Maria Edgeworth by the Hon. Emily Lawless (1845-1913). New York & London: The Macmillan Company, 1905.
ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS
EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY
MARIA EDGEWORTH
ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS
BY THE
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1905
All rights reserved
COPYRIGHT, 1904
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published July, 1904. Reprinted, April, 1905.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.–Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
ALL the letters of Miss Edgeworth in full-sized type to be found in the following pages are new, the greater number having been not only never before been published, but not even printed. For permission to make use of them, as well as for much invaluable advice in the course of writing this book, I am indebted to the kindness of Mrs. Arthur Butler (the daughter of Miss Edgeworth's youngest brother, Michael Pakenham), who has allowed me to read over a number of letters still in her possession in MS., and to select those which seemed to me of most interest. For permission to make use of the privately printed family Memoir of Miss Edgeworth I am further indebted to Mrs. Arthur Butler, and in addition to Miss Edgeworth's two nephews, Professor F. Y. Edgeworth, of All Soul's College, Oxford, and Mr. Eroles Edgeworth, the present owner of Edgeworthstown.
E. L.
HAZELHATCH, GOMSHALL,
SURREY, April 1904.
CHAPTER I
EARLY LIFE
. . 1
CHAPTER II
RICHARD LOVELL EDGEWORTH
. . 18
CHAPTER III
FATHER AND DAUGHTER
. . 31
CHAPTER IV
ARRIVAL IN IRELAND–FIRST BOOKS
. . 44
CHAPTER V
DISTURBED DAYS
. . 59
CHAPTER VI
NINETY-EIGHT
. . 68
CHAPTER VII
"CASTLE RACKRENT"–IRISH LETTERS
. . 86
[Page viii]
CHAPTER VIII
"BELINDA"–VISIT TO PARIS
. . 98
CHAPTER IX
MIDDLE LIFE
. . 113
CHAPTER X
"ENNUI"–"THE ABSENTEE"–"ORMOND"
. . 127
CHAPTER XI
"MEMOIR OF R. L. EDGEWORTH"–THE "QUARTERLY"–PARIS–GENEVA
. . 146
CHAPTER XII
FRIENDSHIP WITH SCOTT
. . 162
CHAPTER XIII
LATER LIFE
. . 180
CHAPTER XIV
CONCLUSION
. . 210
INDEX . . 215
IT is as the author of Irish books that Maria Edgeworth's fame stands surest, and it is upon this aspect that her present biographer mainly relies in venturing to set foot upon a field which has already been explored by not a few able pilgrims. The history of the Edgeworth family, especially of that very remarkable personage Mr. Richard Lovell Edgeworth, his complicated marriage arrangements, his relations with his daughter Maria, her submissiveness to his views of literature, and the further question of how far that submissiveness has, or has not, injured her own position as an author,–all this has formed the theme of a good many capable pens. It happens, however, that all who have occupied themselves with Maria Edgeworth have, so far as my researches have gone, been English; consequently the more purely Irish side of her writings, as well as the influence which those writings have exercised in Ireland itself, have either been neglected, or been treated as merely incidental. There is little in Mr. Hare's two volumes that would enable a reader to realise the quite exceptional affection [Page 2] felt by all the members of the Edgeworth family for their Irish home. In the earlier Life by Miss Zimmern, published in the "Eminent Women" series, the lack of interest in this part of the subject is yet plainer–may almost be said to go to the length of antipathy. Two extracts will suffice to illustrate this. The first concerns Ireland as a whole:–
"Ireland is not amongst those countries that arouse in the hearts of strangers a desire to pitch their tents, and to judge from the readiness with which her own children leave her, we cannot suppose that they find her a fascinating land. And little wonder, when we consider the state of ferment and disorder which in a greater or less degree has always prevailed there."
The next concerns County Longford:–
"Neither was there much congenial society. The Edgeworths had no liking for the country gentlemen who spent their lives in shooting, hunting, and carousing; booby squires who did not even know that their position put duties upon them. Formal dinners, and long sittings, with the smallest of small talk, were the order of the day and night. They were, however, fortunate in finding in this social wilderness some few persons really worth knowing, chief among whom were the families resident at Pakenham Hall and Castle Forbes."
The last remark is perfectly true. Pakenham Hall and Castle Forbes were both sources of great enjoyment to all the Edgeworth family, and especially to Maria. Apart from this there were, however, alleviations. Moreover, County Longford, even County Longford in the years immediately preceding the Rebellion of '98, was not quite so deplorably dismal a place to live in as the foregoing extract would imply. There is an unmistakable stamp of unfamiliarity about the [Page 3] whole picture–"booby squires," "formal dinners," and "small talk," not being any of them details which bring Ireland particularly vividly before the mind. In such matters the personal bias no doubt counts for a good deal, and–far from regarding her as having been too deeply immersed in any Irish "social wilderness"–the worst deprivation which, in the opinion of her present biographer, Maria Edgeworth had to endure, was that no part of her childhood, save for a brief time when she was about eight years old, ever was spent in Ireland. This is a point which will have to be returned to later, so only needs to be touched upon here, before going on to consider the few, and not particularly interesting, facts which have survived with regard to her infancy and early girlhood.
