employs these intertitles ironically, they function to infuse the local and domestic with national and international tensions. With the excesses of the French Revolution in mind, Hamilton obviously subscribes to the prevailing British class structure, supported at the time by various theories of evolution and racial (read national) types. She has Mrs. Mason observe one of the MacClarty daughters “rub[bing] the wall up and down with her dirty fingers.” Mrs. Mason sarcastically notes that “happily the wall was of too dusky a hue to be easily stained” (CG, 141). She compares the dirty walls to the white ones of “our southern neighbors” who must deal with the “inconvenience which reduces people in that station, to the necessity of learning to stand upon their legs, without the assistance of their hands” (CG, 141–2). As she continues with a comparison of the Scottish peasants for whom “custom has rendered the hands in standing at a door, or in going up or down a stair, no less necessary than the feet” (CG, 142), her tracing of the delayed progression of mankind in Scotland is unmistakable. Hamilton concludes the discussion with Some learned authors have indeed adduced this propensity, in support of the theory which teaches, that mankind originally walked upon all fours, and that standing erect is an outrage on the laws of nature; while others, willing to trace it to a more honourable source, contend, that as the propensity evidently prevails chiefly among those, who are conscious of being able to transmit the colour of their hands to the objects on which they place them, it is decidedly an impulse of genius, and in all probability derived from our Pictish ancestors, whose passion for painting is well known to have been great and universal. (CG, 142)

The wry humor here would clearly have greater resonance with an educated audience than with the laboring class that Hamilton explicitly designates as her readers. As happens repeatedly in the novel, Hamilton employs the domestic to explore issues of much wider import. She moves from a discussion of unclean cottage walls to theories of evolution. She then invests the careless marks of dirty hands with the intentionality of art and a link to ancient civilization. The humor, though, is at the expense of the lower orders, and Hamilton indirectly addresses the reform debate, wherein the issue of the innate capabilities of the uneducated masses certainly was not a matter of consensus.

containing the best digested plan that the ingenuity of man has hitherto been able to invent, for facilitating, and perfecting the work of instruction” (CG, 375).

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The gloss Hamilton appended in the form of a letter to the second and later editions of the novel emphasizes the extent to which she was aware of the comic effect of the unflattering traits she attributed to the cottagers. The letter is supposedly addressed to the “Author of The Cottagers of Glenburnie” and “came to hand” too late in the publication process “to make due enquiry concerning the accuracy of the information it contains.” This letter revisits the MacClartys as inn keepers and echoes the vivid and comical descriptions of the middle section of the novel. The letter highlights Hamilton’s playfulness and interacts with the genre of the travel narrative as the traveler details the deficiencies of an inn run by the now grown MacClarty daughter Jean. While Jean’s fate is less dire than her sister’s (who is lost to the town after an illegitimate pregnancy), as an adult she is visited by the many inconveniences of not following Mrs. Mason’s recipe for efficient housekeeping, for nothing is in its place and nothing has been done in a timely fashion. The traveler suggests that future guests, when escorted into the “best dining room,” will believe that they have “immediately succeeded to a company who have been regaling themselves with rum-punch and tobacco; but you need not scruple to occupy the room on that account, as I assure you the smell is perennial.” Hamilton’s intent with this gloss is not merely to indulge in condescending humor but to continue to engage and promote the social reform that had long dominated her interest. In an 1808 letter to Dr. S., Hamilton explains her motivation for writing Cottagers: You will see in the newspapers, that I have not been quite idle all the winter; but were you to look into the little work which is now advertised, I am afraid you would think I have been employing myself to very little purpose. Had I thought it worthy of your perusal, I should have sent a copy; but in fact it is intended for a very different order of readers, and was written solely with a view to shame my good country folks into a greater degree of nicety with regard to cleanliness, and to awaken their attention to the source of corruption in the lower orders. The interest I have taken in our Edinburgh society for promoting industry, and the schools connected with it, has introduced me to a more intimate knowledge of the state of manners and morals among the poor than I have had any opportunity of obtaining for many years. Both seem to have been going back in that time, and to have declined in proportion as the nation has advanced in wealth and luxury.

The line “and was written solely with a view to shame my good country folks into a greater degree of nicety with regard to cleanliness, and to awaken their attention   Elizabeth Hamilton, The Cottagers of Glenburnie, second edition (Edinburgh: Stirling, Kenney, & Co.; London: James Duncan and H. Washbourne, 1837), 318.   Hamilton, Cottagers (1837), 319.    Benger, 2: 72–3.

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to the source of corruption in the lower orders” clearly indicates Hamilton’s dual audience and her sense that Cottagers addressed both the practical reform of the lower orders and the philosophical reform of the middle and upper classes regarding the issues of poverty and morality. Hamilton’s vision of her novel as a means to instruct the poor in manners and morals, thus closing the gap between them and their more prosperous countrymen, was shared by other liberal members of Edinburgh society. Hamilton, in fact, originally designed the Cottagers on the model of Hannah More’s Cheap Repository Tracts, moral lessons to be distributed among the poor. The final length of Cottagers made such a plan impractical, and its cost meant it would be read by “the class of persons” for whom it was not intended (CG, vi). As with the Cheap Repository Tracts and similar writings, it was suggested that persons purchase the novel and pass it along to readers in the lower orders. Thus the dissemination of the novel itself could become an act of benevolence. The Edinburgh Review advocated a more direct approach, requesting that Hamilton “strike out all scenes in upper life” and “print the remainder upon coarse paper, at such a price as may enable the volume to find its way into the cottage library.” Cottagers was deemed “useful” and “practical” by almost every reviewer, and according to “A Sketch of Mrs. Hamilton” from the “pen of a most intimate friend,” “[t]he peculiar humour of this work, by irritating our national pride, has produced a wonderful spirit of improvement. The cheap edition is to be found in every village library; and Mrs. M’Clarty’s example has provoked many a Scottish housewife into cleanliness and good order.”10 Such a claim for the book seems questionable, yet it accords with Hamilton’s designs. She had long believed that individual happiness and virtue contributed to national progress, and she had engaged in a number of activities to accomplish both. In her 1801 Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education, Hamilton urged parents to cultivate the “growth of benevolence in the infant mind” because “[b]enevolence, in a general sense, includes all the sympathetic affections by which we are made to rejoice in the happiness, and grieve at the misery, of others. It disposes the mind to sociality, generosity, and gratitude, and is the fountain of compassion and mercy.”11 Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education    Qtd in Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 291. In Cottage Dialogues Among the Irish Peasantry by Mary Leadbeater with Notes and a Preface by Maria Edgeworth (Philadelphia: A. Fagan, 1811), Edgeworth notes “Mrs Hamilton’s admirable Cottagers of Glenburnie—of which the public must rejoice to see a cheap edition for popular use” (135). 10   Qtd. in Benger, 1: 180. The “example” of Mrs. MacClarty is the moral lesson of the woman who refuses to reform either her housekeeping or her parenting according to Mrs. Mason’s precepts and pays dearly. She loses her husband to a curable fever; her disobedient children fare little better: the eldest is transported after deserting the military, the next eldest son marries badly and turns his mother out of the family home, and one of the daughters, as mentioned, disappears on the streets of Glasgow after an illegitimate pregnancy. 11  Elizabeth Hamilton, Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education, second edition, 2 vols. (Bath: R. Cruttwell, for G.G. & J. Robinson, London, 1801), 1: 181, 178–79.

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contains two full letters or chapters on “Associations Producing Benevolence” and one letter discussing “Associations Destructive of Benevolence.” For Hamilton, the “more frequently” the mind “has rejoiced in the consciousness of having conferred felicity on others, the more it will be disposed to a repetition of the acts of beneficence, charity, and mercy. Of what importance, then, is the early management of children; since upon it, in a great measure, depends the vice and virtue, the happiness and misery, of the world!”12 Fifteen years later, in her Hints Addressed to the Patrons and Directors of Schools, Hamilton credits the “spirit of charity” with the “attention that has of late been paid to the mental as well as to the physical wants of the poor, . . . and as the pleasure of doing good is not like other pleasures attended by satiety, there is little reason to apprehend that benevolence will speedily relax in its efforts.”13 Though Hamilton focused on methods for the cultivation and increase of benevolence, indicating that it was a quality to be taught, she believed that the “influence of maternal solicitude and maternal tenderness” endowed women in particular with the desire to act upon the benevolent affections, claiming in her 1815 Hints Addressed to Patrons and Directors that women had “instituted” or “endowed” more than three quarters of the schools for the poor in Britain and Ireland.14 In her Letters, Hamilton bolstered her own observations with a sort of anthropological account from the testimony of the African travelers John Ledyard and Mungo Park: In wandering over the barren plains of inhospitable Denmark, through honest Sweden, and frozen Lapland, rude and churlish Finland, unprincipled Russia, and the wide-spread regions of the wandering Tartar; if hungry, dry, cold, wet, or sick, the women have ever been friendly to me, and uniformly so; and to add to this virtue (so worthy the appellation of benevolence,) these actions have been performed in so free and so kind a manner, that if I was dry, I drank the sweetest draught, and if hungry, I ate the coarse morsel with a double relish.15

While Ledyard and Park’s sweeping characterizations of nations—“rude and churlish Finland,” for instance—might have made their generalizations 12

 Ibid., 1: 200.  Elizabeth Hamilton, Hints Addressed to the Patrons and Directors of Schools (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, & Brown, 1815), 2. Hamilton herself may have doubted the extent to which benevolence was self-perpetuating. In Cottagers, she comments wryly about how the village had been won over to Mrs. Mason’s methods for improvement: “Even the old women, who during the first summer had most bitterly exclaimed against the pride of innovation, were by mid-winter inclined to alter their tone. How far the flannel waistcoats and petticoats distributed among them, contributed to this change of sentiment, cannot be positively ascertained” (CG, 397). 14  Ibid., 42–3. 15  Hamilton, Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education , 1: 430–31. 13

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regarding gender and benevolence less credible, Hamilton seems to have taken their observations as confirmation of the global validity of her local experience. She advocated that “women of good sense and good education” be permitted to perform volunteer work and be given charge of the education of women in the schools without the interference of men.16 Janice Farrar Thaddeus suggests that for Hamilton, “her chief interest and subject was women—their position, their education, their means to power.”17 Mitzi Myers argues that Hamilton, as well as authors such as Edgeworth, More, and Mary Wollstonecraft, all “created ‘moral fantasies of benevolent female power achieved through usefulness, not love, visions of domestically grounded heroism as potent for radicals like Wollstonecraft as for Evangelicals like More.’”18 Hamilton wrote from personal experience, having helped found the Edinburgh House of Industry for women in 1804, an event that became inextricably linked with the writing of Cottagers. In the “Sketch of Mrs. Hamilton” published in the Memoirs, the “intimate friend” writes that It was not only by correcting the vulgar prejudices against literary women, that Mrs. Hamilton conferred the highest benefit on the society of Edinburgh, but by giving a new direction to the pursuits of her own sex, and by extending the sphere of female usefulness . . . she was enabled to devote much of her attention to the management of charitable institutions, particularly the House of Industry,—an institution supported by public subscription, which affords employment and instruction to the female poor . . . and it will be long before those who heard her affectionate exhortations to the little scholars, as she distributed the prizes to the most deserving, will forget the benevolence and wisdom of her counsels.19

The transition in the paragraph immediately following this quote begins, “If the active benevolence of our excellent friend was worthy of imitation, so was her exemplary submission to suffering,” thus indicating that the writing of Cottagers was viewed as categorically the same as Hamilton’s work for the House of Industry, that is, both were acts of benevolence.20 In her study of Vocational Philanthropy and British Women’s Writing, 1790–1810, Patricia Comitini comes to a similar conclusion: “Towards the end of the eighteenth century, charity takes on a distinctive tone of ‘self-help’ and the philanthropic work of women’s writing  See Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 298–9.   Janice Farrar Thaddeus, “Elizabeth Hamilton’s Domestic Politics,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 23 (1994): 269. 18   Qtd. in Thaddeus, 268, from Mitzi Myers, “Hannah More’s Tracts for the Times: Social Fiction and Female Ideology,” in Fetter’d or Free?: British Women Novelists, 1670– 1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), 277. 19   Qtd. in Benger, 1: 179. 20  Ibid. 16 17

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becomes disciplining readers into desiring self-improvement. Benevolence was an act of writing.”21 The Edinburgh House of Industry was “instituted for the purpose of affording assistance to aged females of respectable character . . . and of training the young to habits of industry and virtue.”22 Industry is the key word here, as it is in Cottagers. Members of the House of Industry engaged in spinning, lacework, and needlework, with young girls devoting one in ten hours to reading and spelling. Although Hamilton believed that the “pleasure” of benevolent actions makes them selfperpetuating, at some level she recognized the limit of such pleasure as a motivating force. The middle-class subscribers who supported the House of Industry were assured that the mission of the House was not to “make accomplished readers and needleworkers” but to form “active, diligent, and sober-minded servants, well instructed in their duty to God and man.”23 In Hints Hamilton urges general involvement in deciding the fate of poor girls: “Are not these girls destined to fill a place in society, in which they may either augment or detract from the peace and comfort of families? Are they not in themselves objects of interest to every benevolent mind?”24 Given the first question, the answer to the second question must be “no.” If the girls “themselves” inspired interest, then why would Hamilton suggest self-interest, that is, the “peace and comfort” of the middle class family, as motivation for charity? The girls in question here may “augment” the family’s comfort as well-trained servants, but “detract” here carries the veiled threat of girls as prostitutes (perhaps ruinous to the peace of a family). In fact, the Grey Coat School for Girls in York underwent investigation in the 1780s in part because “at that time nine miserable girls, who had been educated in it [were] upon the town, the wretched victims of prostitution.”25 What Hamilton and other advocates of benevolence understood was that pleasure alone would not perpetuate giving but accountability might. Catharine Cappe, in her Account of Two Charity Schools for the Education of Girls, published in 1800, includes multiple appendices to document the success of the schools. Cappe, whose work is referenced repeatedly by Hamilton in Hints, includes costcomparison analyses, “estimates” for the “price of food,” “earnings of the girls,” and a human accounting of how graduates of the school fared. Her interest in the project began upon becoming acquainted with the “numerous evils” to which 21

 Comitini, 1.   Qtd. in Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 277. Kelly writes that he quotes this information and the following from a four-page, separately paginated description of Hamilton’s House of Industry that he notes is included as an appendix in Exercises in Religious Knowledge (277, n. 9). The second edition (1810) that I examined of this text did not contain the appendix. 23   Qtd. in Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 278. 24  Hamilton, Hints, 159. 25  Catharine Cappe, Account of Two Charity Schools for the Education of Girls (York: William Blanchard: 1800), 18. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 22

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children employed in the York Hemp Manufactory, particularly girls, “were exposed.” She, like Hamilton’s Mrs. Mason, “determined to try if something could not be done to mend their condition” (1). Cappe and other interested ladies determined upon the plan to “establish a School for the Spinning of Worsted” in 1782 (2). Her original plan quickly developed into a full-fledged industry in which even the smallest decisions had to be accompanied by business rationale. Cappe details a proposal advanced for a second subscription for the “object of supplying the Children with Milk for Breakfast”: They attend the School early, and it was found not only that a great deal of time was wasted in going and returning, but that their breakfasts at home consisting generally of ordinary Tea, without Milk or Sugar, was not sufficiently nutritive to enable them to go through their work; and the good effects of this additional benefit are visible in the improved looks and greater activity and exertion of the children, and moreover it acts as an incentive to constant regular attendance. (12)

Clearly, under the charity school system, even the most basic benevolent action of feeding hungry children was subject to cost-benefit analysis, with explicit claims for investment and production results, that is, better-fed children have more energy to spin more wool. The paradox of industrial charity was widespread enough by the end of the eighteenth century for Maria Edgeworth’s seemingly naïve narrator Thady in Castle Rackrent to comment astutely on the state of the Irish charity schools. As you may recall from Chapter 2, when Thady discusses Sir Murtagh’s wife of the “family of Skinflints,” he remarks, However, my lady was very charitable in her own way. She had a charity school for poor children, where they were taught to read and write gratis, and where they were kept to spinning gratis for my lady in return; for she had always heaps of duty yarn from the tenants, and got all her household linen out of the estate from first to last; for after the spinning, the weavers on the estate took it in hand for nothing, because of the looms my lady’s interest could get from the Linen Board to distribute gratis. (C, 69)

Thady casually outlines the quid pro quo of the charity school, and though the word “gratis” appears three times in the passage, the benefits of the charity school are obviously weighted in favor of Sir Murtagh’s wife rather than of the children of the poor. Whereas Edgeworth’s irony shows sensitivity to the potential for exploitation in the charity school system, Hamilton kept her focus on its benefits. Both writers, of course, regarded education as essential to a progressive society, and in her 1801 Letters, Hamilton writes that wherever “education becomes an object of universal interest and attention, we may safely pronounce society to be in a state of

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progressive improvement.”26 As the Cottagers shows, however, her theory of education for the poor was narrowly prescriptive and focused on the vocational. Thus, she derides the “pretensions” of teaching Latin to the peasant children. The previous schoolmaster is said to have displayed “the pedantry of a blockhead, who piqued himself upon hic, haec, hoc” and is “as proud as he is stupid” (CG, 355).27 What Hamilton makes clear here and elsewhere is that charitable education should be tied inextricably to industry. Tobin observes that “[c]ombining surveillance with kindness, women of the middling ranks sought to teach the poor what they themselves had mastered: self-discipline and techniques for managing time, space, and resources. Women like Hannah More, Mary Leadbeater, and Elizabeth Hamilton believed that the poor’s misery and destitution were the result of ignorance and improvidence and that if they could be taught to control their appetites and passions (a Malthusian wish) they could then begin to apply their energies to making the best of their limited resources by learning household economy.”28 The charity school of Cottagers operates according to the system of Belfast educator David Manson. In one of only two footnotes to Cottagers, Hamilton praises Manson’s methods at length, which feature a landlord, tenant, and undertenant system, where the student “landlord” tasks student “tenants” with lessons, which they complete and return as “rents.” “Each of the tenants had one or two under-tenants, who were in like manner bound to pay him a certain portion of reading, or spelling lesson; and when the class was called up, the landlord was responsible to the master, as superior lord, not only for his own diligence, but for the diligence of his vassals” (CG, 387). Manson’s system reinforces the social order. It reifies class hierarchies and the inherent duties of the workers to their landlord. Along with later methods by Lancaster, Manson’s ideally facilitated the most efficient means for teaching the poor. A single school-master could thus actively teach far greater numbers of children.29 Boys performing well within this system were rewarded with “premiums” in the form of gardening implements and seeds. The “two girls who had best performed the duties assigned to them, were promoted to the honour of dusting and rubbing the furniture” in Mrs. Mason’s parlour (CG, 391). Thus good work secures tools and opportunities for continued industry. Having attended the school of Glenburnie “was considered as an ample recommendation to a servant, and  Hamilton, Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education, 1: xi.   A September 16, 1811 letter from Hamilton to Dr. S_____ indicates that Hamilton may have been persuaded that she was wrong about a classical education for the poor. Upon visiting an “excellent school-house” in a town outside of Edinburgh, Hamilton notes, “About twenty of the boys were in the Latin class; and the effect produced by the exertion thus given to their faculties, was so perceptible in their superior intelligence, as to afford a convincing evidence of the advantages of classical education” (qtd. in Benger, 2: 130). 28   Tobin, Superintending the Poor, 120. 29   Though initially lauded as one of the greatest innovators in educational instruction, Lancaster and his methods became quite controversial by the 1820s. 26 27