She was born on the first day of the year 1767, at the house of her mother's father, Mr. Elers, at Black Bourton, some fourteen miles from Oxford, her father and mother having been married while the former was still an undergraduate, and under nineteen years of age. How far the failure of that marriage is to be ascribed to this circumstance is an open question. What is quite certain is that, for a man who afterwards rather distinguished himself as a husband, Mr. Edgeworth's first début in that character cannot be called brilliant. Upon whichever pair of shoulders the blame ought to lie, by general consent the marriage was far from a success. Five children were born of it, a son Richard, in 1766, Maria herself, as stated, in 1767, two daughters, Anna and Emmeline, and an infant which died young. Shortly after the birth of her last child Mrs. Edgeworth herself died, at the house of her aunts, the Miss Blakes, in Great Russell Street. It has been noted [Page 4] with some surprise how casual, almost indifferent, the references to her own mother were apt to be, on the part of one, not only so affectionate, but so invariably dutiful as Maria Edgeworth. At the time of that mother's death she was, it must be remembered, barely six years old, and she recalled little of the event beyond the fact of having been taken into the bedroom to receive the poor woman's dying kiss. It followed that her first definite impressions as to the meaning of the word "mother" came to be associated, not with the rather depressed and sickly woman whom she had first called by that name, but with the young and remarkably pretty stepmother, whose advent upon the scene was only delayed about four months.
The beauty of this new mother, Miss Honora Sneyd, is always spoken of enthusiastically by all who have occasion to mention her name. An anecdote is told of the small Maria, when about seven years old, standing beside her stepmother's dressing-table, and looking up in her face with a sudden and irresistible impression of "How beautiful!" Apart from such spontaneous tributes, her submissiveness as a daughter knew no bounds, not only towards this stepmother, who, arriving on the scene when she was a small child, would naturally receive it, but also–where it seems scarcely equally inevitable–to a succession of other stepmothers, the latest of whom was actually younger than herself, and who arrived in a house of which she, as the eldest daughter, was presumably the mistress, and was in any case already well known and distinguished, alike as woman and as author.
This, however, is wild anticipation! At the date at which we have arrived Maria Edgeworth was still [Page 5] a tiny child, fresh from the nursery of Great Russell Street, where her chief recreation seems to have consisted in being taken for walks by her great-aunts, the dignified Miss Blakes, in the neighbourhood of the British Museum and similar resorts. Shortly after his new marriage Mr. Edgeworth took his wife and children to Edgeworthstown, to which he had succeeded a few years earlier upon the death of his father. This appears, however, to have been a mere family episode, and to have made hardly any permanent impression upon Maria's own mind. When in later years she endeavoured to re-awaken the recollections which this first visit to the family home had left behind, little or nothing seems to have survived. Of Ireland itself, or what is called "local colour," there does not seem to have been even a trace. Two prominent incidents indeed emerged out of the void. She remembered, so her stepmother assures us, cutting out the squares of a checked sofa-cover with a pair of scissors, which some one had incautiously left within reach of her active little fingers. What occurred when the owner of those scissors returned does not, strange to say, seem to have left any particular impression upon her mind! A more heroic piece of mischief consisted in trampling through a set of newly glazed garden frames, which had been laid out upon the grass; and it is characteristic that, even after an interval of more than fifty years, the heavenly crash and smashing noise of that breaking glass was still, so she told one of her relations, vividly present to her mind. Recalling how little girls, or for that matter little girls' mothers and aunts, were shod in and about the year 1774, the remarkable part of this anecdote seems to be [Page 6] that no permanent injury was sustained by any one, with the exception of the ill-fated garden frames.
Soon–a great deal too soon for her own future interests as a romancer–these scenes of youthful guilt were left behind. Unlike luckier children, who are born to permanent Irish homes, poor little Maria Edgeworth's buccaneering days were very early over and done with. The doors of the prison-house–in other words, the doors of Mrs. Lataffiere's superior seminary for young ladies at Derby–were shortly to close behind her. At eight years old she left Edgeworthstown, not again to set foot on Irish soil for seven long years.
Of these seven years not many details seem to have been preserved. With the easy optimism of the biographer, Mr. Hare assures us that from the period of their mother's death, Maria and her sisters enjoyed "a childhood of unclouded happiness." How many childhoods of unclouded happiness, outside the pages of biographies, there have ever been, is a question that it would take us some time to discuss. In Maria Edgeworth's case it does not seem to have been more unflecked with clouds than other childhoods. Indeed, bearing in mind the date of it, and the very active and zealous part played by rod and taws in those days–in educational establishments dedicated to little girls hardly less than in those dedicated to their brothers–we may feel certain that it was crossed by a good many discomforts, which in maturer years we should be apt to describe as tolerably full-grown sufferings. That her spirit was effectually subdued by the discipline is at least clear. The brief days of liberty and of light-hearted marauding; the days of sofa-cover [Page 7] cutting and of frame-smashing, were gone for ever. If we wish to see how far the pendulum had swung in the opposite direction, we have only to study the following artless epistle, written to her first stepmother in 1776, when she must have been a little over nine years old:–
"DERBY, March 30, 1776.