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implied a security for truth, diligence, and honesty. And fortunate was the lad pronounced, whose bride could boast of the tokens of Mrs Mason’s favour and approbation; for never did these fail to be followed by a conduct, that insured happiness, and prosperity” (CG, 400).30 Through Mrs. Mason’s example and efforts in the schoolhouse, the village of Glenburnie is also gradually transformed, and the previous hovels become model cottages, admired by every traveler. (She also gains the power to distribute money.) The benevolent gift of Hamilton’s charity is what she termed the “blessing of Providence upon industry.” Though the villagers are slow to acknowledge the benefit of the new gaits introduced by Mrs. Mason, they gradually are won over: “as the people were coming from church the first fine day of the following spring, all stopped a few moments before the school-house, to inhale the fragrance of the sweet-brier, and to admire the beauty of the crocuses, primroses, and violets, which embroidered the borders of the grass-plot” (CG, 395–6); thus the school becomes the new center for the community and the impetus for the “improvements that were speedily to take place in the village of Glenburnie” (CG, 397). Hamilton writes that the improvements

 It seems obvious that Hamilton was familiar with Sarah Scott’s A Description of Millenium Hall (edited by Gary Kelly [1762; repr., Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1999], in which the utopian community run by women employs a similar relation of benevolence and industry. Mrs. Mancel describes to her cousin the school and methods for molding conduct: 30

By little presents they shew their approbation of those who behave well, always proportioning their gifts to the merits of the person; which are therefore looked upon as the most honourable testimony of their conduct, and are treasured up as valuable marks of distinction. This encouragement has great influence, and makes them vye with each other in endeavors to excel in sobriety, cleanliness, meekness and industry. She told me also, that the young women bred up at the schools these ladies support, are so much esteemed for many miles round, that it is not uncommon for young farmers, who want sober good wives, to obtain them from thence, and prefer them to girls of much better fortunes, educated in a different manner, as there have been various instances wherein their industry and quickness of understanding, which in great measure arises from the manner of their education, has proved more profitable to their husbands than a more ample dower. She added, that she keeps a register of all the boys and girls, which, by her good ladies means, have been established in the world; whereby it appears, that thirty have been apprenticed out to good trades, three-score fixed in excellent places, and thirty married. And it seldom happens, that any one takes an apprentice or servant, till they have first sent to her ladies to know if they have any to recommend. (168)

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had their origin in the spirit of emulation excited among the elder schoolboys, for the external appearance of their respective homes. The girls exerted themselves with no less activity, to effect a reformation within doors; and so successful were they in their respective operations, that by the time the Earl of Longlands came to take possession of Hill Castle, when he, accompanied by his two sisters, came to visit Mrs Mason at Glenburnie, the village presented such a picture of neatness and comfort, as excelled all that in the course of their travels they had seen.” (CG, 397)

For Hamilton, upward social mobility had no place in the “domestic rebellion” she advocates; the intent remains limited to enhancing the character and lives of the poor and thereby contributing to the national common wealth. In Cottagers, she has Mr. Stewart delineate his objections to his daughter Bell’s friends the Flinders, focusing upon their “paltry attempts at concealing the meanness of their origin by parade and ostentation.” Expanding this particular critique to one of much greater scope, he says, “It is them, and such as them, who, by giving a false bent to ambition, have undermined our national virtues, and destroyed our national character; and they have done this, by leading such as you to connect all notions of happiness, with the gratification of vanity, and to undervalue the respect that attends on integrity and wisdom” (CG, 342–3). When Mrs. Morison bemoans the fact that her daughters “must be obliged to work: poor things,” Mrs. Mason quickly rejoins, “and on what can they depend so well as on their own exertions?” (CG, 348). She promises the worried mother that the “good Providence of God” will provide for her family: “Who ever saw the righteous man forsaken, or the righteous man’s children either, so long as they walked in their father’s steps?” (CG, 349). As Gary Kelly points out, “social emulation and ambition” in Cottagers leads “to a fall.”31 The characters who over-reach meet with literary justice: when the middle-class Bell attempts to marry an aristocrat, he turns out to be a penniless tradesman’s son; when Mr. Morison “wished to raise [his] wife and bairns above their station,” he goes bankrupt, believing God has punished his pride. In his study of Hamilton’s writings, Ian Campbell posits that Hamilton’s non-fiction and fiction promote “[g]ood sound education, early training, a keen awareness of religious responsibility, civic duty and an acceptance of the given role in society and life” as the “keys to happiness.”32 For Hamilton, benevolence, prudently applied, could improve Scottish national character by elevating the poor without disturbing the classes above. The title of her book and the introductory glosses reveal her desire to challenge depictions of Scottish character constructed by Robert Burns and fostered by John Wilson, which romanticize the poor. Hamilton’s novel certainly indulges in moments of high sentimentalism, yet, for the most part, its “realism” and pragmatism explode romanticized representations of the peasant classes popular in print and   Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 285.  Ian Campbell, “Glenburnie Revisited,” Scottish Studies (1992): 73.

31 32

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visual culture. Hamilton’s seven-page dedication to Hector MacNeill serves both to honor MacNeill and to position herself as his ally in illustrating the habits of the poor that need to be reformed. Hamilton approaches MacNeill in the dedication as an equal, for by the time she wrote Cottagers, she was already quite famous. In addition to Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, she had published Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), Letters on Education (1801), and Letters, Addressed to the Daughter of a Nobleman (1806).33 Her position as hostess of a well-established literary salon in Edinburgh was secure, so her dedication to MacNeill does not embody the usual expectations of patronage or some more contemporary form of reciprocal favor.34 Hamilton appears to have had genuine respect for MacNeill and a desire to affirm their joint interest in “the moral habits, or domestic comforts of their brethren of any rank” (CG, xi). (MacNeill was known for his commitment to temperance.) For reformers such as they, Hamilton declares, “Precious in their eyes are the gleams of joy that illumine the poor man’s cottage; sacred the peace that reigns in it; doubly sacred the virtues by which alone that peace can be established or secured” (CG, xi). These were not far from Hamilton’s private sentiments as well. In an undated letter to MacNeill, Hamilton writes, “And I do assure you, my dear friend, upon my honour, that, of all the testimonies of approbation I have yet received, none has been so truly gratifying to my feelings as that your last letter conveyed. Applause is, in my estimation, a sort of paper currency, which I value in exact proportion to the degree of credit in which I hold the bank that utters it. . . . I feel with you that the value of approbation rises in proportion to its being discriminating.”35 While Hamilton claims no pretensions to equaling the “genius” of MacNeill’s poem, Scotland’s Scaith; or, The History o’ Will and Jean: Owre True a Tale!, she muses, “but if it shall be admitted, that the writers have been influenced by similar motives, I shall be satisfied with the share of approbation that must inevitably follow” (v). In his own dedication to the 1800 Edinburgh edition of his poem, MacNeill explains his motives for inscribing the poem to David Doig, “Master of the Grammar School, Stirling,” who apparently shares his commitment to reform: My motives for having depicted, and yours in publishing this too faithful portrait of modern depravity, were the same. Impressed with the baneful consequences inseparable from an inordinate use of ardent spirits among the lower orders of 33  Elizabeth Hamilton, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, 3 vols. (Bath: R. Cruttwell, for G.G. & J. Robinson, London, 1800); Letters on Education (Bath: R. Cruttwell, for G.G. & J. Robinson, London, 1801); Letters, Addressed to the Daughter of A Nobleman, on the Formation of Religious and Moral Principle, 2 vols. (London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1806); Letters on Education was also published as the revised edition, Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education. 34  For an acute discussion of dedications, Genette, 117–36. 35   Benger, 2: 26–7.

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MacNeill clearly espouses the philanthropic potential of literature, believing that fiction could “retard ” immoral tendencies, that it could reform the individual, and hence, the nation. Hamilton, who shared MacNeil’s “ardour of philanthropy,” seems to take his dedication as her model in Cottagers. She writes, “independently of all considerations of esteem or friendship, I know not to whom the COTTAGERS OF GLENBURNIE could be with such propriety inscribed, as to the Author of the SKAITH [sic] OF SCOTLAND” (CG, v). By explicitly evoking MacNeill in her dedication, Hamilton here enlists Cottagers in MacNeill’s agenda to illustrate the detrimental habits of the lower orders, similarly presenting a tale “in the language of simplicity and passion” in hopes of protecting and promoting “endangered virtue.” Though little of Hamilton’s Cottagers focuses on the scaith of whisky, her tale engages the same contrasts between sloth and indolence on the one hand and virtuous industry on the other, which MacNeill employs to good effect in his poem. Cottagers also functions like MacNeill’s Scaith in employing a domestic scenario to effect reform. Hamilton’s dedicatory paratext suggests that she desires readers to think of her work in conjunction with MacNeill’s popular poem. While MacNeill clearly proclaims the “inordinate use of ardent spirits” as the scaith detrimental to the laboring classes, the text of his poem reveals that he links imbibing whisky with an equally dangerous habit, that of taking the “news.” The Will and Jean of MacNeill’s poem marry in the full “bloom” of youth and foster a life of full domestic pleasure: Youth and worth and beauty cuppl’d; Luve had never less to do. Three short years flew by fu’ canty, Jean and Will thought them but ane; Ilka day brought joy and plenty, Ilka year a dainty wean; 36  Hector MacNeill, Scotland’s Scaith; or, The History o’ Will and Jean: Owre True a Tale! ‘New Edition.’ Edinburgh: a. Guthrie, Manners & Miller, and Ar. Constable, 1800, ii. Scotland’s Scaith had already sold ten thousand copies in the “short space of five months” (MacNeill ii), so it had, indeed, been “liberally patronised” before MacNeill chose to dedicate the later edition to Doig.

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Will wrought sair, but aye wi’ pleasure; Jean the hale day span and sang; Will and Weans her constant treasure, Blest wi’ them, nae day seem’d lang; (39–48)37

For MacNeill here, the joys of domestic life are intrinsically linked with Will’s and Jean’s willingness to labor. Will “wrought sair” and Jean combines spinning, a domestic labor with external market potential, with childcare. MacNeill introduces temptation into this intimate and self-contained scene in the guise of the public house: “But at this time News and Whisky / Sprang nae up at ilk road-side” (51–2). Will, homeward bound, meets up with his neighbor Tam, a name clearly connected to Burns’s Tam O’ Shanter, and though “Baith wish’d for their ain fire side” (68), the two men are lured by the sign “PORTER, ALE and BRITISH SPIRITS, / Painted bright between twa trees” (95–6).38 The single night’s binge becomes an “owkly meetin,” and Will’s attention and wages go to the proprietor, Widow Maggie Howe, rather than to Jean and his children. The “British Spirits” of the sign open the secluded Scottish village to degrading national imports, both literal and metaphoric. Drinking in the home is encouraged even by reformers,39 but drinking in the public house threatens domestic as well as national peace because the public house provides a forum for subversive activity. MacNeill writes: Drink maun aye hae conversation, Ilka social soul allows; But, in this REFORMIN NATION, Wha can speak without the NEWS? News, first meant for state Physicians, Deeply skill’d in Courtly drugs; Now whan a’ are Politicians, Just to set folks by the lugs. 37

  The poems of MacNeill, Burns, and Gray will all be cited parenthetically by line.   The hero of Burns’s “Tam O’ Shanter,” described by his long-waiting wife as “A blethering, blustering, drunken blellum; / That frae November till October, / Ae market-day thou was na sober; / That ilka melder wi’ the Miller, / Thou sat as lang as thou had siller; / That ev’ry naig was ca’d a shoe on / The Smith and thee gat roarin’ fou on; / That at the Lord’s house, ev’n on Sunday, / Thou drank wi’ Kirkton Jean till Monday, / She prophesied that late or soon, /Thou wad be found, deep drown’d in Doon” (lines 20–30). 39  See Hannah More’s The Cottage Cook, or, Mrs. Jones’s Cheap Dishes (London: J. Marshall, 1797), where the reforming widow, after campaigning to close two public houses, “had the pleasure to see many an honest man drinking his wholesome cup of beer by his own fire side” (11), thus saving money and solidifying the domestic circle. 38

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Maggie’s Club, wha cou’d get nae light On some things that shou’d be clear, Found ere lang the fau’t, and ae night Clubb’d and gat the GAZETTEER*. Twice a week to Maggie’s cot-house, Swith! by post the papers fled! Thoughts spring up like plants in hot-house, Every time the news are read. (141-156)

Should readers doubt the content of the “news,” MacNeill’s asterisk sends them to his note: “The EDINBURGH GAZETTEER, a violent opposition paper, published in 1793–4” (16).40 MacNeill suggests that political unrest—such as amateur politicians seeking to “mak a’ things square and even” (162) —contributes to excessive drinking and that public house conversation encourages dissatisfaction with the cottagers’ domestic lot. From the degeneration of Will’s and Jean’s personal lives and the general tone of the poem, MacNeill emphasizes that the lovers cannot effect positive change by becoming informed about national affairs. The gloss of Hamilton’s dedication to MacNeill, though not as overtly political as her dedication to Warren Hastings in Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, still engages in political work, framing her domestic novel as a political statement and suggesting the inherent connections between domestic representation and national politics. Hamilton was deeply committed to one of several competing notions of the national character, and her dedication serves as one means of placing that commitment within a positive light, despite the criticism of the poor it involves. She reminds MacNeill, and her readers, of the “warm attachment to the country of our ancestors” that “naturally produces a lively interest in all that concerns its happiness and prosperity.” Yet she acknowledges that “widely different are the views” endorsing the “manner” in which such attachment to Caledonia “ought to be displayed”: In the opinion of vulgar minds, it ought to produce a blind and indiscriminating partiality for national modes, manners, and customs; and a zeal that kindles into rage at whoever dares to suppose that our country has not in every instance reached perfection. Every hint at the necessity of further improvement is, by such persons, deemed a libel on all that has already been done. (CG, viii)

While Hamilton does not mention Robert Burns or his promoters as propagators of such “indiscriminating partiality,” MacNeill, in his poem, is explicit: “Robin 40

 In the 1795 second edition of the poem, MacNeill was even more elaborate in his gloss of the Gazetteer: “The EDINBURGH GAZETTEER, a scandalous paper, evidently calculated to inflame the minds of the people against Government, by an insertion of gross falsehoods and misrepresentations” (10).

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Burns, in mony a ditty, / Loudly sings in whisky’s praise; / Sweet his sang—the mairs the pity” (233–35).41 Hamilton puts her opposition in more general terms, which are just as forceful: Happily, there are others, to whom the prosperity of their country is no less dear, though its interests are viewed by them through a very different medium. National happiness they consider as the aggregate of the sum of individual happiness, and individual virtue. The fraternal tie, of which they feel the influence, binds them, not exclusively to the poor or to the affluent—it embraces the interests of all. (CG, x)

Though she does not mention him by name, Hamilton directly engages with Burns by choosing the exact passage from Gray’s “Elegy in a Country ChurchYard” for her epigraph to Cottagers as Burns had used for the epigraph to his “Cotter’s Saturday Night”: “Let not Ambition mock their useful toil, / Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; / Nor Grandeur bear, with a disdainful smile, /The short and simple annals of the Poor.” By framing her own tale with this identical gloss, Hamilton signals her desire to have Cottagers serve as a pendant or companion piece to the “Cotter’s Saturday Night.” For her, the nation was best represented not by idealizing the poor and their habits, as Burns’s nostalgic poem does, but by a broader and more realistic portrayal of the Scottish people as a whole. The Thomas Gray poem, because it is an elegy, both laments and celebrates the life and contribution of the peasant. The nostalgia of the poem is predicated in part upon the forgotten value of the laborer. His was a life that could transpire unnoticed or evoke disdain from the upper classes. The neglected accounting of this life takes place in a country graveyard, eliding the living and virile peasant by a shallow indentation in the cemetery. The poem makes clear that the poor whose annals are worth recording are those invested in “useful toil.” The stanza preceding the lines of the epigraph romanticizes the labor of the poor: “Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield, / Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke; / How jocund did they drive their team afield! / How bow’d the woods beneath their sturdy stroke” (25–28). This portrait of “jocund” peasants gives the false impression of their power as the earth submits to them—the harvest “yield[s],” the furrow is broken, and the woods “bow’d.” However, the power here emanates from the narrative voice rather than from the laborer. The poem presents a series of imperatives where the narrator seemingly must urge that the peasants’ lives are worthy of some respect, “Let not Ambition mock,” “Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile,” and “Nor you, ye Proud, impute to these the fault, / If memory o’er their tomb no trophies raise” (29, 31, 37–8). The narrator’s admonitions, and repeated apologies for the lives unmarked by external validation, serve to emasculate the laborers, 41

  As Gary Kelly has pointed out, MacNeill “assimilated the popular dialect tradition of Robert Burns but eliminated Burns’s ‘licentiousness’ and ‘immorality’, and especially his pro-Revolutionary sentiments” ( Women, Writing, and Revolution, 279).

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who are isolated, idealized and silenced: “Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife, / Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray; / Along the cool sequester’d vale of life / They kept the noiseless tenour of their way” (73–6). Like Gray, Burns valorizes the poor in his “Cotter’s Saturday Night,” a poem that celebrates a single day in the life of a humble Scottish laboring family. Burns proposes to “sing, in simple Scottish lays, / The lowly train in life’s sequester’d scene; / The native feelings strong, the guileless ways” of the cottagers (5–7); however, the cotters in Burns’s poem are vital, energetic, and anything but silent. The scene bustles with activity in the present, and instead of pining nostalgically for the past, foresees a promising future for the cottagers’ children: “The Parents partial eye their hopeful years; Anticipation forward points the view” (41–2). In the poem, Burns chronicles the return of the “toil-worn Cotter” to his home (14), greeted “wi’ flichterin noise and glee” by his “expectant wee-things” and smiling “Wifie” (21–24). Burns emphasizes the setting of the cottage as a domestic space removed from the world with phrases such as “sequester’d scene,” “lonely Cot,” and “Cottage far apart” (6, 19, 151), but the poem is decidedly not a lament, and the daughter Jenny’s prospective suitor links the cotters to a network of other villagers. As the cotters contemplate their future, they are empowered through their religious beliefs. Partaking not of the pageantry and false power that “men display to congregations wide” (147), the poor family’s solitary religious practice is presented as one of integrity. The poet suggests that here God “[m]ay hear, well pleas’d, the language of the Soul; / And in His Book of Life the Inmates poor enroll” (152–3). What made Burns’s poem truly remarkable was his move in the final three verses from this sequestered scene to claims of nationalistic import: “From scenes like these, old SCOTIA’S grandeur springs, / That makes her lov’d at home, rever’d abroad: / Princes and lords are but the breath of kings, / ‘An honest man’s the noble work of GOD’” (ll. xx–x). While the rural poor of Gray’s poem seem to moulder quietly to dust and return pleasantly to the earth, Burns’s poor become the salvation of the nation: O SCOTIA! my dear, my native soil! For whom my warmest wish to heaven is sent! Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil, Be blest with health, and peace, and sweet content! And O may Heaven their simple lives prevent From Luxury’s contagion, weak and vile! Then howe’er crowns and coronets be rent, A virtuous Populace may rise the while; And stand a wall of fire around their much-lov’d ISLE. (172–180)

As Hamilton was composing her Cottagers, Burns’s “Cotters Saturday Night” was in the process of becoming the emblematic Burns poem; it had been moved to the front of his collection, and critics, such as Currie, Macpherson, and

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Wilson, were working to recast Burns as Scotland’s national poet. The case of Burns presented a certain dilemma for Hamilton. She, on the one hand, admired him greatly, but, on the other hand, became resistant to the use of his works as representative of Scottish national character. In private letters and in Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), she praises him both for his gift of capturing the Scottish dialect and initially for his realistic portrayal of Scottish peasants. In a letter written in April 1801 after having read James Currie’s biography of Burns, Hamilton comments, The strength of Burns’s feelings, the character of his mind, had excited an enthusiastic admiration, at a period when my own enthusiastic feelings were in perfect unison with those of the poet; and in him alone did I meet with the expression of a sensibility in which I could perfectly sympathise: in his emotions there was a strength, an energy, that came home to my heart; while the tender sorrows of all other poets had to me appeared mawkish and insipid. Even the strong light in which he saw the ridiculous, was, I fear, too agreeable to me. The idea I then formed of his mind has been confirmed by Dr. Currie’s delineation of it. A mind conscious of superior powers, but placed by fortune in an inferior situation, must not only have uncommon magnanimity, but a judgment highly cultivated, to insulate itself, and stand, in a manner, alone in society.42

Hamilton stresses her kinship with Burns here, commending his genius and energy, but with a nod to his low station as well, which isolated him in a social sense. Eight years before Cottagers, Hamilton had penned a tribute to Burns in her Modern Philosophers, where her enlightened hero, Dr. Henry Sydney, discusses his tour of Scotland at length, finding the “peasantry of Scotland” far “superior” to their English counterparts in terms of education: “Their reading (for there all can read) was, it is true, often confined to the Bible; but it would seem, that the knowledge of the Bible alone can have a wonderful effect in enlightening the understanding and invigorating the intellect.”43 Henry continues with a description of the many “labourer’s” cottages that he visited in Scotland. He describes in particular detail one idyllic family where a man reads aloud from a “long chapter of the Pilgrim’s Progress,” while everyone in the cottage is cheerfully employed: two tailors sat “stitching away at a great rate,” as two adolescent girls were “industriously employed at their spinning wheels,” and the “good woman of the house was busied in preparing oat cakes.”44 The benevolent Harriet Orwell responds to Henry’s description, “How charmed I am . . . to find that the beautiful description given by Burns in his ‘Cotter’s Saturday Night,’ was not the mere child of fancy, but an original picture taken from truth and nature.” Henry confirms her   Benger, 2: 2–3.  Elizabeth Hamilton, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, ed. Claire Grogan (1800; repr., Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2000), 110. 44  Ibid., 114. 42

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assessment, “It is, indeed . . . so true a picture, and so justly drawn, that it has been repeatedly called to my remembrance by similar scenes.”45 Hamilton follows Henry’s description with a lengthy excerpt from the Burns poem, claiming Burns renders an “exact description.”46 By 1808, Hamilton has witnessed the state of the Scottish poor first-hand and such “intimate” knowledge seems to have stripped away her admiration for Burns’s idealized representations. As she started working with the House of Industry and spent more time among the Scottish poor, she realized that the idealized cottage scenes with the happy cottagers were unlikely to direct attention toward improving their lives. In much the same way that her decision to write her Letters of a Hindoo Rajah in the epistolary style was neither a neutral nor a particularly feminine genre choice, her decision to situate Cottagers principally in the domain of the cottage was also a politically charged decision, especially her interior perspective on the cottage door. As with the frontispiece from the 1812 edition of the novel (see Figure 5.2), her focus is on unpleasant details, such as the large dunghill blocking any view to the outdoors and the ducklings almost transgressing into the cottage. Gainsborough’s idealized cottage door scenes from the 1780s were one example of the visual culture’s answer to Burns and Gray. Many of the picturesque cottages were painted or drawn from the outside and represented a pastoral ideal. As Ann Bermingham, John Barrell, and others have compellingly demonstrated, such eighteenth-century depictions of the rural poor existed in a semiotic relationship with British social policy. These representations were guided by societal critique and, in turn, influenced thinking about the poor. Barrell suggests that responses to questions of where and how to situate the figures of the poor in a landscape by painters such as George Lambert, Gainsborough and Constable “reveal attitudes not to the poor alone but to the society as a whole, which may be their own, or their customers’, or both; and in this way their paintings come to express what they or their customers wish to believe was true about the rural poor and their relations with nature and with the rest of society.”47 Bermingham argues that the “picturesque, like the political debates of the period about the problem of rural poverty, mystified the agency of social change so that fate, and not the economic decisions of the landowning classes, seemed responsible. In this respect, the picturesque represented an attempt to wipe out the fact of enclosure and to minimize its consequences.”48 Bermingham further posits that some of the “features” of the picturesque—the “class snobbery, the distancing of the spectator from the picturesque object, and the aestheticization of rural poverty—suggest that at a deeper level the picturesque endorsed the results of

45

 Ibid., 115.  Ibid., 116. 47   John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 18. 48   Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology, 75. 46

Fig. 5.2 Frontispiece. In The Cottagers of Glenburnie, a Tale, for the Farmer’s Fire-side (1812), by Elizabeth Hamilton.

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agricultural industrialization.”49 Instead of working with anonymous industrious figures in the middle-distance that might be more reassuring for the rich, Hamilton opts for a close examination of her rural poor characters. The cottage, as emblematic of the national health of Britain, was employed repeatedly during this period. The cottagers appear in various types of print propaganda and on medals. Some idealized cottage door scenes typically focused upon a solitary cottage with the women and children appearing well-dressed and well-fed (see Figure 5.1). The “unreality of Gainsborough’s peasants” was attacked by William Hazlitt, “who accused the artist of introducing the ‘masquerade style’ into landscape painting, in which the driver of a hay-cart is given the ‘air of Adonis’ and the features of a milkmaid are ‘modeled on the antique.’”50 Contemporary painter Thomas Hearne voiced similar objections to Gainsborough’s cottage paintings: his “representations of the simple life are given with such taste as to delight and never offend. He is never coarse; His Peasant in rags has no filth; no idea of dirt or wretchedness is ever excited.”51 In addition, as Barrell observes, none of the aspects of village communal life are featured (the inn/pub, the green) in these paintings; the cottages are isolated and apparently self-contained. Similarly, the aesthetic ideal of the ruined cottage pleased the eye, but elided the fact that the cotters had abandoned their domestic home in the country for work in an industrial center. Reformers, as opposed to casual observers, interpreted the ruined cottage as a sign of poverty and neglect. In Hannah More’s Black Giles the Poacher (1796), as Barrell points out, the protagonist plans to survive by cunning rather than by industry. Giles will not repair his cottage because he believes that the sight of the ruined cottage will play upon the sympathy of the passersby. The description of the cottage is remarkably similar to the main cottage described by Hamilton in Cottagers. It has “broken windows, stuffed with dirty rags,” as well as “ragged tiles on the roof, and the loose stones which are ready to drop out from the chimney; though a short ladder, a hod of mortar, and an hour’s leisure time would have prevented all this.”52 Like Hamilton, More encourages a timely action to avoid drastic consequences (a tile in time). However, More makes clear that the philanthropist is much more likely to assist the industrious cottagers, rather than someone like Black Giles. Cottagers, like the Cheap Repository Tracts, does not simply suggest social reform but is instrumental in effecting that reform. Hamilton believed that her 49

 Ibid.   Bermingham, introduction to Sensation and Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough’s “Cottage Door,” ed. Ann Bermingham, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 6. 51   Bermingham, “Gainsborough’s ‘Cottage Door’ in Sir John Leichester’s ‘Tent Room,’” in Sensation and Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough’s “Cottage Door” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 158. 52   Quoted in John Barrell, “Spectacles for Republicans,” in Sensation and Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough’s “Cottage Door,” ed. Ann Bermingham (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 56. 50

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writing had the power to change society. In the same 1808 letter where Hamilton reveals to Dr. S______ that she has written Cottagers “to awaken their attention to the source of corruption in the lower orders,” she discusses just having read a “publication which plainly shows what may be accomplished by the persevering exertions of a righteous zeal. I allude to Clarkson’s History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which I think one of the most interesting books I have ever read. One cannot help envying the feelings of this good man in contemplating the effects of his labours; nor can we reflect on the extensive consequences they may produce, in rescuing millions of our fellow-creatures from a state of misery and degradation.”53 By linking Cottagers with Thomas Clarkson’s work, Hamilton expresses here her belief that writing could indeed be a benevolent act, motivating action on behalf of those in need. In the final pages of the The Cottagers of Glenburnie, Hamilton, who was indebted to More and surely familiar with Gainsborough, returns to the language of the picturesque with which she began, and she also moves back to the exterior of the cottages. Ironically, the “modern improver” alluded to in Hamilton’s opening description of the glen is now very much in evidence. She has regulated the behavior of the poor, which has brought order to the landscape. The natural elements have been carefully placed and the palette of “embroidered” flowers evinces the feminine influence of the particular improver. The village presents a “picture of neatness and comfort,” but the “ornamental” “coverings of honeysuckle and ivy” and the “flowering shrubs, that were trimly nailed against the walls” are in the service of industry. In supplying the “goodly rows of bee-hives” with sustenance, the “flowers were of other use besides regaling the sight or smell” (CG, 397–8). The domestic rebellion has succeeded. Of all of the novels discussed in this study, Cottagers is the only one directed at a lower-class audience. Though Cottagers and Castle Rackrent seem to have much in common because of their shared experimentation with dialect, Edgeworth’s audience was far removed from a world conceivably occupied by Thady Quirk. As discussed in Chapter 2, Edgeworth clearly designed Castle Rackrent for an English audience, as her justification of the glosses tells us. Historical context also makes the two novels quite different. While I have shown that the humor of Castle Rackrent veiled the anxiety of a potential native Irish uprising in the years immediately following the 1798 rebellion, Hamilton’s peasants, though not wishing to be “fashed,” hardly seem likely to be fomenting revolt. In the world of Hamilton’s Cottagers, industry and cleanliness can ultimately reform a nation.

53

  Benger, 2: 73, 70–71.

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Chapter 6

“Have you Irish?”: Heroism in Morgan’s The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys

When Shane-na-Brien, the wild Irishman of Lady Morgan’s The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys: A National Tale (1827) encounters, after many years, Murrogh O’Brien, the hero of her final Irish novel, he asks him, “Have you Irish?” and O’Brien replies, “Not enough to converse with you. . . I have almost lost my Irish, though I still understand it.” In this novel, Morgan employs the irony of the hero of an Irish national tale having “almost lost” his Irish to subtly critique the constructs of national heroism, many of which she had championed in her first national tale The Wild Irish Girl. Morgan’s artful critique can be seen most clearly through an exploration of three types of the novel’s glosses: 1) Morgan’s Preface; 2) a media shift to a medieval manuscript entitled Annals of St. Grellan; and 3) dramatic glosses within the text and the epigraphs, especially from John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), Isaac Bickerstaff’s The Sultan; or, a Peep into the Seraglio (1775), and Ludvico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516). All of these glosses reveal a novel at odds with its narrative form and use female agency and the construction of Irishness to challenge the conventions of traditional romance. In this chapter, I will argue that Morgan doubted the efficacy of heroes like O’Brien to effect positive change in Ireland, and her glosses focus attention on the lead female characters to show the power they wield despite the limitations of gender. In The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys, Morgan employs almost all of the variations of editorial and cultural glosses that have been discussed in relation to the principal novels of this study. Like Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, Castle Rackrent, and The Wild Irish Girl, this novel demonstrates an active editorial presence in a Preface and extensive footnotes. The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys differs from these earlier novels, however, in glossing what is mostly a third-person narrative (the first chapter is epistolary), so the editorial voice coalesces more naturally with the central narrative. While the footnotes here do make references to other texts, there is nothing approaching the display of Irish print resources as found in The Wild Irish Girl. The editorial voice seems more assured in making observations and Irish translations without outside reference. In perhaps the most elaborate gloss that we have seen, Morgan experiments with a media shift to a replication of  Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson), The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys: A National Tale (1827; repr., London: Pandora Press, 1988), 246. Hereafter abbreviated O and cited parenthetically by page number. 

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a medieval text. Like Edgeworth in Belinda, Morgan adds laminations to the text through ekphrastic glosses in the Annals and at the Abbey of Moycullen. Though the central narrative of the novel revels in disguise and double meanings, the Preface to The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys presents the most straightforward political claims of any of the novels discussed in this book. In it Morgan anticipates the central thrust of the work and fiercely defends her right to have a political voice: I anticipate upon this, as upon similar occasions, that I shall be accused of unfeminine presumption in ‘meddling with politics;’ but while so many of my countrywomen ‘meddle’ with subjects of much higher importance;—while missionary misses and proselytising peeresses affect to ‘stand instead of God, amongst the children of men,’ may not I be permitted, under the influence of merely human sympathies, to interest myself for human wrongs; to preach in my way on the ‘evil that hath come upon my people,’ and to ‘fight with gentle words, till time brings friends,’ in that cause, which made Esther eloquent, and Judith brave? For love of country is of no sex. It was by female patriotism that the Jews attacked their tyrants, and ‘broke down their stateliness by the hands of a woman;’ and who (said their enemies) ‘would despise a nation, which had amongst them such women?’ (O, xv)

In this initial paratext, Morgan boldly defends her “meddling in politics” and eschews the more standard preface that claims modesty and usefulness. Though she seems to mock female authors working in the more sanctioned field of religious writings, Morgan, while claiming humanist motivation, cleverly chooses as her model the biblical heroine Judith who single-handedly brought down the Assyrian leader Holofernes by charming her way into his tent. As you may recall, Judith beheads Holofernes and returns to the Hebrews to direct their battle against the Assyrians. While Judith credits God for all of her success, the biblical narration emphasizes, as Morgan does, the defeat of the Assyrians “by the hands of a woman.” This passage foregrounds a central theme in The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys of the efficacy of female agency, and Morgan’s insistence that it is not only natural but necessary to right the wrongs of an oppressed nation. Morgan continues to politicize the Preface by labeling the contemporary era in Ireland as an “epoch of transition between the ancient despotism of brute force, and the dawning reign of public opinion”; she then explicitly targets the “supremacy of the oligarchy,” whose “sense of irresponsible power engendered a contempt for private morals, as fatal as their political corruption” (O, xvi). Like Hamilton and Edgeworth, Morgan links private action to the health of the nation and sees 

 Ina Ferris has also argued compellingly for the effectiveness of Morgan’s female characters in her later novels; see Chaper 3, “Female Agents: Rewriting the National heroine in Morgan’s Later Fiction,” in her The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland.

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moral corruption of the Ascendancy class as underlying more pervasive political corruption. What Morgan also makes clear in her Preface is that the nostalgia for ancient Ireland that played so important a role in her portrait of the country in The Wild Irish Girl has lost its power to charm. The era that we might imagine the Prince of Inismore attempted to recreate is described here as a time of the “ancient despotism of brute force.” Morgan develops this assertion in her lengthy gloss in the form of a medieval chronicle, The Annals of St. Grellan. Before I turn to this gloss, I wish to point out that the overt political critique of the Preface carries over into the central narrative and informs several of the footnotes. In the third chapter entitled “The Review (i),” Morgan traces cycles of oppression and revolution in Ireland. Though the “Review” refers to the military review depicted in this and the following chapter, the intertitle also functions to signal a review of Irish political history at the end of the eighteenth century that occupies the first part of the chapter. Morgan rehearses the oppressive penal laws and what she sees as the selfish motivation behind the relaxation of those laws: America had revolted; and England, in her hour of peril, fearing Ireland, as the oppressor in times of danger always fears the oppressed, reluctantly abandoned a part of that all-pervading and comprehensive system of tyranny, which had hitherto paralyzed the energies of the nation; and by this ‘premier pas’ rendered the ultimate emancipation of the people, morally, and almost physically, inevitable. It was not, however, until a French fleet rode triumphantly in the Irish seas, that the attempt was made to bribe Ireland into tranquillity [sic], by relaxing her chains. (O, 63–4)

The tone of this passage is not at all conciliatory. The narrator does not attempt to appease or cajole the English reader as we have seen done in Castle Rackrent and The Wild Irish Girl, but instead attributes the seemingly progressive repeal of the penal laws to fear increased by the American Revolution and the lingering threat of French invasion. This passage also reads Anglo-Irish relations in the context of a wider political landscape that includes America and the Continent; here, as 

  Morgan’s description of the military review extends to two long chapters, titled “The Review (i)” and “The Review (ii).” As in Belinda and The Cottagers of Glenburnie, Morgan makes use of intertitles to set up her various chapters, but they are not as playful as those employed by Edgeworth and Hamilton. Here the intertitles perform a fairly standard function of establishing a setting by citing either a place or an event, such as “O’Brien House,” “The Row,” or “The Jug Day.” Very occasionally, a chapter is named for a person or group of persons, “The Rapparee” or “The United Irishmen.”   Recall that the Editor of Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent ends the Preface with a cheerful passage about the impending Union: “When Ireland loses her identity by an union with Great Britain, she will look back with a smile of good-humoured complacency on the Sir Kits and Sir Condys of her former existence” (C, 63). The “good-humoured complacency” here seems to spill over into the more general Anglo-Irish relations.