"DEAR MAMMA,–It is with the greatest pleasure I write to you, as I flatter myself it will make you happy to hear from me. I hope you and my dear papa are well. School now seems agreeable to me. I have begun French and dancing, and intend to make" ["great" was written here, but on second thoughts struck out] "improvement in everything I learn. I know that it will give you great satisfaction to know that I am a good girl. My cousin Clay sends her love to you; mine to my father and sisters, who I hope are well. Pray give my duty to papa, and accept the same from, dear Mamma,–your dutiful Daughter."
The year 1780 stands out as a rather noteworthy date in Maria Edgeworth's youthful history. Three events occurred in it, all three of no small importance to her. The first of these was the death from consumption of her first stepmother; the second was the marriage of her father within a few months to another stepmother, who was the sister of the preceding one; the third, and what perhaps at the time was the most important to herself of these three events, was her own removal from Mrs. Lataffiere's school in Derby, to the more advanced one of Mrs. Davis in Upper Wimpole Street, London. At this establishment we are assured that "she had excellent masters," but the honours of her education seem in reality to have fallen rather to her old school, since the unpublished family memoir tells us that she had been so well grounded in French and [Page 8] Italian by Mr. Lataffiere, the husband of her first schoolmistress, that when she came to do the exercises set to her class at Mrs. Davis's, she found them so easy that she wrote out the whole quarter's exercises at once, "keeping them strung together in her desk, and, while the other girls were labouring at their tasks, she had all that time for reading what she pleased to herself, and, when the French master came round for the exercises, had only to unstring hers, and present it."
For a young person who was already an omnivorous reader, and even in a mild way a budding author, this was a propitious circumstance. Maria Edgeworth's long literary life of nearly sixty years may be said to have begun officially a little before this date, upon the receipt of an order from her father to send him a tale–"about the length of a Spectator, on the subject of Generosity." It was to be taken, so the order ran, "from History or Romance, and must be sent the day s'ennight after you receive this, and I beg you will take some pains about it." These directions were appropriately issued from that home of the muses, Lichfield, the same subject having been also given to a "young gentleman from Oxford," who was, it seems, upon a visit there. Mr. Edgeworth's brother-in-law, Mr. Sneyd, was requested to decide upon the respective merits of the competitors, and he unhesitatingly pronounced in favour of Maria's version. "An excellent story and extremely well written, but where's the Generosity ?" was the form which his verdict took, a saying which she was fond herself of using afterwards as a sort of proverb.
This early effort has not apparently been preserved, [Page 9] and at school her story-telling instincts took what was the more immediately successful form of improvisation. At Derby, and later at Wimpole Street, she appears to have had the satisfaction of keeping awake all who had the advantage of sharing a bedroom with her. It was not without considerable emotion that I recently ascertained that–unlike the stern utilitarianism of later years–these first products of Miss Edgeworth's muse seem to have dipped decidedly into those elements of Romance, and even of Horror, which she afterwards held it to be one of her main duties to crush down and reprobate. So, at least, I am forced to conclude, on finding–also from unpublished sources–that a character in one of the tales which was specially applauded by her room-mates, was that of a hero, or more probably a villain, who had the exceptional good fortune to possess "a mask made from the dried skin taken from a dead man's face, which he put on when he wished to be disguised, and which he at other times kept buried at the foot of a tree !"
While still at Mrs. Davis's school, and still engaged in the concoction of these thrilling, if very uncharacteristic devices, Maria was overtaken by what seemed likely to become a serious, not to say a lifelong trouble. Her eyes became so painfully inflamed that she was unable to use them. By her father's orders she was accordingly taken to "one of the first physicians of the day in London"–oculists were apparently beings as yet uninvented. This gentleman's methods seem to have been as considerate as his diagnosis was accurate. Placing the little girl between his knees, he examined her eyes, and at once loudly announced in a tone of absolute certainty, "She will lose her sight." [Page 10] In spite of this cheerful and kindly verdict, she fortunately did nothing of the kind, although her eyes continued for some time to be a trouble to her.
It was while still suffering from this discomfort that she was sent to spend her holidays at Anningsly, in the house of that formidable disciplinarian, Mr. Thomas Day, the author of Sandford and Merton.