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throughout the O’Briens and the O’Flahertys, Morgan mitigates the binary of England and Ireland. After mentioning France, Morgan includes a footnote that indicates the extent to which she understands her narrative to be politically provocative: To what purpose, it may be asked, are these bitter recollections revived? Certainly neither to irritate nor insult the English nation, from whose justice and good sense Ireland has so much to expect. The fact, however, being as it is, it is neither unfair nor unwise to remind the party in England, who are perpetually vociferating, both in and out of parliament, ‘we won’t be bullied,’ and who endeavour, by alarming the timid, and by arousing the passions of the people, to seduce them into no-popery fanaticism, that the Tory faction (calling itself the State) has been bullied and may be bullied; and that, as it never has granted any thing to justice or generosity, the turbulence of the catholic agitators is not quite as groundless, or devoid of policy, as their opponents affect to imagine. It should not be forgotten, that though a brave and high-spirited people can never be threatened into a tame submission to wrong, nothing is more common than for the most powerful to be forced into a concession of rights. (O, 63)

Morgan employs a fascinating rhetoric here, pretending that the note apologizes for the incendiary claims of the main text but instead augmenting the accusations offered there. In assuring English readers that she intends no insult in the foregoing passage, she simultaneously applies more pressure to the colonizer, “from whose justice and good sense Ireland has much to expect.” By pointing out that the seemingly hapless “agitators” have in fact been able to alter official policy, Morgan simultaneously affronts British pride and validates the courage of the Irish people. This footnote evokes a recall of Morgan’s entreaty in the Preface, “may not I be permitted, under the influence of merely human sympathies, to interest myself for human wrongs; to preach in my way on the ‘evil that hath come upon my people,’ and to ‘fight with gentle words, till time brings friends,’” enforcing the idea of her novel as a form of political agitation. The main narrative of The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys tells the story of two Catholic families with deep roots in traditional Irish culture. The central action involves the youngest descendents of both families, the boy Murrogh O’Brien and the girl Beavoin O’Flaherty. Both children were immersed in local folklore and nurtured in the wild landscapes of Connemara and the Isles of Arran by the mystic Irish woman Mor-ny-Brien and tutored in nature by her son Shane. Their    Though Beavoin O’Flaherty knows that they interacted as young children, O’Brien’s recollection of this is hazy. She says, “I shared with you, in my infancy, the affectionate solicitude and the wild legends of Mor-ny-Brien, and even the instructions of her wilder son.” O’Brien responds, “Good, God!” and remembers “some impressions of your name” and eyes “that have floated like half-forgotten dreams in my memory” (O, 520). This is one of many instances where O’Flaherty has information that O’Brien does not.

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education was completed separately by the Jesuits in Italy, and, for O’Brien, as a mercenary soldier for the Austrians. O’Brien’s and O’Flaherty’s returns to Ireland coincide with the events leading up to the rebellion of 1798. Ancient myth holds that they will be the deliverers of their people. Most of the novel traces O’Brien’s actions, and O’Flaherty remains a shadowy or literally masked character until midway through the fourth and final volume of the novel. Though espousing the most noble values about his intentions to aid the people of Ireland, O’Brien becomes intimately involved with Lady Knocklofty of the Ascendancy class, losing some of his zeal for the Irish cause. Before being tried in Dublin for treason and murder, O’Brien is spirited out of Ireland by the benevolent machinations of O’Flaherty and Shane. The final scene reveals O’Brien, now a general for Napoleon, and O’Flaherty united in Paris, with both of them leading the constitutional party in “opposition to the measures of the First Consul,” that is, openly working against Napoleon’s regressive measures (O, 566). The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys has all of the trappings of a Bildungsroman as it records O’Brien’s battles, scrapes with justice, and romantic intrigues; however, as I will demonstrate, Morgan purposefully retards O’Brien’s progress toward maturity, challenging his heroic status, as well as the possibility that Ireland might be saved through military action. In speaking to O’Brien about her father near the end of the novel, O’Flaherty, now the Superior of an Abbey, says, “Alas! with all his sins, he was but what you are.” When O’Brien demands what that might be, a discussion ensues in which, I would suggest, Morgan outlines the complexity of representing Irish national character: ‘An Irishman,’ was the cool reply. ‘That, I trust, is not a disgrace?’ There was a sort of ironical hesitation, a humorous play of feature, as the Superior replied, ‘Why—a—perhaps not a disgrace; but it is sometimes almost a ridicule; and it is always a misfortune. With some it is a farce; with others a tragedy, according as the person, on whom so fatal a birth-right is inflicted, is an O’Mealy, or an O’Brien. To be born an Irishman is a dark destiny at best . . . Here, indeed, as everywhere, mediocrity is safe; dulness [sic] is its own protection, and insensibility its own shield: but genius and feeling, the pride, the hope, the ambition of patriotism, the bitter indignation which spurns at oppression, the generous sympathy which ranges itself on the side of the oppressed,—if there are lands where such virtues thrive and flourish, and force forward the cause of human happiness, Ireland is not one of them.’ (O, 516–17)

This passage supports the assessment of several critics that The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys is Morgan’s least optimistic portrayal of Ireland, but it also engages in literary self-consciousness as Morgan defines the individual fates of Irish men

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via the generic categories of “farce” or “tragedy.” While farce and tragedy are certainly not the only options of a lived life, Morgan likely sensed that these were the roles most likely to characterize early nineteenth-century portrayals of the Irish. Though O’Flaherty’s discourse seems to cast O’Mealy (who will be discussed below) as a farcical character and O’Brien as a tragic one, the novel undercuts O’Brien’s status as a tragic hero, and certain scenes involving him are positively comic. What Morgan suggests here and carries out throughout the narrative is the idea that Irishness is to some degree staged, and her use of dramatic glosses allows her to emphasize this point. In the chapter mentioned above, titled “The Review (i),” Morgan paints an elaborate description of a military review of the Irish volunteers staged in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. Morgan goes to great lengths to portray the event as one enjoyed by every rank and sect. The narrator describes the “brilliant, but short-lived story” of the volunteers as the “only illuminated page in Ireland’s dismal annals!” (O, 64). The glory of the Irish volunteers in part stems from their inclusiveness; every small town could mount its own corps, “so singular in its nature as to include the several gradations of nobles and commons, merchants, yeoman, and mechanics” (O, 65). The ranks of the volunteers swelled with “daily acquisitions of strength” from “all classes. Nobles sought the distinction of becoming their officers; men of boundless wealth were proud of being enrolled in their ranks; all sects and all religions united under their banners” (O, 64). Similarly, the audience assembled in Phoenix Park 

 Mary Campbell writes that the “failure of that feverish patriotism to achieve any other object except death or exile for its activists brought [Morgan] to a deep pessimism, expressed later by Beavoin O’Flaherty” in her introduction to The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys by Lady Morgan (London: Pandora, 1988), xi. James Newcomer writes that the “feeling of deep sympathy that stimulated her to action was threatened by the apprehension, even as she worked, that her efforts would be in vain” in his Lady Morgan the Novelist (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1990), 65. Finally, Julia Wright notes that the “novel is ultimately pessimistic: the colonial past which both nationalisms repudiate remains inescapable” in her “‘The Nation Begins to Form’: Competing Nationalisms in Morgan’s The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys,” ELH 66 (1999): 940.   Wright asserts that “Morgan often invites her reader to laugh at him, and precisely because he is so easily ‘str[uck] on the senses,’” in her “National Erotics and Political Theory in Morgan’s The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys,” European Romantic Review 15 (2004): 234.    Art historian Fintan Cullen suggests that in her effort to capture a “spurious Golden Age,” celebrating the “enlightened leadership of the Anglo-Irish,” Morgan pens a “vivid re-creation of a Volunteer review in Phoenix Park, a word picture that echoes the colour of Wheatley’s” A View of College Green with a Meeting of the Volunteers on 4 November 1779, to Commemorate the Birthday of King William (1779–80) in his Visual Politics: The Representation of Ireland, 1750–1930 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997), 114–15. I am grateful to Julie Donovan for alerting me to Cullen’s observation.    A letter to Lady Morgan responding to her description of the volunteers in the novel suggests that her idealized perspective was biased: “My Lord (who when he was sixteen

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runs the gamut from “bare-legged spalpeens, with their ragged jackets on their arms, their brogues on their shoulders,” and “their brawny breasts exposed to the sun” to the aristocracy, arriving in “splendid and numerous equipages” with “liveries that sparkled in the sun, like cloths of gold, and outriders mounted on steeds, that looked like chargers” (O, 69, 70). However, the democratic ideals of the volunteers and the pastoral harmony of the scene are rapidly undercut as characters demonstrate their sense of entitlement and begin attempting to label members of the volunteers by class and profession. After carelessly allowing her horses to “plunge headlong” through the “humble crowd,” “scattering” the laboring classes “‘like chaff before the wind,’” the aristocratic Lady Knocklofty, whose “lofty phaeton” was “emblazoned with arms, and covered with coronets,” begins questioning her entourage about a particularly attractive young volunteer (the first appearance in the novel of the hero O’Brien). Captain O’Mealy, in an attempt to bolster his own tenuous connection with the aristocracy, affects complete disdain for the volunteers, “We, reglars, never know any thing of the train bands, and more partickilarly, we cavalry make it a point; besides, there are some ugly customers among them, such as one’s tailor, or shoemaker, upon my honour!” (O, 76–7). O’Mealy’s brogue, emphasized by Morgan, reveals his own class to be quite a bit lower than that to which he aspires; Morgan characterizes him as a “handsome, flashy looking person, in military uniform, with large features, scattered at random over a broad face” (O, 77). His uncultivated features are contrasted with those of the Irish volunteer with “dark, unpowdered locks (then a mark of singularity, if not of disloyalty) which clustered round his high and intellectual temples,” “exhibit[ing] one of those heads which painters love to copy, and sculptors to model” (O, 77). Captivated by the handsome O’Brien, Lady Knocklofty exclaims, “What eyes! . . . those are what Hamilton, the painter, calls Irish eyes, large, dark, deep set, and put in, as it were, with dirty fingers” (O, 77). In spite of his fine looks, Lady Knocklofty’s companion Lady Honoria suggests, like O’Mealy, who swears O’Brien is a “boot-maker,” that these “volunteers heroes” often “descend from their altitudes to take the field; and exchange their leather aprons for their leather belts” (O, 77). Morgan’s dramatic glosses with their emphasis on role playing address the challenge faced by the Ascendancy to demarcate its class from its Others. At the Review, Lady Knocklofty initiates a flirtation with the still-unidentified handsome volunteer and fantasizes about what might develop between them. In response, Lady Honoria warns, “Oh, I grant you . . . that politics and patriotism, and the French revolution, are upsetting all, and playing ‘the devil among the tailors.’ But again, to quote from your prologue (which, by the by, Mrs O’Neil did not give last night with her usual spirits)—‘To check these heroes, and their laurels crop, / And was generalissimo of volunteers for the King’s County) . . . says, ‘there was not one Roman Catholic received into the original institution,’” Lady Charleville to Lady Morgan, 30 December 1827, Lady Morgan’s Memoirs: Autobiography, Diaries and Correspondence, ed. by W. Hepworth Dixon, 2 vols. (London: William H. Allen & Co, 1862), 2: 251.

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bring them back to reason and the shop,’ would, for the present, be difficult, while such eloquent demagogues as Curran and Grattan are working on the folly and passions of the lower orders” (O, 100). The dramatic gloss employed here comes from the Prologue to Arthur Murphy’s 1756 play The Apprentice. Murphy’s farce mocks the young apprentices who fancied themselves actors and participated in the “Spouting Club[s]”: “Where Prentic’d Kings—alarm the Gaping Street! / There Brutus starts and stares by midnight Taper; / Who all the Day enacts—a Woollen-Draper. / There Hamlet’s Ghost stalks forth with doubl’d Fist / Cries out, with hollow Voice—‘List, List, O, List!’ / And frightens Denmark’s Prince—a young Tobacconist.”10 Morgan’s media shift here to The Apprentice alerts the reader to look closely at young men playing at heroic roles. The equalizing effect of the volunteers in uniform, valorized by Morgan at the beginning of the chapter, unsettles the Ascendancy class characters because distinctions of rank and sect are temporarily removed. As discussed in the Castle Rackrent chapter, distinctions between colonizer and colonized dependent upon ocular evidence break down when applied to England’s colonial venture in Ireland. Though Morgan, like Edgeworth, employs language as a marker of difference (as seen above in O’Mealy’s speech), she also exposes linguistic difference as a false marker of class or national identity. When the culturally-conscious Lady Honoria, who speaks more French than English generally, calls Lady Knocklofty one of the “home-bred Irishwomen,” Lady Knocklofty retorts, “And pray, what are you, my dear, pretty, Honoria O’Callaghan, with all your county Cork kindred—” Undaunted, Lady Honoria replies, “It is true, that, as ill luck would have it, ‘I comed over to Ireland to be born,’ but I was never dipped in the Shannon for all that” (O, 99). Though Lady Honoria “preferred speaking the language she had acquired in the best circles of Paris, to the dialect she had learned in her native mountains,” Lady Knocklofty tells her with a “pretty little malignant smile” that she has been nicknamed “Madame de Polthogue” for “your constant use of French phrases, and, as they pretend, from your patriotic preservation of the Munster accent” (O, 90, 82).11 Lady Knocklofty’s “malignant smile” indicates the degree to which she knows it will gall Honoria that people claim she retains a Munster accent. When Honoria enquires what “polthogue” means, Lady Knocklofty tells her that it is an Irish word for “a thump, or blow,” descriptive of Honoria’s cruel wit. Lady Honoria responds, “To my French phrases, I plead guilty: for the phraseology of the mere bel air of Dublin is so baroque, so anti-European, that of necessity I take refuge in the French. But I deny the Munster brogue” (O, 82). The constant interplay of phrases from several languages marks most of the dialogue of the novel. Joep Leerssen terms Morgan’s frequent use of foreign phrases “glossolalia” and notes that “Lady Knocklofty and her friends lard their 10   Arthur Murphy, The Apprentice, 2nd ed. (London: P. Vaillant, 1756), Prologue, lines 23, 24–9. 11   The discussion also reveals that Lady Knocklofty knows some Irish.

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discourse with French and Italian expressions, whereas in the west people speak in a strong Irish brogue peppered with Gaelic phrases.”12 Leerssen observes that while Morgan generally does not translate the French and Italian phrases, those Gaelic terms are all glossed in footnotes and thus almost rendered exotic (because deemed incomprehensible) by the very act of explanation. The contrast thus once again becomes that between urbane cosmopolitanism, shared by author and reader, and archaic uncouthness, where the author becomes a mediator and translator, explaining a foreign, alien culture to the readership.13

Leerssen’s argument certainly has validity, yet I would suggest that Morgan uses linguistic markers to do more than signify the divide between “cosmopolitanism” and “uncouthness.” Though Lady Knocklofty banters almost as often as Honoria in French, Morgan mentions a detail that would make her seem far less polished than all of the foreign phrases indicate: she answers Honoria “in the drawling French accent, acquired in her paternal castle in Connaught, from her mother’s Swiss maid” (O, 90). When Honoria pokes fun at a cultural faux pas made by Lady Knocklofty’s aunt, Lady Knocklofty replies “sharply,” “But you should remember every one has not travelled like you” (O, 82). You will recall from the beginning of this chapter that when asked if O’Brien knows Irish, O’Brien replies, “Not enough to converse with you. I have almost lost my Irish, though I still understand it.” His answer seems less like revulsion toward his native language (something the feckless O’Mealy expresses) and more like something akin to shame.14 By emphasizing the instability of language as a marker of identity, Morgan thus challenges other assumptions about what it means to be Irish and admirable. This slipperiness of linguistic and class (not to mention gender) signifiers continues when Lady Knocklofty, disguised as an officer in O’Mealy’s helmet, cloak, and boots, liberates O’Brien from his prison cell and leads him through the dark passages of Dublin Castle. She says, “Quote me a line instantly from any author, in any language, no matter what; but be quick.” O’Brien replies, “Di mia sciocchezza tosto fui pentito, / Ma troppo mi trovai lungo dal lito” (O, 149). To which she replies, 12

 Leerssen, 47.   Leerssen, 48. Like many of Morgan’s nineteenth-century critics, Leerssen finds her language skills to be sub-par, terming her Irish, “her error-ridden smatterings of Gaelic” 47. 14   When Lady Knocklofty asks O’Mealy to help her translate a phrase that “looks like Irish,” O’Mealy responds that he “never had one word of Irish in my existence” (O, 78). Ferris sees Morgan casting Irish in a more positive light in her novel Florence Macarthy (1818) when the heroine diffuses a potentially violent mob by “address[ing] them in Irish; but it was evident neither in command nor in supplication. Whatever she said produced bursts of laughter and applause,” qtd. in Ferris, The Romantic National Tale, 91. For Morgan in this case, Irish becomes a sophisticated and powerful resource for keeping violence at abeyance. 13

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The Art of Political Fiction in Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson ‘Oh! you know Italian; where did you learn it?’ ‘In Italy.’ ‘In Italy? but you are an Irishman!’ ‘Soul and body.’ ‘Humph!’ said the interrogator, significantly. ‘Tant pis pour vous.—You have, at least, the Irish qualities of wit and courage: but wit and courage, without discretion, will not avail where you are about to appear.’ (O, 149)

The phrase O’Brien chooses here comes from Ludovico Ariosto’s sixteenthcentury Orlando Furioso. An eighteenth-century translation of the text renders O’Brien’s phrase as, “I for my folly presently bemoan, / But found I from the shore too far was gone.”15 With this quotation, Morgan introduces another of her primary glosses that will extend to four of the epigraphs and numerous textual references. Within the Orlando Furioso lamination, Lady Knocklofty figures as Alcina the enchantress, O’Brien alternately as Astolfo or Ruggiero, the easily distracted paladins, and O’Flaherty as Bradamante, the female Christian warrior in love with the pagan Ruggiero. This gloss will be treated more extensively below. Though O’Brien has seemingly impressed her with his knowledge of Italian language and literature, Lady Knocklofty expresses pity for O’Brien. This must be taken ironically, however, because, she is, of course, an Irishwoman (as Honoria as emphasized) with no apparent travel abroad; thus she is one of the few main characters born and raised solely in Ireland. Even Shane has lived in Rome for an indeterminate amount of time, where the Irish Dominican sisters taught him English.16 Morgan’s most elaborate gloss, the Annals of St. Grellan, emphasizes the extent to which cultural purity is a construct. The Annals are Morgan’s fictional illuminated manuscript tracing the history of the O’Briens and of Ireland itself from the beginning of time; the title page of the Annals, off-set and centered, adds after the title and scribe, “with Notes and Commentaries by / The Right Hon. T. O’Brien, Baron of Arranmore” (O, 211), forecasting a series of glosses by O’Brien’s father on the narrative within the novel.17 O’Brien likens the Annals to the Annals of Inisfallen and the Black Book of Hoath. They comprise more than 15  Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, trans. William Huggins, 2 vols. (London: James Rivington and James Fletcher, 1757), 1: 75 (Canto 6, verse 41). It is unclear whether Lady Knocklofty understands what he has said; later in the novel, at the Abbey of Moycullen, O’Brien seems to be the only one in the party who speaks Italian. 16   The fact that Shane learned English in Rome from Irish nuns demonstrates the permeability of the borders between Ireland and the Continent. 17  In this section of the novel, Lord Arranmore’s notes are interspersed with a series of notes by the author. His commentary is differentiated by the tag line: “Note by Lord Arranmore.” Lord Arranmore’s notes curiously do not differ substantially from the notes by the author; they discuss family lineage and etymology and refer the reader to authenticating references such as the “Codex Momonesis, or Munster Book.” The main difference is that

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sixty pages of the original second volume of the novel. The fictional entry from AM 1800 reads, “Arrivall of three shippes in the port of St Grellan, and one barque, contayning three hundredth men . . . greate skirmish and fierce battaille betweene the new comers and the ancient oulde Irish; the former claiming a righte to the place, in respect of theire kin, and Cousine Cesarea, who conquered the lande” (O, 217). Similarly, in AM 1803, “More new comers or transplanters. Arrivaulle of the Belgians in a fleete, well rigged, led on by Slangey or Slang, prevaileth over the Bartholanians; but the Danans, a new colony, arriving, the Bartholanians forfeit their londes, and the Belgians are driven into the Fassaghs of Connact province” (O, 217). The Annals also record departures, noting in A.D. 664, “The saintes multiplie exceedingly, and the lande being overrun with them, many are sent into foreign countrees on the mission of the Propaganda” (O, 221). The latter part of the Annals details the battles and infighting between the clans of the O’Briens, the O’Flahertys and the Mac Taafs. The Annals trace wave after wave of invaders and successive struggles to control the land. O’Brien, who initially reads the Annals with great interest, becomes disgusted with the Irish: “He now saw them as they were, a barbarous people, checked in their natural progress toward civilization by a foreign government, to the full as barbarous as themselves; their boasted learning, a tissue of monkish legends; their government, the rudest form of the worst of human institutions—feudality; their heroes, bold, brave, fierce, and false, as men acting under the worst political combinations” (O, 231). What the Annals also makes clear is that the situation of the rapparee should in no way be construed as natural. The entry for 1691 describes the King’s army “hang[ing] up poore Irish people by dozens, without pains to examine them; they scarcely thinking them human kind: so that they now began to turn rapparees, hiding themselves in the bog-grass of the Mac Taaf’s fassagh, and in glens and crannies of the O’Flaherty’s mountaines. And others of the better sort of papists, being driven out of the towne to go upon their keepinge, turn rapparees, being forced to unquiet means” (O, 241–2). In casting Shane as the wild Irishman of the O’Briens and the O’Flahertys, Morgan employs the label deliberately and frequently. The phrase is typographically differentiated through italics and featured as the gloss of a “full-length drawing” in the embedded narrative the Annals of St. Grellan. In a late section of the manuscript, three lines, centered in the text, read: “A rapparee, / Or wild Irishman, / Of the 18th century” (O, 243). The illustration, “evidently a portrait,” represented a man in rude, vigorous senility. The figure was gaunt, powerful, and athletic; but the countenance (the true physiognomy of the western or Spanish race of Irishmen), was worn, wan, and haggard, and full of that melancholy ferocity, and timid vigilance of look, which ever characterizes man, when hunted from civilized society; or when in his savage, unaccommodated state, ere he has the fictional character offers himself and the books, “whereof I have an authentic copy,” to bolster the truth claims of the Annals (O, 219).