Mr. Day is one of those incredibly erratic mortals, dear to the student of human nature, who, when they cross the path of a biographer, are apt to turn him aside for a while from his proper business. He and Mr. Edgeworth had met for the first time at a house called Hare Hatch, where their friendship seems to have sprung into existence at once. Their next meeting was at Lichfield, where they formed part of a very accomplished and erudite circle. "Mr. Day's appearance was not," his candid friend says, "at that time prepossessing. He seldom combed his raven locks, though he was remarkably fond of washing in the stream." This visit to Lichfield may have been one of the rarer occasions upon which his hair was combed, for he had just made up his mind, after some hesitation, to pay his addresses to no less a person than the beautiful Honora Sneyd, mentioned a page back as having at a later date become the second wife of Mr. Edgeworth himself. That determination Mr. Day confided to his friend, who, being still safely married to his first wife, was felt to be an appropriate confidant. He further confided to him a declaratory letter, to be delivered to Miss Sneyd, in which he explained the terms upon which alone he could be induced to offer his hand and heart to any woman. Seeing that these terms included, amongst [Page 11] other details, an absolute submission to the marital rule, especially in the matter of feminine dress, as well as an abstention from all the ordinary amenities of life, including such trifles as music, poetry, light literature, and epistolary correspondence, it will be seen that the letter did not come short in the matter of frankness. Whether in consequence of this engaging programme, or because her attention was distracted by the too great agreeableness of the messenger, Miss Sneyd declined the proposals, although Mr. Edgeworth assures us that she did so "in terms of the most studied propriety." "She would not"–this is from his own published account of the incident–"admit the unqualified control of a husband over all her actions. She did not feel that exclusion from society was indispensably necessary to preserve female virtue, or to secure domestic happiness." Furthermore, "since Mr. Day had decidedly declared his determination to live in perfect seclusion from what is usually called the world, it was fit she should decidedly declare, that she would not change her present mode of life, with which she had no reason to be dissatisfied, for any dark and untried system that could be proposed to her." Poor Mr. Day was not only greatly surprised, but extremely mortified by this rejection, no matter how beautifully it may have been worded. So great was the effect which it had upon his mind that–having discreetly left him to peruse the letter by himself–"when I returned," says Mr. Edgeworth, "I found him actually in a fever !" So serious was this fever, that it was found necessary to summon the great Doctor Darwin, author of The Botanic Garden, and grandfather of Charles Darwin, who was then [Page 12] living at Lichfield; nor was the patient able to be aroused from his dejection until the fortunate arrival at Lichfield of another Miss Sneyd, Elizabeth by name, who appeared there in company with her father, and no less than three more of her sisters.
This second Miss Sneyd is described by Mr. Edgeworth–who ought to have known about both sisters if any one did–as having "more wit, more vivacity, and certainly more humour than her sister. She had, however, less personal grace; she walked heavily, danced indifferently, and had much less energy of manner and of character." In spite of a painful suspicion of fashion which hung about her, and to which he naturally objected, Mr. Day was seen to observe this young lady "with complacent attention." Her indifferent dancing was a source of particular gratification to him, dancing being one of those "female accomplishments" to which he had a rooted objection. Her conversation, moreover, satisfied his taste, apparently because, having no strong views of her own, "Mr. Day had liberty and room enough"–this again is his candid friend's view of the matter–"to descant at large and at length upon whatever became the subject of conversation." Here seemed to be the wife selected for him by destiny! In spite, however, of these promising auguries, the affair again miscarried. At first the young lady showed herself more complacent than her sister, only stipulating that if she, to oblige him, abstained from all the pleasures and lighter accomplishments of life, Mr. Day should on his side endeavour to acquire some of those graces of personal deportment of which he stood so manifestly in need. With a lack of consistency hardly to be [Page 13] expected of so rigid a moralist, he consented to this bargain, and accompanied his friend Mr. Edgeworth, who, for reasons of his own, as will presently be seen, was just then leaving Lichfield for France. Here, under the charge of a French dancing-master, Mr. Day heroically put himself through a succession of severe tortures, in the hopes of persuading his limbs to become more pliable, and thereby to acquire those graces which nature had in his case so inconsiderately withheld. Unfortunately his efforts proved to be of no avail. Either nature was herself too stubborn, or some other hindrance intervened. When, upon his return to Lichfield, he hastened to claim the reward of his labours, not only did Miss Elizabeth Sneyd refuse to accede to his wishes, but she was actually cruel enough to declare that she "liked him better as he was before." When we realise that both these Miss Sneyds–not only Honora, but also, in her turn, Elizabeth–became the wife of his brilliant friend and confidant Mr. Edgeworth, we cannot avoid a tribute of admiration to a friendship which proved to be of a texture tough enough to withstand two such very trying ordeals!
At the date in which the small Maria arrived to pay a visit under his roof, these earlier vicissitudes in Mr. Day's matrimonial career were long over. So also were another and an even more remarkable series, which it would take too long to enter upon at present. By one of those extraordinary coincidences which, when they occur in real life, can–fortunately for the characters of biographers–generally be substantiated, Mr. Day had found, or there had been found for him, the precise wife for which his requiring soul had so long [Page 14] vainly panted. She was amiable; youthful; she was pleasing to look at, if not particularly handsome; she was ready to adore him; she was wealthy; above all she was submissive to any and every vagary which might chance to cross the fevered brain of her lord. In short, she seems to have been precisely the wife that might be expected to be provided for a disciplinarian from on high! Thus provided, and naturally calmed by a submission so absolute, Mr. Day's first educational austerities had by this time softened. Enough still remained to cause him, one feels, to have been quite a sufficiently formidable host to a shy and rather delicate youthful guest. In the memoir of her stepdaughter, Mrs. Edgeworth assures us that "the icy strength of his" (Mr. Day's) "system came at the right moment for annealing her" (Maria's) "principles," whatever precisely may be meant by that. Of this "icy strength," as applied to other people, we do indeed hear one instance. That detestable legacy of an illustrious prelate–"Bishop Berkeley's tar-water"–was still at that date pursuing its dreadful career, and carrying tears and misery into innumerable families. Here was a chance for a disciplinarian! "Mr. Day thought that the tar-water would be of use to Maria's inflamed eyes," the polite Mrs. Edgeworth relates, and accordingly "he used to bring a large tumbler full of it to her every morning." Evidently the specific was not intended to be applied to her eyes, but quite otherwise, for we are expressly told that she dreaded to hear his "Now, Miss Maria, drink this!"–although her stepmother is again good enough to remark, that "in spite of his stern voice, there was something of pity in his countenance which always induced her to swallow it." [Page 15]
Any reader of these lines who is old enough to remember the days of unmitigated dosing–those days when, as the author of The Water Babies truly says, an infant's inside was regarded as much the same thing as that of a Scotch grenadier–will perhaps kindly pause for a moment, and meditate sympathetically upon this picture. Instinctively there rises before the mind's eye the vision of some cold winter's morning, and of a shivering small person waking up in the rawness of an as yet unwarmed nursery, or similar dormitory. Before the eyes of that small person there presently enters an executioner in déshabille, carrying a cup, which cup is–abhorrent vision!–being slowly stirred by a spoon, to which loathly red or black particles adhere! If to this once too familiar picture the reader will kindly add one crowning terror more, that of the author of Sandford and Merton, with his oft-described long black locks floating behind him, the detestable cup in his hands, and clad presumably in a quite ungarnished dressing-gown; such a reader will, I think, agree with me that the cup–too literally cup–of Maria Edgeworth's youthful troubles must now and then have been felt to fairly brim over!
While upon the subject of such early tribulations, there is yet another which ought to be described here, although in this case the petty martyrdom had to be endured–not while enjoying the pleasures of a friendly visit–but, more appropriately, as forming part of the arcana of her school life. Naturally in so superior an establishment as that of Mrs. Davis in Upper Wimpole Street, all the ordinary calisthenic appurtenances, in the form of backboards, iron collars, and dumb-bells, were [Page 16] provided. These, it seems, were not considered to be sufficient in Maria's case. For her special benefit one more had to be added, one which even the judicious family biographer seems to have regarded as rather severe. She was now fourteen years of age, and her shortness was observed with no little disapproval by her own family circle. The Edgeworths had always been a well-grown race, and so pronounced a lack, at once of height and of good looks, seemed like a decided slight to the family standard. To obviate this shortness, not only therefore were all the above-named "usual" exercises resorted to, but also one which Mrs. Edgeworth herself characterises as "unusual," that, namely, of "being swung by the neck to draw out the muscles, and so increase the growth."
Unfortunately all this well-meant, if surely rather too agonising, discipline proved to be of absolutely no avail. Short she was, and short she was destined to remain. One of the very few persons whom it has been my own good fortune to meet with who was actually acquainted with Miss Edgeworth, has described to me the excitement created by her arrival at a house in which my informant–then a child of six–was herself staying, and amongst the few salient points which were recalled, the excessive shortness of the visitor was perhaps the most salient. "Small ? Yes; she was exceedingly small, except for her nose, which, I remember, seemed to me to be very big !" Evidently the discrepancy between the height, the nose, and the enormous reputation of the guest was the point which left the most vivid impression on the mind of her youthful acquaintance. And this brings me back to the year 1782, in which year it was that at last, [Page 17] and as it happily proved permanently, Ireland began to loom large upon Maria Edgeworth's horizon. Before following her thither it will be necessary for us to retrace our steps a little, in order to pick up some of the other scattered threads of the family history.
NOTE.–Only one authentic portrait of Miss Edgeworth seems to be extant, namely a drawing done in 1786 by Adam Buck, in which she forms part of a large family group; it will be found fully described by Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, in the Introduction to Messrs. Macmillan's collected edition, vol. i. page xviii. In connection with this point, it is rather amusing to realise that the portrait which serves as the frontispiece to the Life and Letters by Mr. Hare is not a likeness of Miss Edgeworth at all. It was a purely "fancy piece," executed for some American magazine, and embodied apparently the artist's idea of how an authoress ought to be shown–seated, namely, with one elbow upon a pile of her own books, and a finger pointed significantly towards her brow. It has been identified as being the very "portrait" sent by herself as a joke to her aunt, Mrs. Ruxton, with the inscription–"O, said the little woman, this is none of I !"