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been admitted to its protection. A dark, deep, and sunken eye, with the Irish glib, cumhal, and prohibited coolun, or long, black, matted lock, hanging down on each side, added to the wild and weird air of a figure, still not divested of manly comeliness. (O, 243–4)

O’Brien recognizes the portrait as that of his “dearly loved” and “deeply lamented” foster-brother Shane, but Morgan makes clear that this is a “most perfect picture of a wild Irishman, as he was called, and exhibited on the stage in his traditional dress and deplorable humiliation, from the time of Charles the Second almost to the present day,—from Teague to Paddy O’Carrol” (O, 244). That is, where O’Brien sees a particularized portrait, Morgan sees a national stereotype. Through his close communion with the land and ties to generations of wild Irishmen, Shane would seem to be an even more “purely national, natural character” than The Wild Irish Girl’s Glorvina, but very little of the O’Briens can be taken at face value. Julia Wright finds the idea of “natural and national character” “charged with parody” in the later novel, arguing that “Morgan now denies a positively defined or coherent Irishness.”18 Indeed, beyond the little Connemara mountain pony, it is difficult to encounter any character with cultural integrity. Robert Lee Wolf posits that this novel significantly complicates the familiar “triple play” of the “Celtic Catholic remote past,” the “neglectful Anglican Ascendancy” and the “menacing agents.”19 Similarly, Ina Ferris suggests that “[t]his late fiction uncovers an Ireland of different layers and different histories which stand in tense and shifting relation to one another.” Ferris sees this cultural and historical layering as carried out in the narrative form: “Later novels like The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys may present a smoother, more conventional surface than The Wild Irish Girl with its sharply separated upper and lower texts, but they contain within themselves narrative cuts and folds, not to mention a plethora of genres (e.g., letters, annals, gothic, carnivalesque), that fracture any sense of the wholeness of national-historical time.”20 Morgan likely depended upon both her readers’ recognition of the “wild Irishman” stereotype and their ready juxtaposition of this wild Irishman with her famous wild Irish girl. The ekphrastic glosses of the portraits of these two characters make jarring companion pieces. When Horatio takes Glorvina’s likeness as she plays her harp, he describes the image thusly to his correspondent J.D.: “Conceive for a moment a form full of character, and full of grace, bending over an instrument singularly picturesque—a profusion of auburn hair fastened up to the top of the finest formed head I ever beheld, with a golden bodkin—an armlet 18

 Wright, “The Nation Begins to Form,” 945. In a related study, Ferris has discussed what she terms the “hyper-hybridity” of Morgan’s later heroines. 19  Robert Lee Wolf, “The Irish Novels of Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan,” introduction to The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys, by Lady Morgan (New York: Garland, 1979), xxiii. 20  Ferris, The Romantic National Tale, 87.

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of curious workmanship glittering above a finely turned elbow . . . The expression of the divinely touching countenance breathed all the fervour of genius under the influence of inspiration” (W, 97–8). Notice the contrast here between Glorvina’s “grace” and Shane’s “melancholy ferocity and timid vigilance.” Though Horatio is “bewitched” by Glorvina’s wildness, admitting that his eyes are “rivetted [sic] on Glorvina—who . . . sweeps with a feathery touch the cords of her harp, or plies her fairy wheel with double vigilance” (W, 161), we understand that the emblematic harp and spinning wheel do not bewitch Horatio on their own. What separates Glorvina from the “old hag” and “full chorus of females” around their spinning wheels, encountered by Horatio early in the novel, is that Glorvina couples the Irish exoticism of her bodkin and harp with education and cultivation (W, 21). Her “paradoxical” (Horatio’s term) boudoir in the ruined castle of Inismore on a rocky peninsula on the far west coast of Ireland contains a “silver escritoire,” “antique vases . . . of Etruscan elegance,” bookshelves “filled with the best French, English, and Italian poets,” publications and newspapers of “no distant date,” manuscript music, and “unfinished drawings” (W, 157). The tutelage of Father John has afforded Glorvina an advanced education, and the objects and texts in her boudoir bear witness to a sophisticated intercourse with the materials and philosophies of the Continent. As discussed in Chapter 4, Owenson’s portrait of Glorvina went a long way toward convincing her British readers that the Irish had much more in common with their Continental neighbors than the barbaric “Esquimaux”—a comparison that Horatio makes early in the novel. So one wonders what Morgan might have been up to when she pens The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys twenty years later, presenting her readers with another “purely national, purely natural character” whose barbarity supersedes anything Horatio might have imagined. In terming Shane the “rapparee”—a name that finds its origin in the half-pikes employed by fugitive Irish in guerilla warfare at the end of the seventeenth century, Morgan invests him with violent potential from the outset and aligns him with a tradition of Irish reduced to savagery. A 1691 entry from the Annals of St. Grellan suggests that “before the woods were destroyed, or the mountains were cleared of their heath and underwood, nothing was commoner than to find many [rapparees], who from too much melancholy, grief, fear of death, and constant danger, being turned in their brains, did run starke, or live in tatters, subsisting on herbs, berries, wild fruit, and the like” (O, 242). When O’Brien asks Shane how he survives, Shane confirms a similar subsistence: “there’s berries on the bramble, and cresses in the ditch, and wather in the ford”; he “sleeps where the fox has his hole, and the eagle his nest; and never lays his head under shingled roof, nor goes near town or townland” (O, 250). Two footnote glosses in the Annals compound the narrative’s depiction of the unfair treatment of the rapparees, discussing them as “for the most part, poor harmless country people, that were daily killed in vast numbers” (O, 242). As Katie Trumpener writes, “The continuation a century later of a subculture of political outlaws and guerilla fighters, based in the same hills and engaged in the same struggle, makes it difficult to dismiss the chronicle’s portrait of the ‘rapparee, or wild Irishmen,

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Of the 18th century’ either as mythology or historical aberration [p. 243]. We are a long way, suddenly, from the ‘maddening’ charms of the wild Irish girl and from an Ireland whose history of conquest poses a picturesque and empathy-inducing picture.”21 The juxtaposition of the rapparee with other war “heroes” in the Annals from Brien Boru forward calls into question the construction of such heroes and the justification for any acts of violence. Morgan’s questioning of the characteristics essential to a literary hero had contemporary valence. As Seamus Deane remarks regarding the time of the novel’s production: “The belief that the Irish national character was degraded beyond the point of recovery was more likely to be found in the writings of English literary men, although the fear that this was the case is a pronounced feature of much Irish writing too, especially among those who regarded Daniel O’Connell with disfavour and who felt that his demagogic crusades had had a deleterious effect on the character of the peasantry.”22 Shane, the barbaric foster-brother who shadows O’Brien, rescuing him repeatedly, represents a native counter to O’Brien’s polished gallantry and military prowess, exhibited in the novel in the “mock” or “sham” battle at the military review at Phoenix Park. The dramatic glosses of The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys serve to highlight the self-conscious display constructing notions of national heroism. The twopart “Review” chapter provides a compelling example because the volunteer corps have gathered at Phoenix Park precisely for the purpose of being seen. The volunteers stage a “sham fight” or “mock combat” in which the goal is for one set of troops to defend the Star Fort against attacking troops (O, 86, 89). The Star Fort “appeared the ruin of a strong and ancient hold . . ., but was, in reality, of modern construction. It was raised by the celebrated Earl of Wharton as a retreat for safety in the event of insurrectionary movement in the capital—some symptoms of such an event having manifested themselves in an attack upon the statue of King William III…But the apprehensions it had awakened proved groundless; the Fort, ere it was quite finished, was permitted to fall into a picturesque and premature decay (presenting to the eye the image of a once impregnable place; and adding to the fine scene it dominated a feature of characteristic interest and great effect)” (O, 86). The Fort, called “Wharton’s Folly,” participates in the same ambiguous series of representations that many of the characters do; the building of the Fort was initiated on a misreading of the people. This passage resounds with terms like “sham” and “mock” that suggest that much of the action, like the Fort, is not to be taken as reality. O’Mealy’s comment later to O’Brien regarding the success of the volunteers in the sham battle adds to this sense of theatricality: “The reglars (barring we cavalry) couldn’t do it better; you must have had a good many rehearsals to get it up so well, as we say at Lady Ely’s Attic” (O, 137). Originally built to stave off a revolting mob, then entering into the realm of aesthetic effect,   Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 153.  Seamus Deane, “Irish National Character, 1790–1900,” in The Writer as Witness: Literature as Historical Evidence, ed. Tom Dunne (Cork: Cork University Press, 1987), 98. 21

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the Fort is once again the setting for an attack, though the mock one of the Review. In the midst of all of the festivity and theatricality, however, Morgan offers a comment that suggests a tragic flip-side to the pomp and circumstance: “Yet in a few short years many of those young lives were offered up upon the scaffold, a sacrifice to sincerity in that cause, which, wrong or right, was by the victims deemed the cause of their country. These victims were then all full of youth, life, love, and hope, surrounded by admiring compatriots, and gazed on by eyes whose smiles were immortality—by eyes soon to be dimmed with tears which time has not even yet dried up” (O, 74). It is on this stage that O’Brien performs to general acclaim: “[W]ithin view of many thousand spectators, and under the eye of many veteran officers, the Irish brigade commenced the action, by a spirited and simultaneous attack upon both the bridges” (O, 87). Through a brilliant tactical maneuver, O’Brien is able to take the Fort: “[A]llowing the enemy to advance beyond the possibility of a recall, he rushed forward, sword in hand, at the head of his light infantry, scaled the unprotected ramparts, and, forgetting for a moment the unreality in the ardour of the attack, forced the artillery men from their guns, and, amidst cheers and shouts of the excited and anxious spectators, he planted the colours of the Irish brigade in the centre of the Fort” (O, 88). O’Brien’s exhibition of military prowess, coupled with his pleasing form make him not only the fit subject for painters and sculptors but for literature as well. After his success in the mock battle, Lady Honoria teases Lady Knocklofty by saying, “Now, tell truth, haven’t you conjured up that young volunteer into a regular hero of romance?” (O, 101). Similar comments regarding O’Brien’s status as hero recur throughout the novel, including within the Annals of St Grellan gloss. The Annals prophesy the man that “shall restore his church and sept, an Irish distich, which done in fair Englishe, thus inditeth:—‘Midst Ængus forlorne / Shall th’ O’Brien be borne; / And bear in his face / The mole of his race’”. After reading this passage, O’Brien recognizes “how easily the accidents of his own birth and person might, in darker times,” have been read as fulfilling the prophecy (O, 231). O’Brien was born amidst the ruins of Dun Ængus and his face is marked with a mole. As he continues to read, he “discover[s] a superb vignette, the chef-d’oeuvre of the book,” which is an illustrated manuscript. Morgan then describes a painting of the “Gothic archway of the Convent of Mary, John, and Joseph, at St Grellan . . . Within its deep shadow stood a woman in a religious habit, her head turned back, as if taking a last view of the altar. . . to which she had vainly vowed the sacrifice of all human passions. . . and leading her by the hand, with an apparently gentle violence, stood a young man in the Irish habit, as it was worn in Connaught in Elizabeth’s time, in spite of laws and statutes forbidding truis and mantle, glib and coolun” (O, 233). The image is meant to depict O’Brien’s ancestor Murrogh-na-Spanaigh, also a mercenary, who unlawfully married the Abbess of Moycullen, but O’Brien “was struck by the bold outline of this figure, sketched as it was upon the sunny fore-ground, ‘a colpo di pennello,’ after the manner of Salvator Rosa’s strong, but careless figures. All but the head was a mere sketch; but that was a finished miniature” (O, 233). O’Brien,

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mesmerized by the beauty of the miniature portrait, notices something particular about the rendition of his “celebrated ancestor”: “blushing deeply, though alone, he at last recognized his own flattered resemblance” (O, 234). Morgan employs this ekphrastic gloss to accomplish several things. Her contemporary hero retroactively becomes the hero in another book with the idea of his complicity enforced by the doubling of the name Murrogh and the recurrence of “the O’Brien mole” (O, 233), the family mark of valor and fame. This representation makes him physically complicit with the Irish tradition of conquest and rebellion for which he now has quite ambivalent feelings. The figure in the painting wears clothing aligned with illegal and insurgent action. As discussed in the Castle Rackrent and Wild Irish Girl chapters, sumptuary laws attempted to regulate rebellious activity, and O’Brien’s ancestor is depicted here as clearly in violation of those laws, indicating his subversion of colonial authority. As he leads the female figure with “gentle violence” away from her affiliation with the Catholic church, he willfully snubs the authority of the church as well. In addition to the content of the image, Morgan concentrates upon the style. To cast the figure as painted with brushstrokes in the “manner of Salvator Rosa” is much more than an aesthetic allusion. As we know from Morgan’s use of Rosa in The Wild Irish Girl, Rosa’s aesthetics work for Morgan as shorthand for subversive activity. Thus the figure on which O’Brien’s head has been transposed in the Annals co-opts his character into the representation of a political radical. We later learn, of course, that O’Flaherty has illustrated the Annals; thus Morgan aligns her with Rosa and his cultural context. O’Brien wears the mantle of his family’s tradition of subversion uneasily and seems particularly self-conscious about the way that he is being viewed by others. In her discussion of Morgan’s similar use of an embedded text in her novel O’Donnel, Ferris suggests that she employs such a tactic “to convey the way in which one kind of time contains, often unexpectedly, other kinds of time and present intervals are traversed by unharmonizable traces of the past.”23 Morgan quite purposefully threads such “traces of the past” throughout her narrative, in the doubling of characters with historical figures and in the reiteration of histories long past. During the Review, when O’Brien first hears the war cry of “O’Brien aboo”—an Irish phrase meaning, as the note tells us, the “cause of the O’Briens”— he flushes, pales and quickens the march of his troops, but when the “cry” “found an echo from the popular voice, he seemed proudly to apply its meaning to himself, and saluted the multitude with his sword, and smiled with all the popular grace of a young Roman tribune” (O, 75).24 O’Brien tailors his actions to the response of the crowd. Later, as a prisoner in Dublin Castle, when a disguised Lady Knocklofty leads him through dark passages, he stops her, not because he fears an examination or punishment, but because he fears “ridicule” (O, 151): “Infinitely more willing to  Ferris, The Romantic National Tale, 88.   We later learn that it is Shane, who, “like the druidical oracles of old, from the top of a tall and magnificent oak,” begins the cry (O, 75). 23 24

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be shot, than to be laughed at, he was devoutly wishing himself up to the neck in the trenches before Belgrade, where he had already distinguished himself” (O, 157). For all of his pride, Morgan’s O’Brien is a wayward hero. The reader discovers him to be deeply flawed as he attempts to fulfill his predestined role. He wins the Review battle, and he saves Lady Knocklofty twice in very daring rescues (once by stopping her runaway horses at the Review and later on the west coast of Ireland, by scaling down a treacherous cliff to drive her carriage from the encroaching tide), but these gallant acts do not equal national heroics.25 In the chapter entitled “The Frolic,” Morgan describes O’Brien’s character immediately before he enters the society of Lady Knocklofty’s set: With a temperament all Irish, and a character made up of those elements, which in the poetry of life form its sublime, but in its prose tend a little to the ridiculous,—impetuous and spirited, as the genuine Hibernian always is, petulant and fierce as a foreign militaire usually affects to be,—his natural and national qualities had been sharpened rather than subdued by a life of early excitement and vicissitude. Too susceptible to impressions, as they flattered or mortified his passions and his pride, he now stood in a position the most painfully opposed to all that was strongest or weakest in his nature (O, 157).

As when O’Flaherty discusses the trials of being an Irishman in terms of farce and tragedy, Morgan emphasizes the literary medium and cues her readers to expect a certain tendency toward the “ridiculous” in her portrayal of him because O’Brien clearly belongs to a prose fiction rather than a poem. Elsewhere she describes O’Brien as “indeed, the very beau idéal of the French and the Irish youth, who, in many important particulars, so closely resemble each other” (O, 272). When Sir Walter urges O’Brien to take the United Irish test oath, he admonishes O’Brien with, “the hired officer of the despot of Austria need not blush to receive the honest remuneration earned in service of his country” (O, 304). Sir Walter’s “honest remuneration” calls into question both O’Brien’s loyalty to Ireland as well as his work as a mercenary soldier; O’Brien has killed people for money in a cause in which he was not personally involved. Murrogh O’Brien, who clearly has the birthright and the training, after passing the “last eight years of his life as a soldier of fortune” in the Austrian regiment (O, 200), should be a natural hero for an Irish national tale, but even he has a sense that he is not. In the fourth volume, O’Brien, now Lord Arranmore, speaks with Lady Knocklofty about his misadventures, “I am the victim of some mysterious agency—be it for my good, or for my ill—of whose existence I am only conscious by the influence it exerts over my actions” (O, 468). Lord Arranmore alludes to a series of interventions that have at times protected him and at others thwarted his 25

 Similarly Wright suggests that “O’Brien’s failure to effect even a minimal change in Irish politics stands as a critique of gallantry, of a national masculine performance guided by spectacle and desire rather than theory,” in her “National Erotics,” 239.