NO study of Maria Edgeworth, however slight, could possibly pretend to completeness without a somewhat careful survey of her father. The admirers of her admirable gifts are apt, with hardly an exception, to bear a somewhat heated grudge against the memory of this too consciously edifying Richard Lovell Edgeworth. They are wont to consider that the author of Miss Edgeworth's being was also too frequently the author of the least satisfactory portions of her books. Even when not actually guiding her pen–a piece of parental presumption of which he was perfectly capable–in spirit he hovered over it, and that a desire for the paternal approbation was with her the first and strongest of all incentives there can be no question. Wherever, in her case, the didactic impulse is seen to distinctly overpower the creative one; wherever we find Utility lauded to the skies as the only guide of an otherwise foundering humanity; above all, wherever we find an enormous emphasis laid upon the necessity at all times and places of a due subordination of the feminine to the masculine judgment,–there we may feel sure that we are upon his track, and that such sentiments were uttered primarily with a view to the approbation of the domestic critic. [Page 19]
Like the rest of our race–wise, witty, or the reverse–Richard Lovell Edgeworth was emphatically the child of his forebears; indeed he seems in certain respects to have been even more directly traceable to them than is usually the case. With regard to the causes which induced the Edgeworth family to settle originally in Ireland, little appears to be accurately known. There is a vague report of a monk–one Roger Edgeworth–who is asserted to have broken his vows and married for love, but we find no mention of him in Mr. Edgeworth's own memoir, which is our principal source of information with regard to the family. The year 1583 is the date fixed upon for their arrival in Ireland, before which time they are said to have been settled at Edgeware, in Middlesex, which is even declared to have been once called Edgeworth, though the data for any such connection appear to be entirely apocryphal. The first Irish Edgeworth who emerges clearly into sight is Edward Edgeworth, Bishop of Down and Connor, who, dying without children in the year 1593, left his fortune to his brother Francis, at one time a clerk of the Hanaper, and the direct ancestor of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, consequently of his daughter Maria. This Francis Edgeworth married the daughter of a Sir Edmond Tuite, owner of a place called Sonna, in the county of Westmeath. She is described by her descendant as "beautiful, and of an ancient family," and he further relates that having been obliged on some occasion to give place at church to a neighbour, upon her return home she indignantly pressed her husband to take out a baronet's patent, thereby insuring against such ignominies in the future. This he declined to do, declaring, with commendable [Page 20] prudence, such patents to be "more onerous than honourable." She thereupon announced her intention of going no more to church, and he, in a tone which brings the connubial conversations of Castle Rackrent strongly before our mind, retorted that "she might stay, or go wherever she pleased." The permission so given she accepted, more literally apparently than it was meant, and quitting, not alone her husband, but Ireland, she betook herself to the English court, where she became attached in some capacity to the Queen, Henrietta Maria, whom she afterwards accompanied to France. After the queen's death, she returned, we are informed, to Ireland, having in the meantime become a Roman Catholic, and disregarding the claims of her family, she there "laid out a very large fortune in founding a religious house in Dublin."
So runs the account in Mr. Edgeworth's own autobiography, which occupies the first volume of his daughter's memoir of him. It is clear, however, that this part of the family history must be taken with a considerable amount of reserve, since in the very next paragraph the writer of it assures us that the son of this lady, Captain John Edgeworth, was with his wife and infant heir settled in the Castle of Cranallagh, in county Longford, in the year 1641. That in the same year, he being at a distance upon military duty, the rebels rose, attacked the castle, set fire to it at night, dragged the unfortunate lady out, "literally naked"; that the castle was plundered, and would have been entirely destroyed but that–here the mystery comes in–the rebels were persuaded to extinguish the fire from "reverence for the picture of Jane Edgeworth, which was painted upon the wainscot, with a cross [Page 21] hanging from her neck, and a rosary in her hands: Being a Catholic, and having founded a religious house, she was considered a saint."
A more confusing piece of family history surely never was printed. How Mrs. Jane Edgeworth could possibly have been regarded as a saint in Ireland, in the year 1641, on account of having established a religious house in Dublin, which we are expressly told was not founded till after Queen Henrietta's death, an event that occurred twenty-eight years later, is an unfathomable mystery. The only way of explaining that mystery seems to be to suppose that the family records had got hopelessly mixed, and that, when he came to write his own memoirs, Mr. Edgeworth trusted–as he well might–to that Cimmerian darkness as regards Ireland and Irish history, which probably prevailed all but universally in his day, and has only been very partially dissipated in ours.
Leaving this portion of his record as too hopelessly tangled to unravel, we pass on to the study of his own and his family's later history.
With regard to the unfortunate infant heir of the castle, a series of terrific adventures is recorded upon that same fateful night. Indeed if the Edgeworth family annals come now and then a little short in the matter of mere bald accuracy, they more than make up for that defect by their supply of graphic and alluring detail. Take the following instance as a sample:–
"One of the rebels seized the child by the leg, and was in the act of swinging him round to dash his brains out against the corner of the castle wall, when an Irish servant, of the lowest order, stopped his hand, claiming the right of killing the little heretic himself, and swearing that a sudden death [Page 22] would be too good for him; that he would plunge him up to the throat in a boghole, and leave him for the crows to pick his eyes out. Snatching the child from his comrade, he ran off with it to a neighbouring bog, and thrust it into the mud; but, when the rebels had retired, this man, who had only pretended to join them, went back to the bog for the boy, preserved his life, and, contriving to hide him in a pannier under eggs and chickens, carried him actually through the midst of the rebel camp safely back to Dublin !"