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goals, but over which he exercised no control. These mysterious forces repeatedly rescue O’Brien from dangerous situations, and in a reversal of gender and class expectations, the rescues are effected by women, either Lady Knocklofty or Beavoin O’Flaherty, sometimes in concert with the wild and penniless Shane-naBrien. At least one early nineteenth-century reader found Shane better suited for the role of hero than O’Brien. In December of 1827, Lady Charleville wrote to Lady Morgan to pass along her critique of the O’Briens and the O’Flahertys: “You have written powerfully, and many of great judgment say so when they dare . . . The king, I find, was interested in the lighter parts; but some of the charges against the Irish government, he said, were too bad, while God knows they were not half bad enough to my mind. Now, what I like best in the whole was Shane; he beat Eddie Ochiltree off the ground.26 I wish he had not killed anybody, nor been killed; but all the poetical fancies will fix upon him, if he had murdered all the excisemen in Europe. In short, I love him so that I think he is the hero of the tale.”27 When O’Brien is commended by the Review-General for his tactical skill and cheered by thousands on the green, his great display of military skill is contrasted with Shane’s seemingly wanton violence. O’Brien ponders Shane at length: He knew him to be brave, persevering in action, and enduring of privation, faithful to the death in his attachments, an affectionate son, an incorruptible follower, with a heart that beat with a rude, but impulsive sympathy for the sufferings of others, and glowed with a genuine, though ill understood love of country. Yet is this man (he thought), a murderer, an outlaw, ready for every violence,—his hand armed against civilization, as civilization is armed against him,—and the whole tenor of his life at variance with the best interests of society! . . . the man thus situated makes for himself a code of compensating morality, which fits him for the peculiar circumstances of his untoward and difficult position. (O, 408)

Although O’Brien condemns Shane’s “code of compensating morality,” he acknowledges that Shane is the “man to whom he was indebted for that strength, agility, and adroitness, that robust and unalterable health, which had served him so materially in the arduous profession he had afterwards adopted” (O, 244). What becomes increasingly clear is that very little separates the rapparee from the man of military profession. As the story rapidly unfolds, O’Brien’s character undergoes a series of shifts that begin to erode his own moral code. After the vaunted victory in Phoenix Park, O’Brien is arrested and imprisoned for his part in a politicized tavern brawl; while in prison he is introduced into the highest Dublin society and becomes further entangled with the married Lady   You may recall that Eddie Ochiltree is a character in Sir Walter Scott’s The Antiquary (1816). 27  Lady Charleville to Lady Morgan, 30 December 1827, Lady Morgan’s Memoirs, 2: 250. 26

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Knocklofty. He is arrested a second time for consorting with the rapparee; his ancestral home literally crumbles to dust around him; he is expelled from Trinity College for seditious writings, and he is inducted into the United Irishmen (though protesting his abhorrence for any society that must be secret rather than public). The paragraph following O’Brien’s final moral lapse (with Lady Knocklofty in a fishing cottage) describes the following scene: [W]hen upon the brink of one of the precipices of the Glan Mountain, a human figure appeared, which well belonged to a scene so wild, so awful, and so desolate. The fugitive (for such he must have been, unhoused, and wandering in such an hour and place) . . . [had] blood upon his hands, his eye was wild and sunk, his colour ghastly, his features distorted. His uncovered head had caught, in its thick and matted locks, fragments of burrs and thistles . . . his clothes were torn, his neck was bare, and his whole exterior bespoke one hunted to the death . . . The fugitive was Murrogh O’Brien, Lord Arranmore. (O, 548)

Though O’Brien has been a fugitive for less than twenty-four hours (and it is difficult to believe that his person could be so drastically altered), his form has clearly merged with that of the wild Irishman. The details of O’Brien’s matted hair give the effect of the “prohibited coolun,” or long, matted lock that Shane proudly wears. The “blood upon his hands,” I would argue, both foreshadows Shane’s murder of Corny the cadger, for which O’Brien will be held responsible, and speaks to Morgan’s larger concerns about sanctioned military violence. O’Brien is horrified when he stumbles upon the dying Corny with a “torrent of blood” “gushing from his breast” (O, 549). He is further dismayed by the “appalling figure of Shane” with his fist “clenched, as in triumph over the dead body” (O, 549). O’Brien, a veteran of eight years of foreign war, finds himself “with every faculty frozen and palsied, unable, and perhaps unwilling to communicate with the perpetrator of a deed so bloody” (O, 550). Shane’s fist raised in triumph mirrors the moment when O’Brien takes the Star Fort in the “mock battle” at Phoenix Park and plants the insurgent flag in similar triumph. Initially O’Brien is arrested for Corny’s murder, but Shane frees him from an impenetrable prison tower and confesses to the murder. Morgan, via Beavoin O’Flaherty, spirits O’Brien out of the country before the bloody 1798 rebellion. However, she is unwilling to completely sanction his rise to military power in Napoleon’s army. Wright points out that for Morgan, “[a]ll feudal systems are primitive, and systems based on constitutional guarantees to individuals are . . . the future.”28 As Lady Morgan writes in her Italy: “[T]here are no legitimate beginnings of empires; and that all monarchical governments, owing their origin to the wants or the crimes of man, are founded in conquest, or are consolidated by usurpation. Different stages of society may variously colour the event: but the Odoacres, the Alboins, the Clovises, the Charlemagnes, the Guiscards, and the 28

 Wright, “The Nation Begins to Form,” 949.

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Bonapartes, have all equally proceeded upon the same principle, and triumphed by the same means.”29 Thus O’Brien’s complicity in Napoleon’s compromised moral code does, in fact, leave him with “blood on his hands.” Morgan’s critique of masculine heroic action finds its counterpart in the glosses which highlight feminine heroic action. Morgan quite purposefully employs the performative glosses, with the vast majority of the novel’s epigraphs originating in or concerned with drama (thirteen of the epigraphs come from Shakespeare alone). While Morgan is careless in her transcriptions and in some of the attributions, she clearly intended to develop a dialectic between the paratexts and the central text by weaving performative references throughout her novel.30 As we have seen previously, attention to the glosses complicates and enriches our reading of the central text. The “Review (i)” chapter begins with an epigraph from Sir George Etheridge that sets the tone for this idea of characters playing at their roles: “Beauty,  Lady Morgan, Italy, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1821), 1: 2–3.   Genette has defined the epigraph as a quotation placed “at the edge of the work, generally closest to the text,” that is, closer in proximity than the dedication, for instance (Genette, 144). Though Genette “find[s] scarcely any epigraphs” in the “major novels of the eighteenth century” (excepting La Nouvelle Héloïse and Tom Jones), he observes that “the gothic novel, a genre simultaneously popular (in its themes) and erudite (in its settings), is the channel by which epigraphs in large number get into prose narrative: Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Lewis’s Monk (1795), and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) all contain an epigraph for every chapter” (146–7). Sir Walter Scott followed this trend. Most of Scott’s novels display extensive epigraphs though, unlike Morgan, he rarely includes epigraphs in any language other than English. Scott becomes highly engaged with the aesthetics of the epigraph, though his comment in his Chronicles of Canongate (1827–8) would have us believe otherwise: 29

30

The scraps of poetry which have been in most cases tacked to the beginnings of chapters in these novels are sometimes quoted either from reading or from memory, but, in the general case, are pure invention. I found it too troublesome to turn to the collection of the British poets to discover apposite mottoes, and, in the situation of the theatrical mechanist, who, when the white paper which represented his shower of snow was exhausted, continued the storm by snowing brown, I drew on my memory as long as I could, and, when that failed, eked it out with invention. I believe that, in some cases, where actual names are affixed to the supposed quotations, it would be to little purpose to seek them in the works of the authors referred to. (Qtd. in Genette, 147.) Given the self-conscious literary manipulations of Scott’s Editor in this series, this comment should be read as heavily ironic. Scott’s emphasis on theatricality and upon the process of fabrication, or what Hutcheon might call “to fiction something,” and the fact that his comment was contemporaneous with the publication of The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys, should make us attend closely to Morgan’s efforts to construct a series of epigraphs in English, Italian, French and Latin. Morgan, like Scott, “tacked” on her “scraps of poetry” with a great deal of care.

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and such a stock of impudence, / As to the playhouse well might recommend her” (O, 62). The quotation, obviously meant to describe Lady Knocklofty, comes from Etheridge’s “The Lady of Pleasure, A Satyr” about Nell Gwyn, mistress to Charles II. This gloss casts a questionable light upon Lady Knocklofty’s moral character and suggests power gained through sexuality, but it also sets up her character as an actress and the novel as a sort of playhouse with the Countess Knocklofty often directing. As she sits in her phaeton at the review, “Lady Knocklofty, with looks and spirits all abroad, hummed an air from the Beggar’s Opera; and playing her very pretty foot against the side of her phaeton, slipped it in and out of a little zebra shoe, which was the fashion of the day, and an exact type of a slipper from the seraglio of the Grand Signor” (O, 97). This description engages Lady Knocklofty in two performative glosses that Morgan threads throughout the novel, employing Gay’s popular opera and Bickerstaff’s The Sultan; or, a Peep into the Seraglio to emphasize themes of cultural hybridity and women’s agency that compromise the project of the national tale. The staging of the novel’s key scenes is usually under the control of either Lady Knocklofty or Beavoin O’Flaherty. As Lady Knocklofty flicks her zebra shoe, “[t]his movement, conscious or unconscious on the part of the exhibitor, had attracted the eyes, and caused some confusion along the line of the Irish brigade . . . The slipper (as might be expected) at last fell to the ground! and the young volunteer, springing from his post, pounced on his pretty prey” (O, 97). When O’Brien returns the shoe, she presents him with her naked foot so that he may replace her shoe; he treats the moment with “an air of such religious respect, as pilgrims give to the consecrated slipper of St. Peter,” and thus begins their intimacy (O, 97). While Morgan writes “conscious or unconscious” as though an interpretation of Lady Knocklofty’s actions is unclear, she undercuts this with the parenthetical “as might be expected.” Just as Lady Knocklofty has orchestrated the scene that draws the handsome volunteer to her side, she is also in the midst of arranging what O’Mealy refers to as one of the “private thayathricals,” namely The Beggar’s Opera. (O, 79). Gay’s popular comic opera featured highwaymen, thieves, prostitutes and a corrupt jailor. Like Morgan’s copious epigraphs, each of the scenes in the opera is introduced with a different song, the lyrics applying directly to the action and the air borrowed from a wide-range of popular tunes. The central action of the play concerns the highwayman Macheath who has married the Peachums’ daughter Polly. The Peachums fence a world of stolen goods and periodically have their own thieves arrested in order to collect the reward money. Upon learning of the marriage, they decide to have Macheath imprisoned and hanged to prevent any future threat he might pose to their earnings or their enterprise. Save Polly, none of the characters is admirable or trustworthy, and one of the themes of the play is proclaimed by Peachum: “The greatest heroes have been ruined by women. But to do them justice, I must own they are a pretty sort of creatures if we could

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trust them.”31 Macheath is both betrayed by women prostitutes and then set free by one of his lovers (also called his wife), the jailor’s daughter Lucy. Like The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys, Gay’s play self-consciously toys with literary genre, discussing how the plan to hang the hero would make the play “a downright deep tragedy”; Macheath is freed because “an Opera must end happily.”32 The confusion between comedy and tragedy echoes O’Flaherty’s discussion of how an Irishman’s life may be portrayed. Like Macheath, O’Brien’s two imprisonments fail to end in tragedy (one of them ends with a frolic), and his freedom is effected both times by women. The other confusion that Gay emphasizes at the end of the opera is that of morality and class, stated explicitly in the Beggar’s final speech: “Through the whole Piece you may observe such a similitude of manners in high and low life, that it is difficult to determine whether, in the fashionable vices, the fine gentlemen imitate the gentlemen of the road, or the gentlemen of the road the fine gentlemen.”33 The “fine gentlemen” of The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys play the roles of highwayman and con-artist, and thus Morgan underscores the arbitrary nature of Ireland’s class hierarchy and the precariousness of the Ascendency. Lady Knocklofty is evidently in charge of casting and using her entourage to fulfill the roles for the play. With “a levelling familiarity,” “‘Edward Fitzgerald’ was sent to his brother Leinster, to beg he would put off the private play at Carton; as she had got the Dean of _____ to play Filch, who had to preach at St Patrick’s on Sunday; so that his private vocation might not interfere with his public duties” (O, 96). Morgan clearly plays with Lady Knocklofty directing one of the most powerful members of the United Irishmen on an errand in the service of drama. To fulfill the Beggar’s final observation, she has ironically chosen a high-ranking man of religion to play a pickpocket, suggesting the hypocrisy and duplicity at the heart of Dublin society.34 O’Mealy’s portrayal of the leading character Macheath is mentioned repeatedly (O, 92, 312); in fact, his success in that role has facilitated his military ambitions: “It was Captain Macheath that made a Captain of Barney O’Mealy. The Duke was so pleased with him at Lady Ely’s” (O, 81). His roleplaying abilities then have enhanced his real social status, at least within the frame of the fiction. His playing a thief to great acclaim, in a corrupt meritocracy, has earned a promotion. O’Mealy, referred to as the “Moor of Ennis” (O, 79), is a regular player at the “Countess of Ely’s Attic theatre,” where Honoria anatomizes

  John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera (1728; repr., London: Printed for the Proprietors, 1794), Act 2, lines 250–53. 32  Ibid., Act 3, lines 577–90. 33  Ibid., Act 3, lines 593–7. 34   In addition to Filch’s skills as a pickpocket, he has also “picked up a little money by helping the ladies to a pregnancy against their being called down to a sentence” (Gay, Act 3, lines 105–7), so Morgan must have enjoyed casting the Dean in such a role. 31

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his great success: “With his immaculate brogue, his pushing manners, and divine voice, how could he fail?” (O, 80).35 The Roxalana gloss from Bickerstaff’s The Sultan helps illuminate aspects of Lady Knocklofty’s character not readily visible. In addition to sporting the zebra slippers, Lady Knocklofty is shown “throwing off her ponderous helmet, shaking out her ruffled drapery of soufflet gauze (which the cloak of Captain O’Mealy, borrowed for her disguise, had crushed), and resuming her turban à la Roxalane” (O, 153) and later “with the smile and air of the Roxalana she personated in dress, she suddenly disappeared” (O, 182). In case the reader has missed these references, later in the novel Morgan includes a secondary representation of Lady Knocklofty’s role playing through a magazine article. While O’Brien waits to swear an oath to the United Irishmen in an exterior room, he picks up a magazine and finds a description of the “Private Theatricals at Knocklofty House,” where the Beggar’s Opera was performed, followed by The Sultan with the “Countess Knocklofty, as Roxalana” (O, 312). Though the character of Roxalana is originally a slave in the Sultan’s seraglio, this character in Bickerstaff’s play transforms a position of powerlessness into one of complete power. The English Roxalana brooks no opposition and refuses to conform to the rules of the harem. She seduces the Sultan by her impertinent remarks and ready wit, reforming him in the process. Finally he declares, “I here devote myself to you, and the whole empire shall pay you homage.” In response to his grand gesture, Roxalana asks, “But, pray, tell me then, by what title am I to govern here?” Though the Sultan seems not to understand her meaning and cannot imagine what more she would want beyond his devotion, she insists, “nor will I ever consent to ascend his bed at night, at whose feet I must fall in the morning.” Eventually, Roxalana effects the transformation of an empire, where she will “be like the queen of the country from where I came.” The Sultan finally declares his “scruples” and “prejudices” overcome by the “lights of your superior reason—My love is no longer a foible—you are worthy of empire.”36 The Roxalana gloss thus endows Lady Knocklofty with additional power. She not only convinces the Sultan to throw open the “gates of the Seraglio,” but she attains for herself the right to govern.37

35   The references to The Beggar’s Opera continue with Lady Knocklofty twice enquiring after her mare “Mrs. Slamikin,” named for one of the play’s crafty prostitutes (O, 79), and Honoria chastising Lady Knocklofty’s zebra slipper intimacy with O’Brien by referencing the play: “as Mrs Peachum says, ‘not with a highwayman, you hussey’” (O, 98). Her comment casts Lady Knocklofty for the third time in the role of the worldly woman; this quote paired with the Nell Gwyn reference in the epigraph and the seraglio slipper reinforces Morgan’s suggestion in the Preface that the oligarchy’s “sense of irresponsible power engendered a contempt for private morals” (O, xvi). 36   Isaac Bickerstaff, The Sultan, or a Peep into the Seraglio (1775; repr., London: C. Dilly, 1787), Act 2, page 20. 37   Bickerstaff, Act 2, page 21.

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The final gloss that illuminates the female heroics in The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys is the Orlando Furioso gloss mentioned earlier, which O’Brien initiates with his response to Lady Knocklofty’s requests to pick a line from any author. O’Brien’s choice of Ariosto is then echoed in four separate epigraphs and alluded to several times in the text. The early sixteenth-century epic poem Orlando Furioso continues the unfinished saga of Matteo Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (1495), though treating the war between the Christian emperor Charlemagne and the Saracen king Agramante and the whole idea of chivalric codes with more irony than the original. The poem takes as part of its inspiration the legends of Charlemagne and the paladins—Orlando, nephew of Charlemagne, and Astolfo, the son of the king of England are both paladins. Bradamante, as mentioned previously, is a Christian warrior with some magical skills involved in a fraught love relationship with the pagan warrior Ruggiero. Alcina, the name explicitly applied to Lady Knocklofty (O, 157), is the sorceress with a penchant for seducing young men and then turning them into trees or rocks when she tires of them. The epigraph to “The Frolic” is a verse concerned with Alcina and Ruggiero, but also meant to illuminate the relationship between Lady Knocklofty and O’Brien. Morgan gives the verse in Italian; an eighteenth-century translation reads: Each part about her did a snare contain, Did she but talk, or smile, or sing, or move; No wonder ‘twas, Ruggiero then was ta’en, As she of such benignity did prove: That, which the myrtle to him did explain, Help’d not, how base she was, how apt to rove; For cheat and treachery, he’d not suppose, Could dwell with such celestial smiles as those.38

The “myrtle” here is Astolfo, a former lover of Alcina’s, now condemned to his fate in the forest. When O’Brien enters the salon in Dublin Castle filled with Ascendency elite, Lady Honoria refers to him as “this handsome, stupified creature,” and the narrator repeats this, “the ‘handsome, stupified creature,’ the Astolfo of the adventure” (O, 156). Thus the gloss both warns about Lady Knocklofty’s “treachery” and also puts our nominal hero in the position of the warrior who gets turned into a tree. Alternately, when O’Brien represents Ruggiero, he is the figure who has been forewarned but believes that he will be able to handle Alcina. Like Ruggiero, however, O’Brien must depend upon his Bradamante (O’Flaherty) to extricate him from Lady Knocklofty’s snares. The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys obviously shares with Orlando Furioso a plot structure in which warriors committed to epic struggles (Christians vs. pagans; Irish vs. English) are easily distracted from their cause. 38

  Ariosto, vol. 1, canto 7, verse 16.