The expedient of hiding a child in a pannier, which is afterwards filled up with eggs and chickens, and carried through a camp of hungry rebels, does not somehow appeal to the mind as quite the safest that could have been devised. However, the child escaped, which is the main point of the story, and in due course came to have other, if hardly equally perilous, adventures. Not so his mother. Whether from the shock, or from some other cause, the poor lady did not long survive that disastrous night. She died shortly afterwards in England, where she and her husband, Captain Edgeworth, were then living, and upon her death he determined to return to Ireland. What happened to him on his homeward journey must again be told in his descendant's words:–
"On his way thither, he stopped a day at Chester, it being Christmas Day. He went to the Cathedral, and there he was struck with the sight of a lady, who had a full-blown rose in her bosom. This lady was Mrs. Bridgman, widow of Sir Edward Bridgman, brother to Sir Orlando Bridgman, the Lord Keeper. As she was coming out of church, the rose fell at Captain Edgeworth's feet. The lady was handsome–so was the captain. He took up the rose, and presented it with so much grace to Mrs. Bridgman, that in consequence they became acquainted, and were soon after married. They came over to Ireland." [Page 23]
It is easy to imagine the gratification which Mr. Edgeworth must have felt in having possessed at least one ancestor so entirely worthy of himself. The whole scene–the newly made widower, the lady, the gallant captain, the full-blown rose, the grace of the action; finally–marriage, and a journey to Ireland. There is something about it positively prophetic! By her previous marriage this lady had an only daughter, an heiress, whereas Captain Edgeworth had, as has been said, one son. Though brought up in the closest connection, the young people were of course no relation to one another. They fell in love, but the young lady's mother being averse to the marriage, and the laws against running away with heiresses serious, the matter had to be arranged by the bride taking her bridegroom to church mounted behind, instead of before, her on the horse;–an anecdote with regard to which we can only say, that a law that could be evaded by so infantile an expedient was a law which thoroughly deserved to be evaded.
And here we are confronted by yet another rather surprising little fragment of family history. The son of this couple was Mr. Edgeworth's own grandfather, consequently he might be expected to know something definite about him. In his memoir, however, he assures us that the child was born "before the joint ages of his father and mother amounted to thirty-one years," an assertion which is enough to take a harmless biographer's breath away! Assuming, as one naturally would do, that the age of the youthful father could hardly have been less than seventeen or eighteen years, that of the mother sinks to a figure that is positively portentous ! Upon referring the matter, [Page 24] however, to an authority outside that of the memoir, it has been recently ascertained, not without relief, that by an unwritten family tradition the ages of both parents have been fixed at fifteen years and six months. Even so, the incident is unusual.
The marriage, thus merrily begun, seems to have gone on pretty much as might have been expected from its start. The extravagance of the young couple was phenomenal, even for a not very economical age–that of Charles the Second. As an instance of it, the gentleman on one occasion parted with "the ground-plot of a house in Dublin to buy a crowned hat with feathers, which was then the mode." The lady, in addition to her extravagance, had a lively temper, and was in the habit of twitting her husband with the fortune which she had brought him. Although a believer in ghosts and goblins, she on one occasion exhibited remarkable courage, if the account given of the affair is accurate. Here it is in her descendant's words:–
"While she was living at Lissard, she was, on some sudden alarm, obliged to go at night to a garret at the top of the house for some gunpowder, which was kept there in a barrel. She was followed upstairs by an ignorant servant girl, who carried a bit of candle without a candlestick between her fingers. When Lady Edgeworth had taken what gunpowder she wanted, had locked the door, and was halfway downstairs again, she observed that the girl had not her candle, and asked what she had done with it; the girl recollected and answered that she had left it 'stuck in the barrel of black salt.' Lady Edgeworth bid her stand still, and instantly returned by herself to the room where the gunpowder was; found the candle as the girl had described; put her hand carefully underneath it, carried it safely out; and when she got to the bottom of the stairs, dropped on her knees, and thanked God for their deliverance." [Page 25]
The last sentence has a familiar ring, but the anecdote is fresh and exciting enough. Whether open barrels of gunpowder, ready for any one who liked to dip into, were common objects in the attics of even Irish country houses a couple of centuries ago, may be questioned. How the lady and her maid got downstairs in the dark, without remembering they had left the candle behind them, is another note of interrogation–but this is mere belated captiousness! The eldest son of this heroine, Francis Edgeworth, was known, we learn, as "Protestant Frank," and raised a regiment in his youth for King William, a service for which the family were never paid. He also married a succession of wives, which seems to have been by this time quite an established family habit; and was rather noted as a gambler, on one occasion going so far as to stake the diamond earrings which his wife–one, that is to say, of his wives–was at the moment wearing, and which she had to take out of her ears for the purpose.