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What is perhaps most significant about Morgan’s use of the Orlando gloss is that it reveals both Lady Knocklofty and Beavoin O’Flaherty to be women warriors, an overlay that resonates with earlier parts of the narrative. In the “Review” chapter that I have featured here, the aristocratic women entering the Park are described as classical warriors: “Driving up the most perilous sites, and ‘seeking glory, even in the cannon’s mouth,’ came rolling on, the female charioteers, supreme above all in splendour and attractions; some of whom, mounted in lofty phaetons, and guiding their fiery coursers with more spirit than discretion, seemed like the spoiled child of the sun, only to have ‘obtained the chariot of the day, to set the world on fire’” (O, 70). Morgan elides their carelessness in guiding their phaetons with their cavalier attitudes toward their social responsibilities, characterizing them as “those great female oligarchs who governed society, as their husbands governed the state, and ruled in the coteries of the capital, as their consorts ruled the country, in all the insolence of exclusive privilege, and all the lawlessness of unlimited power” (O, 70). Singled out as the most “conspicuous” of the charioteers is Lady Knocklofty, whose dress supports her role as female warrior: “She was dressed in a rich habit, whose facings and epaulettes spoke her the lady of the noble colonel of some provincial corps of volunteers. A high military cap, surmounted with a plume of black feathers, well became her bright, bold, black eyes, and her brow, that looked as if accustomed ‘to threaten and command’” (O, 70). Lady Knocklofty, you will recall, also dons O’Mealy’s military uniform when she springs O’Brien from the guard-house. Lady Knocklofty is described as the “female chief” of the Proudforts—“a family on which the church rained mitres, the state coronets, and the people— curses” (O, 71). She and her husband have been effecting improvements to their land in Connaught; their castle Beauregard is a modern showpiece (though displaying no ancient art), and their plantations are flourishing. Beauregard in all of its luxury is obviously meant to represent Alcina’s enchanted castle. Like Alcina’s lovers, O’Brien seems not to be able to leave the castle; although he makes several plans to do so. Instead of the Knockloftys representing the type of improving landlord advocated by Edgeworth, however, there is no indication that their extensive improvements extend to the condition of the native Irish. In fact in “The Excursions” chapter, Lady Knocklofty and her entourage ride along on the new road, “while a few half-naked cottiers, walking up to their middle in the boggy soil, and bearing bushes and stones to patch the bog road lately laid down by the great lord of the district, exhibited in their famished looks and squalid rags, a painful contrast to the splendid party, who turned aside their eyes, as they passed, in pity or disgust” (O, 484). Although she is supposed to be the evil enchantress, Lady Knocklofty does not turn out to be as treacherous as billed (though contemporary reviewers were certainly shocked by her)39; she commits treason in order to try to save O’Brien by 39  William Jerdan refuses to “recommend these volumes for the perusal of the females of England,” finding the relationship of Lady Knocklofty with O’Brien to be “impure

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giving him the papers with the charges against him and offering to help spirit him out of the country, and Morgan includes two scenes that indicate that the Countess in fact considered herself to be much more Irish than she had claimed. As a token of her appreciation for O’Brien’s first rescue of herself and Honoria, she gives him her ring from Lough Corrib: “it is but a single Lough Corrib pearl, set in Irish gold. ‘Tis the family crest, with the family motto round the circle—‘Qui me cherche, me trouve.’ You cannot refuse so Irish an offering—you cannot forget so sincere an intimation” (O, 182). As will be seen below, she remains true to her pledge to O’Brien, even in the face of social disgrace. Morgan also gives Lady Knocklofty a moment in which she reveals her sensibility in her appreciation of the land itself. Upon passing onto the balcony at Beauregard, Lady Knocklofty exclaims. “What a lovely night! what a sublime scene!” Though O’Brien is far “more occupied” with gazing upon her person, she confesses her attachment to the wilds of western Ireland: “When I am here . . . I wonder how I can exist elsewhere. These are the scenes, and these the objects for which I was intended . . . You will scarcely believe how little I belong to the world, in which my ill (or as that world supposed, my good) fortune has thrown me. It is impossible, Lord Arranmore, to describe the emotions with which these scenes inspire me,—or the religious enthusiasm they awaken. Do you not think that such objects communicate to the mind a portion of their own grandeur, and raise it to a loftier cast?” (O, 466). Like Belinda’s Lady Delacour, this seems to be a moment of Lady Knocklofty unmasked, where Morgan allows her to show emotion that aligns her with values represented by Glorvina. In her final act of the novel, Lady Knocklofty commits treason: Lord Arranmore meets with a traveler of “muffled and mysterious appearance” and recognizes her to be Lady Knocklofty. When he exclaims about her presence “in so wild a place, in so unsuitable a dress, and unseasonable an hour, unaccompanied by friends,” she tells him that in spite of “[m]y duty to my husband, to my children, to my selfrespect, my regard for reputation,” she has come because “[y]our liberty, your life, are in danger. To rescue, to save you, to warn you of your danger, and to offer you the means of escape” (O, 545). Sharing state secrets, Lady Knocklofty tells O’Brien of the “charges of a most treasonable nature, on evidence as apparently convincing as I know it to be false,” “which they with whom I am fatally linked, have raised against you” (O, 546). She also shares with him “copies of the information which have been lodged against you,” thus clearly committing a treasonable act herself against the State and in aide of a known insurgent. Even though Lady Knocklofty has her “spies” and knows of O’Brien’s “midnight” visit to the Abbess, she risks a great deal to try to help O’Brien (O, 546). O’Brien is so moved by her generosity that he cannot help but sleep with her. Morgan returns to her perspective of Lady

throughout” and seemingly introduced “for no reason except its own inherent pruriency” (Belanger, 300, 301). See Jerdan’s review from the Literary Gazette no. 563 (3 Nov. 1827): 707–9; repr., Belanger, 299–304.

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Knocklofty as enchantress as she describes O’Brien departing from the “Circean bower,” “but not unsullied” (O, 548).40 Morgan’s other warrior stateswoman is, of course, O’Flaherty, who is the Bradamante character with all of her purity and goodness. Like Bradamante she is able to magically traverse time and space.41 Though O’Flaherty claims that as a woman her “agency is limited” (O, 523), her detailing of the events and intrigues that she has been able to effect in keeping O’Brien from mischief spans several countries and several pages of the narrative. She relates that her “endowments” were “cultivated to the uttermost: for, from the petites maîtressess of the Faubourg St Germain, to the powerful superiors of Italian convents, Jesuitism has always borrowed its agency from the female arts, and female subtlety” (O, 522).42 After her training, O’Flaherty is appointed “to rescue from the dangers of that world, one marked out by ancient prophecy to be the saviour of his country, and the restorer of the rights and the creeds of his forefathers,” that is, O’Brien (O, 522). A contemporary reviewer for the Monthly Review describes Beavoin O’Flaherty as “a singularly fantastic creature of the gentle sex, an O’Flaherty, who, like a guardian spirit attends the person of the hero, and seems to be the invisible witness of his most secret actions. No place is inaccessible to her; she penetrates the castle and is present at the singular hospitality extended to O’Brien.”43 This reviewer could have added that this “fantastic creature” functions as the hero of this story, and the putative hero remains an immature and confused young man. Though O’Flaherty espouses a non-sectarian Christian righteousness, she is far from naïve and innocent. Like Lady Knocklofty, O’Flaherty makes use of a vast network of information and resources to achieve her goals. When O’Brien accuses O’Flaherty of coming to Ireland in the service of the Jesuits, “to give grace and splendour to institutions which had fallen into desuetude,” she replies, “If I have been brought here for that end, I have wielded my influence for far other purposes” (O, 521). What O’Flaherty describes as her “caprice” in effecting 40   Wright points out that even the description of Lady Knocklofty’s divorce is related as a “scene”: “Lady K., one fine day, rubbed off her rouge, let down her hair, called her ‘friends, lovers, countrymen,’ about her, made a speech from Lady Townly, acknowledged herself unworthy to be Countess Knocklofty any more . . . and is now, ‘Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded’” (O, 560); see Wright, “National Erotics,” 239. 41   Beavoin also has a network of informants (O, 526) and apparently literally battles O’Brien in France: “she is ‘the Lady of Lodi’ (as she is called in a little vaudeville written on the subject) who defended herself in her château on the banks of the Adda . . . The château was attacked by a skirmishing party of French soldiers, whom she kept at bay till the arrival of the main army; when, throwing herself at the feet of the General of division, he recognized in the heroine of Lodi, la soeur de charité; and permitted her to march out of her fortress tambour battant, and with all the honours of war” (O, 566). 42   See Ferris for an excellent discussion of Beavoin’s transformation of “sequestered (Catholic) spaces” to “counter-space(s) of women’s agency,” The Romantic National Tale, 92–101. 43   Monthly Review n.s. 6 (Dec. 1827) 508–19; repr., Belanger, 308.

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so many different guises in their meetings has also been thoughtful and effective manipulation of her male charge. She explains her rationale to O’Brien, “men (and above all, such men), are always more readily convinced through their sensations, than their reason—for arguments are words, but images are facts; and a scene got up, is always well worth a case stated” (O, 526). In her Memoirs, Lady Morgan reiterates this statement almost verbatim, ending with “I have always succeeded by a scene.”44 The epigraphs and other performative glosses of The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys cast women in public roles. They perform, they govern, they influence social policy, they gather intelligence and they understand the political workings of the state. Glosses that suggest a domestic or maternal role for women are absent from The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys. There is nothing approaching the single epigraph from Belinda, where Lord Lyttelton recommends “prudence” in his “Monody on his Wife.” Mothers and children are virtually absent from this novel. The figure of Mor-ny-Brien as a nurturing presence comes to mind, but she is far from typical in her fulfillment of gender roles. Known as the “weird woman” of the Arran Islands, our most vivid recollection of her is described by Shane when she saved him: “Mor-ny-Brien cut me down, wid her own two hands and the help of God (O, 249).45 We are floored when Lady Knocklofty reveals that she has children, whom she has left to save O’Brien. Though O’Flaherty delineates her mission at the Abbey as educating “woman for the useful, blessed duties, that belong to her sex, as wife and mother” (O, 521), we do not see the precepts affecting her own destiny. We discover her married to O’Brien in the conclusion; instead of a domestic scene, O’Flaherty appears arrayed as “priestess of the sun” at the Paris Opera, a political activist who “governs” her husband (O, 566).

  Lady Morgan’s Memoirs, 2: 238–9.  Recall that O’Brien becomes ill and faints just before Shane is hanged (O, 245).

44 45

Epilogue

When Othello speaks to the Venetian senate to explain how he has wooed the fair Desdemona, he begins,



And therefore little shall I grace my cause In speaking for myself. Yet (by your gracious patience) I will a round unvarnish’d tale deliver Of my whole course of love—what drugs, what charms, What conjuration, and what mighty magic (For such proceeding I am charg’d withal) I won his daughter. (I.iii.88–94)

Othello, the Moor, like Elizabeth Hamilton, Maria Edgeworth, and Sydney Owenson, speaks from a position of marginality, claiming only “rude” rhetorical skills. However, as is well known, Othello’s ability to tell a story is exceptional. He excels at conjuring and his tales of “hair-breadth scapes” and “men whose heads / [Do grow] beneath their shoulders” (I.iii.136, 144–5) bring his adventures into the present moment and charm his listeners. Disarming his audience with the promise of a “round unvarnish’d tale,” he captivates their “greedy ear[s]” and woos them as he did Desdemona. The novelists of the romantic period follow Othello’s example, both in their claims of “unvarnished tales” and in their sophisticated rhetorical skills. I would suggest that much of their “drugs” and “mighty magic” come in the form of artistic glosses. The use of these glosses by Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson indicates the ways in which marginal groups—those without official representation— sought to draw attention to, and have an effect upon, political and social realities of their times. Tom Dunne’s assessment that Morgan’s novels, “like the histories to which they appealed, can properly be regarded, in Oliver MacDonagh’s phrase, as ‘politics by other means,’” might accurately be applied to all of the novels studied here. Likewise, Balachandra Rajan’s discussion of Hamilton’s Hindoo Rajah and Morgan’s The Missionary illuminates a position that I would argue also applies to the novels treated in this book: “Recontextualization of these works restores their topicality and helps to explain why they mattered in their time.  But



  Tom Dunne, “Fiction as ‘the best history of nations’: Lady Morgan’s Irish Novels,” in The Writer as Witness: Literature as Historical Evidence, ed. Tom Dunne (Cork: Cork University Press, 1987), 135.

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recontextualization also retrieves a literary sophistication which would otherwise not be present in our reading of these novels” This study began with the premise that contrary to their prefatory claims, the novels of the romantic period are neither “plain” nor “unvarnished.” The exploration conducted here of glosses within these novels has, I believe, demonstrated the truth of this premise. In the process, the most significant, and perhaps most surprising, finding presented has been that the more rhetorically varnished a text becomes, the greater the possibility that its self-conscious constructedness will reveal aspects of contemporaneous historical reality. Robert Kiely in his early study of the romantic novel observed a similar paradox: “but what is surprising is that the desire to maintain an appearance of historical authenticity was sustained, and in some cases increased, as the subject matter of novels became further removed from the ordinary.” Although Kiely offers no explanation for this effect, he notes that when the romantic novelists “indulge[d] in parody,” they were “unable to draw a clear distinction between the authentic and the artificial. Either the grounds of [their] ridicule constantly shift or the supposed artifice is attacked with a vehemence that raises it into significance.” The explanation I would offer is that artifice itself, when of a high and complex and distinctive order, allows us to see a glimmer of “historical authenticity.” Obviously the self-conscious technique of rhetorical varnishing which I have explored here might be examined with any group of texts independent of time period or country of origin. However, I believe that glossing is foregrounded in the romantic period and becomes a self-conscious rhetorical device precisely because of the social and political climate of the time. In his search for the “origins of the novel,” Michael McKeon marks the “instability of generic categories” and the “instability of social categories” (precipitated by the execution of Charles I and blurring of economic class and aristocratic inheritance as cause for the elevation of groups of people) as historical points which gave rise to questions of truth and virtue from which the genre originates: “What kind of authority or evidence is required of narrative to permit it to signify truth to its readers? What kind of social existence or behavior signifies an individual’s virtue to others?” Although McKeon finds that by the end of the eighteenth century questions of truth and virtue no longer pose the same problems because of a stability in generic nomenclature and in categories of social stratification, I would argue that the French Revolution, the Irish rebellion of 1798, the British imperial venture, the Napoleonic wars, and the    Balachandra Rajan, “Feminizing the Feminine: Early Women Writers on India,” in Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834, ed. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 149.   Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 10.   Ibid., 2.    Michael McKeon, “Generic Transformation and Social Change: Rethinking the Rise of the Novel,” Cultural Critique 1 (1985): 159–81; 161.

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struggle for the equality of women at the turn of the century create an instability in the traditional assumptions about how authority is gained and controlled. Furthermore, the separation between “history” and “literature” which McKeon ascribes to the romantic period is far from evident in the novel. This study has shown that the period of 1789–1830 witnessed a series of challenges by the novelists Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson to assumptions about how authority and class were socially and politically determined. The original skepticism of readers toward truth claims in the print media, which increased with the burgeoning critical journals, informs Morgan’s own attitudes toward literature and allows her to question the “virtue” of the Edinburgh literati, to parody John Wilson Croker in her novel O’Donnel and to employ her paratexts to debate the merits of the reviewers. This skepticism is also key to the question of the representation of women illuminated by the rhetorical varnishing particularly seen in Belinda and The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys. The authors’ explicit differentiation of editorial commentary from the central narrative illustrates the continuing instability, or, more positively characterized, maleability of the print narrative, as well as the blurring of literature and history. If we return to the example of the moveable panels in “Polyorama or 20, 922, 789, 888, 000 Vues Pittoresques” (Figure 6.1), we may understand these women writers to be involved in projects where the homeless family pushed to the edge of the frame may be infolded in the central narrative or the ruin might be transformed from aesthetic backdrop to political statement. We should always understand these authors as keenly aware of their role as political writers and equally sensitive to the effects of the layered glosses that intentionally disrupt their narratives to engage the world beyond their texts. Attention to their narrative techniques, especially their use of media shifts, reveals a sophistication that certainly deserves recognition in any narrative of the rise of the novel.

  Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 419.

Fig. 6.1 Facsimile of “Polyorama or 20, 922, 789, 888, 000 Vues Pittoresques.”

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Wardle, Ralph M. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1951. Whelan, Kevin. Fellowship of Freedom: The United Irishmen and 1798. Cork: Cork University Press, 1998. Williamson, Dr. G.C. English Conversation Pictures of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. New York: Hacker Art Books, 1975. Wills, Claire. “Language Politics, Narrative, Political Violence.” Oxford Literary Review 13 (1991): 20–60. Wilson, Carol Shiner, and Joel Haefner, eds. Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Wolf, Robert Lee. “The Irish Novels of Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan.” Introduction to The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys, by Lady Morgan. New York: Garland, 1979. Womack, Peter. Improvement and Romance: Constructing the Myth of the Highlands. London: MacMillan, 1989. Wordsworth, William. “Tintern Abbey.” In William Wordsworth, edited by Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Wright, Julia. “‘The Nation Begins to Form’: Competing Nationalisms in Morgan’s The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys.” ELH 66 (1999): 939–63. ——. “National Erotics and Political Theory in Morgan’s The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys.” European Romantic Review 15 (2004): 229–41. Zerby, Chuck. The Devil’s Details: A History of Footnotes. New York: Touchstone, 2002. Zeender, Marie-Noelle Zeender. “Resistance in The Wild Irish Girl.” Cycnos 19, no. 1 (2002): 65–75.

Index

Account of Two Charity Schools for the Education of Girls (Cappe) 140–41 Adams, Jane 61 Age of Innocence (Reynolds) 88 Alexander, James 64n58, 71 Allen, Walter 80 Analytical Review 41n57 Apprentice, The (Murphy) 164 Ariosto, Ludovico 157, 166, 180–81 Asiatic Annual Register 18–19 Asiatic Miscellany 18–19, 30–31 Asiatic Researches 29 Asiatic Society 13, 18, 19, 23–4, 27–28, 30–33; see also Orientalists Atkinson, Colin B. 97n59, 98 Atkinson, Jo 97n59, 98 Authentic Account of the . . . Confession of James Beaghan (Beaghan) 69–70 Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 4 Bandits on a Rocky Coast (Rosa) 117 fig. 4.2, 119 Barrell 152, 154 Barthes, Roland 76 Bartlett, William 118 fig. 4.3, 119 Bartolozzi, Francesco 82, 84 fig. 3.2 Beaghan, James 69–70 Beatty, John D. 45n5 Beckford, William 11–12 Beggar’s Opera, The (Gay) 157, 177–79 Belanger, Jacqueline 5 Belinda (Edgeworth) 14, 73–103, 182, 184; see also Edgeworth, Maria Benger, Elizabeth O. 17, 19, 22, 28, 136, 137, 139, 142, 151 Benstock, Shari 10 Bermingham, Ann 121, 152, 154 Bickerstaff, Isaac 157, 177, 179–80 Black Giles (More) 154–55 blackface 46–50, 51, 67–68, 71–72 Boone, Joseph A. 8 Braun, Heather 108n10

Brehon law 61 British East India Company 18, 19, 23, 24–6, 41–42 Brosch, Renate 92, 95 Burk, John 44n5 Burke, Edmund 25, 34, 40, 97n60, 108, 123n47 Burns, Robert 144, 147n38, 148–52 Bushe, Charles Kendal 69n70 Butler, Marilyn 15n38, 46, 53, 54, 57n43, 61–62n54, 69, 92n45, 102 Camille, Michael 5–6 Campbell, Ian 144 Campbell, Mary 162n6 Cappe, Catherine 140–41 Cass, Jeffrey 74n3 Castle Rackrent (Edgeworth) 9, 13–14, 45–47, 48, 49, 51–57, 59–66, 70–72, 141, 155, 159n4; see also Edgeworth, Maria Castle, Terry 74n3 Caulfield, James 44n5 Charlesworth, Michael 113 Cheap Repository Tracts 137, 147n39, 154–55 Clarkson, Thomas 155 Clery, E.J. 15n38 Code of Gentoo Laws (Halhead) 23–24 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 10–11 Comitini, Patricia 73n2, 139–40 Concise Account of the Material Events and Atrocities (Musgrave) 44, 122 Confessions of an English Opium Eater (De Quincey) 9 Connolly, Claire 106n3 Constable, John 130, 152 conversation piece paintings 91–93, 95–97, 102 Cook, Malcolm 75–76 Copley, Stephen 113–14 Corbett, Mary Jean 16n38, 107–108

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Cordon, Joanne 90 Cottage Cook, The (More) 147n39 Cottage Dialogues among the Irish Peasantry (Leadbeater) 56, 137n9 Cottage Door (Gainsborough) 130, 131 fig. 5.1 Cottagers of Glenburnie (Hamilton) 14–15, 129–55, 153 fig. 5.2; see also Hamilton, Elizabeth “Cotter’s Saturday Night” (Burns) 149–51 Craciun, Adriana 15n38 Critical Review 41n57 Croker, Thomas Crofton 48 Cronin, Anthony 53 Cullan, Fintan 162n8 Day, Thomas 76, 77 De Quincey, Thomas 9 Deane, Seamus 170 Debate on the Rohilla War 41–42 Donovan, John 86–88, 90n38 Douthwaite, Julia 81n22, 102n68 Dow, Alexander 36–37 Dughet, Caspar 115 Dunleavy, Janet Egleson 98 Dunluce Castle (Bartlett) 118 fig. 4.3, 119 Dunne, Tom 47n11, 51n28, 185 Eagleton, Terry 9, 46n8 Eaton, Natasha 37 Edgeworth, Maria 3–4, 6, 9, 11, 12, 16n38, 137n9, 187 Works Belinda 14, 73–103, 182, 184 and conversation piece paintings 91–93, 95–97, 102 literary self-consciousness in 75, 78, 79–80, 95–96, 100–102 and Paul and Virginia 86–8, 90 and portraiture 75–76, 81–82, 85–86, 88, 98–99 Castle Rackrent 9, 13–14, 45–47, 48, 49, 51–57, 59–66, 70–72, 141, 155, and blackface 46–50, 51, 67–68, 71–72

fairy-mount in 62–67 great coat in 57, 59–60 and the Irish Rebellion of 1798 43–45, 49–51, 57, 58 fig. 2.1, 60, 61, 67–8n67, 69–72 and Irish rebellion narratives 43–44, 60, 61, 63, 69–72 and the telegraph 64–65 Ennui 52, 60, 66, 67–68 Essay on Irish Bulls (R.L. and M. Edgeworth) 46n10, 47–48 Letters for Literary Ladies 98 Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth (ed. Hare) 50, 64, 67, 80 Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth (with R.L. Edgeworth) 49–50, 64n60, 67n65 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell 44–45, 46n10, 47–48, 64–65 Works Letter . . . on the Tellograph (R.L. Edgeworth) 65 Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth (with M. Edgeworth) 49–50, 64n60, 67n65 Edinburgh Review 137 “Elegy in a Country Church-Yard” (Gray) 149–50 Ennui (Edgeworth) 52, 60, 66, 67–68 Essay on Irish Bulls (R.L. and M. Edgeworth) 46n10, 47–48 Essay[s] on the Picturesque (Price) 108 Etheridge, Sir George 177 Fair Oysterinda (Houston) 82 Fauske, Chris 16n38 Favret, Mary A. 15n38 Ferris, Ina 15n38, 16n38, 55, 112, 122, 158n2, 165n14, 168, 173, 183n42 Figes, Eva 77–78 Fitzgerald, Lord Edward 110 Flanagan, Thomas 61, 62 Flower Girl, The (Zoffany) 82 Flynn, Joyce 48

Index Fogarty, Anne 114 Foster, R.F. 66 Foucault, Michel 11n33 Fowler, Elizabeth 59 Fraser’s Magazine 77 Gainsborough, Thomas 130, 131 fig. 5.1, 152, 154, 155 Garside, Peter 113–14 Gay, John 157, 177–79 Genette, Gérard 5, 145n34, 176n30 Ghauts at Benares (Hodges) 39 fig. 1.2 Gibbons, Luke 48–9 Gillray, James 57, 58 fig. 2.1 Gilpin, William 105, 108, 111, 113, 114, 129, 129n3 Glover, Susan 46n8, 55, 56n41 Gordon, James 44n5 Grafton, Anthony 6 Gray, Thomas 149–50, 152 Greenfield, Susan 81n22, 85n29, 90n39 Grogan, Claire 18, 18n2, 35 Groves, David 12 Grundy, Isobel 34–35n45 Haefner, Joel 15n38 Halhead, Nathaniel Brassey 23–4 Hamilton, Charles 19–20, 24–26, 27, 28, 42 Works The Hedàya 24–5 An Historical Relation . . . of the Rohilla Afgans 25–26, 42 Hamilton, Elizabeth 3–4, 6, 9, 11, 12, 16n38, 187 and female authorship 19–22, 29–30 and Charles Hamilton 19–20, 22, 26, 28, 42 Memoirs of 17, 19–21, 22, 28, 136, 137, 139, 142, 151 Works Cottagers of Glenburnie 14–15, 129–55, 153 fig. 5.2 benevolence in 130, 132, 137–44, 138n13 and Robert Burns 144, 147n38, 148–52 and the Edinburgh House of Industry 140

205

and education 137–43 and Hector MacNeill 145–49 picturesque in 129–30 reform in 130, 133, 134–37, 143–44, 145–48 and Scotland’s Scaith (MacNeill) 145–49 Hints Addressed to the Patrons and Directors of Schools 138, 140 Letters Addressed to the Daughter of a Nobleman 22n14 Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education 137–39, 141–42 Memoirs of Modern Philosophers 151–52 Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (Hamilton) 13, 18–19, 22–23, 26–38, 40–42 on Warren Hastings 23–25, 41–42 and William Hodges 22, 26, 31–32 Preliminary Dissertation 18, 26–27, 29–30 Hastings, Warren 23–5, 41–42 Hay, Edward 44n5 Hazlitt, William 154 Hearne, Thomas 154 Hedàya, The (C. Hamilton) 24–25 Heffernan, James A.W. 6–7 Hints Addressed to the Patrons and Directors of Schools (Hamilton) 138, 140 Historical Relation . . . of the Rohilla Afgans (C. Hamilton) 25–26, 42 History of Hindostan (Dow) 36–37 History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade (Clarkson) 155 History of the Insurrection of the County of Wexford (Hay) 44n5 History of the Late War in Ireland (Burk) 44n5 History of the Rebellion in Ireland (Gordon) 44n5 Hodges, William 22n16, 26, 31–32, 35, 39 fig. 1.2 Hogarth, William 82, 84 fig. 3.2

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Hogg, James 11, 12 Hollingworth, Brian 16n38, 49 Howley, James 120 Hutcheon, Linda 11n33 “Hymn to Camdeo” (W. Jones) 30, 33 Illustrations of . . . Ireland (Roberts) 109–10 Impartial Narrative of the Most Important Engagements (J. Jones) 44n5 Irish insurgency 122–27 Irish Rebellion 126–27 Irish Rebellion of 1798 43–45, 49–51, 57, 58 fig. 2.1, 60, 61, 67–8n67, 69–72, 122–23, 126–27 Jackson, Charles 43–44 Jackson, H.J. 4 Janowitz, Anne 121 Jaster, Margaret Rose 59 Jerdan, William 182n39 Johnson, Claudia L. 15n38 Johnson, Joseph 11 Jones, Ann H. 4 Jones, John 44n5 Jones, Sir William 30, 33 Jonson, Ben 48, 59 Joseph, Betty 41 Jourdan de Pellerin, E. 29 Kant, Immanuel 38, 40 Kaufman, Heidi 16n38 Kelly, Gary 10, 15n38, 16n38, 18n2, 26, 137, 139, 140, 144, 149n41 Kelly, James 70 Kennedy, Brian 109–10 Kiely, Robert 186 Kim, Elizabeth S. 51n28 Kindersley, Nathaniel Edward 22n16 King, Constance E. 1 Kirkpatrick, Kathryn 54, 57n43, 73n1, 99n65 Knight, Richard Payne 105 Kowaleski-Wallace, Beth 51n29, 54, 80, 81n21, 95 Lady Caroline Howard (Reynolds) 88, 89 fig. 3.3

Lady Cockburn and her Three Eldest Sons (Reynolds) 92–93, 94 fig. 3.4 Lady Morgan’s Memoirs 163n9, 174 “Lady of Pleasure, A Satyr” (Etheridge) 177 Lady’s Magazine 132 Lambert, George 152 Lancaster, Joseph 142 “Landscape, a didactic poem” (Knight) 108 Las Meninas (Velázquez) 3, 4, 75 Last Confession . . . of Peter Porcupine 70 Last Speech and Dying Words of Martin M’Loughlin 44, 70–71 Lazarus, Rachel Mordecai 53, 97–98 Le Beau Monde 4 Leadbeater, Mary 56, 60, 63, 64, 137n9, 142 Leask, Nigel 37 Lecky, W.E.H. 61n54 Ledyard, John 138–39 Leerssen, Joep 106–107, 111, 165 Letter . . . on the Tellograph (R.L. Edgeworth) 65 Letters Addressed to the Daughter of a Nobleman (Hamilton) 22n14 Letters for Literary Ladies (Edgeworth) 98 Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education (Hamilton) 137–39, 141–42 Lewis, Jayne 115n34 Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth (ed. Hare) 50, 64, 67, 80 Life and Times of Salvator Rosa (Owenson) 106, 125–26 Lightfoot, Marjorie 99n65 Lipking, Lawrence 10 Literary Gazette 182n39 Lorrain, Claude 105, 116 fig. 4.1, 115 Lott, Eric 47, 72 Lynn, Kenneth 49 Lyttelton, Lord George 93, 93n50 M’Loughlin, Martin 44, 70–71 Macaulay, Rose 119 McCann, Andrew 81n22, 90n39 McCormack, W.J. 51n28 MacFadyen, Heather 75, 99–100 McGann, Jerome 10–11

Index Macheski, Cecilia 15n38 McKeon, Michael 186–87 MacNeill, Hector 145–49 Makdisi, Saree 28, 34 Malton, James 109 Manson, David 142 Maturin, Robert 119–20, 120n37 Mellor, Anne K. 4n5, 15n38, 18n2, 33, 35 Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (Hamilton) 151–52 Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth (with R.L. Edgeworth) 49–50, 64n60, 67n65 Memoirs of the Different Rebellions (Musgrave) 64 Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton (Benger) 17, 19, 22, 28, 136, 137, 139, 142, 151 Milesian Chief (Maturin) 119–20, 120n37 Millenium Hall (Scott) 143n30 Miller, Nancy 77, 78 Mitchell, W.J.T. 6 Monthly Review 32, 80, 106, 183 Moore, Lisa 91n42 More Hannah 137, 139, 142, 147n39, 154–55 Morgan, Lady Sydney, see Owenson, Sydney Moskal, Jeanne 107 Murphy, Arthur 164 Murphy, Sharon 16n38 Musgrave, Sir Richard 44, 64, 122 Myers, Mitzi 47–48n15, 51n28, 52, 139 Naddaff, Sandra 8n21 Narrative of the Sufferings and Escape of Charles Jackson 43–44 Narrative of What Passed at Killalla (Stock) 44n5 Nash, Julie 16n38, 98 Neill, Michael 46n8, 57n43 Newcomer, James 13, 46n8, 81n21, 162n6 Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan 73n1 Ó Gallchoir, Clíona 16n38, 55 O’Briens and the O’Flahertys (Owenson) 15, 125, 126, 157–84; see also Owenson, Sydney

207

O’Donnel (Owenson) 172, 187 O’Kane, Finola 110 Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (Kant) 38, 40 Observations on the River Wye (Gilpin) 108, 114, 129n3 Oriental Repertory 18–19 Orientalists 13, 17, 19, 22–23, 26–27, 30–32, 34–35, 37; see also Asiatic Society Orlando Furioso (Ariosto) 157, 166, 180–81 Othello (Shakespeare) 8–9, 185 Owenson, Sydney (Lady Morgan) 3–4, 6, 9, 11, 12, 16n38, 187 and women in politics 158–59, 160 Works Lady Morgan’s Memoirs 163n9, 174 Life and Times of Salvator Rosa 106, 125–26 O’Briens and the O’Flahertys 15, 125, 126, 157–84 Annals of St. Grellan in 157, 159, 166–8, 169–70, 171–72 and The Beggar’s Opera (Gay) 157, 177–79 and Napoleon Bonaparte 161, 176 critique of heroism in 166–70, 171–76 epigraphs in 176–7, 176– 77n30, 180–81, 184 and Orlando Furioso (Ariosto) 157, 166, 180–81 performative glosses in 162, 163–64, 170–71, 176–80, 184 and The Sultan (Bickerstaff) 157, 177, 179–80 wild Irishman in 167–70 women warriors in 181–84 O’Donnel 172, 187 Patriotic Sketches 4–5, 106, 108–109, 111, 126–27

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Wild Irish Girl 14, 105–108, 111–15, 119, 121–27, 157, 159, 168–70 and the Irish insurgency 122–27 picturesque in 105, 108–15 Salavator Rosa in 105–6, 112, 115, 117 fig. 4.2, 119, 125–26, 125n51 ruins in 113–14, 119–24 Oyster Girl (Mercier) 82 Packenham, Thomas 43 Park, Mungo 138–39 Parrinder, Patrick 3n3 Patriotic Sketches (Owenson) 4–5, 106, 108–109, 111, 126–27 Patty, James S. 125n51 Paul and Virginia (Saint-Pierre) 86–88, 90 Perkins, Pamela 30, 31, 32, 41 Philosophical Enquiry into . . . the Sublime and Beautiful (Burke) 108, 123n47 picturesque 37–38, 40, 105, 108–15, 129–30 Picturesque and Descriptive View of the City of Dublin (Malton) 109 Pieterse, Jan Nederveen 47 Plan of an Asiatic Register 18, 30 Pointon, Marcia 85, 88, 96–97 “Polyorama or 20,922,789, 888,000 Vues Pittoresques” 1, 2 fig. 1.1, 187, 188 fig. 6.1 portraiture 75–76, 81–82, 85–86, 88, 98–99 Postle, Martin 82 Poussin, Nicholas 115 Praz, Mario 96 Price, Uvedale 105 Rajan, Balachandra 18n2, 32–33, 34, 185–86 Rajan, Tilottama 52 rebellion narratives 43–45, 44–45n5, 60, 61 Remarks on Rural Scenery (Smith) 7–8 Reply of the Right Rev. Doctor Caulfield . . . to the Misrepresentations of Sir Richard Musgrave 44n5

Reynolds, Sir Joshua 88, 89 fig. 3.3, 92–93, 94 fig. 3.4 Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Coleridge) 10–11 Roberts, Thomas Sautell 109–10 Rogin, Michael 47n13, 48 Rosa, Salvator 105–106, 112, 115, 117 fig. 4.2, 119, 125–26, 125n51, 172 ruins 37–38, 113–14, 119–24 Ruoff, Gene W. 53 Russell, Shannon 30, 31, 32, 41 Ryder, Sean 121–22 Said, Edward W. 35, 59 Saint-Pierre, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de 86–88 Sandro Botticelli 100, 101 fig. 3.5 Schofield, Mary Anne 15n38 Scotland’s Scaith (MacNeill) 145–49 Scott, Jonathan 125n51 Scott, Sarah 143n30 Sekula, Allan 76n8 Sha, Robert C. 110–11 Shaffer, Julie 77n10 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 25, 25n22 Shrimp Girl (Hogarth) 82, 84 fig. 3.2 Shrimps! (Bartolozzi) 82, 84 fig 3.2 Simmons, Clare A. 10 Simple Story (Inchbald) 80 Smith, John Thomas 7–8 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll 54 Some Account of the First Apparent Symptoms (Alexander) 64n58, 71 Specimens of Hindoo Literature (Kindersley) 22n16 Spenser, Edmund 57, 59 Stafford, Fiona 110, 121n40 Stock, Joseph 44n5 Stuart, David C. 115 Sultan, The (Bickerstaff) 157, 177, 179–80 Taylor, Susan B. 18n2 Teltscher, Kate 24, 26, 34, 35, 37 Thaddeus, Janice Farrar 139 Three Essays (Gilpin) 111, 113, 114 “Tintern Abbey” (Wordsworth) 130 Tobin, Beth Fowkes 38, 132, 142 Toll, Robert C. 47–8n11

Index Tour of Ireland (Young) 111 Tracy, Robert 46n8, 63n56, 107 Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (Hamilton) 13, 18–19, 22–23, 26–38, 40–42; see also Hamilton, Elizabeth Travels in India (Hodges) 22n16, 26, 31–32, 35 Trumpener, Katie 16n38, 107, 170 Tyson, Gerald P. 11–12 Union. Cease Your Funning (Bushe) 69n70 United Irishmen in Training (Gillray) 57, 58 fig. 2.1 Vathek (Beckford) 11–12 Velázquez, Diego 3, 75 Venus and Mars (Botticelli) 100, 101 fig. 3.5 View of Crescenza (Lorrain) 115, 116 fig. 4.1 View of the Present State of Ireland (Spenser) 57, 59

209

Wardle, Ralph M. 11 Warren Hastings 23–5, 41–42 Watercress Girl, The (Zoffany) 82, 83 fig. 3.1 Watson, Nicola J. 15n38 Westall, Richard 92n45, 93, 95–96 Whelan, Kevin 43n1, 50–51n26 Wild Irish Girl (Owenson) 14, 105–8, 111–15, 119, 121–27, 157, 159, 168–70; see also Owenson, Sydney Williamson, G.C. 91 Wills, Claire 49 Wilson, Carol Shiner 15n38 Wilson, John 144 Wolf, Robert Lee 168 Womack, Peter 111 Wright, Julia 162n6, 162n7, 168, 173n25, 175–76, 183n40 Zeender, Marie-Noelle 108n10 Zerby, Chuck 6 Zoffany, Johan 82, 83 fig. 3.1