Coming down to the period of Mr. Edgeworth himself and of his father, we find ourselves in much tamer days. Of the latter, not so much as a single anecdote is recorded; while of the former, though of course the hero of the record, the most salient early event we hear of him is that in a fit of infantine rage he one day flung a red-hot smoothing-iron across the nursery table at his elder brother, an incident chiefly important from the fact that it served as the text of an excellent sermon preached to him by his mother upon the dangers of impetuosity. Owing to his brother's early death–an event quite disconnected, let me hasten to say, from the red-hot smoothing-iron–she showed [Page 26] unnecessary anxiety, he tells us, about his own health, which was perfectly good, and it was only with infinite precautions that he was even allowed to take his accustomed morning airing, mounted on horseback behind the family coachman. On the other hand, she displayed great discrimination, in his opinion, with regard to the disciplining of his mind, early implanting in it those lessons of utilitarianism which it was his pride and satisfaction to pass on afterwards to his own daughter, and through her to whole generations of Harrys and Lucys, Richards and Marias, as yet unborn.
He was first sent to a school at Warwick, from which he was transferred to one at Drogheda, where he was as much mocked at, he tells us, for his English accent as he had previously been at Warwick for his Irish brogue; from which school, upon attaining the age of seventeen, he was despatched to Trinity College, Dublin. Here it is evident that his health was under no peril from too severe a course of study, since he expressly informs us that "it was not the fashion in those days to plague fellow-commoners with lectures." Possibly it may have been on account of this considerate custom that his father presently transferred him to Corpus Christi, Oxford, placing him under some sort of tutelage with an old friend of his own, Mr. Elers, then living at Black Bourton, a gentleman who–a very important point–was the father of several daughters!
It was due to this arrangement that the first, and much the least successful, of Mr. Edgeworth's many marriages came to pass. What the rights and wrongs of that story were it is, as I have already said, impossible at this date to ascertain, and, since we are [Page 27] unable to hear both sides, we must be content to accept the only articulate one. That, like many another man before and since, young Mr. Edgeworth went further than he had intended is plain, and we must at least give him credit for having carried the affair to its legitimate conclusion. The young people eloped in correct romantic fashion, in a post chaise, and were married at Gretna Green. This is his own account of the matter–an eminently characteristic one:–
"Before I went to Bath, one of the young ladies at Black Bourton had attracted my attention; I had paid my court to her, and I felt myself entangled so completely, that I could not find any honourable means of extrication. I have not to reproach myself with any deceit, or suppression of the truth. On my return to Black Bourton, I did not conceal the altered state of my mind, but having engaged the affections of the young lady, I married while I was still a youth at college. I resolved to meet the disagreeable consequences of such a step with fortitude, and without being dispirited by the loss of the society to which I had been accustomed."
It is a relief to the sympathetic reader to find that the deprivation, confronted with so heroic a fortitude, was anything but an eternal one ! Not long after his marriage, Mr. Edgeworth made his appearance at Lichfield without his wife, and there took his place amid a circle of distinguished and erudite persons, whose sayings and doings have been considerably reported. The two chief stars just then in that social firmament formed a marked and an agreeable contrast to one another. One of them was Doctor Darwin, already alluded to in the last chapter, a savant who contrived to impart science through the medium of [Page 28] poetry, but whose botany and zoology were apt to be a bide warped by his favourite theories. The other was Miss Anna Seward, known locally as "The Swan of Lichfield," the authoress of several volumes of "elegant" verse, who, with her father, a canon of Lichfield, and her cousin, Miss Honora Sneyd, was at that time residing at the Palace' it is not very clear why, but presumably in the absence of its bishop.
Like other rival stars in other social firmaments, these two of Lichfield evidently did not waste much time in admiration for one another, and various anecdotes are told of the occasions when their conflicting claims came into rather sharp collision. In addition to these, the major luminaries of the place, there was a whole galaxy of minor ones, and, high in this secondary rank, we find our disciplinarian with the long black locks, Mr. Day. At the time of Mr. Edgeworth's arrival at Lichfield that erratic friend of his was engaged in what was perhaps the most remarkable of all his experiments in matrimony, that, namely, of "breeding up"–so the graceful phrase of the day ran–a couple of young girls, whom he had selected himself from a foundling hospital, with a view to finally marrying whichever of the two might prove to be the most worthy of that exalted privilege. Already one of them–Lucretia–had been discarded; but the second, Sabrina–names, it need hardly be said, of Mr. Day's own bestowing–was still on trial, although her prospects of happiness were being seriously menaced by the apparition of Miss Sneyd, whose steps were followed by a whole bevy of admiring suitors.
To readers of our belated age, the most interesting of these suitors will always be Major André, the [Page 29] ill-fated victim of the American war of Independence, whose devotion to the fair Honora seems to have been as persistent as it was ill-requited. In place of labouring to repeat an oft-told tale, let me here indulge in a brief extract of the scene, by a pen which has never touched any subject of the kind without embellishing it:–"As one reads the old letters and memoirs, the echoes of laughter reach us. One can almost see the young folks all coming together out of the Cathedral close, where so much of their time was passed, the beautiful Honora, surrounded by friends and adorers, chaperoned by the graceful muse her senior, also much admired, and made much of . . . . So they passed on, happy and contented in each other's company, Honora in the midst, beautiful, stately, reserved; she too was one of those not destined to be old."
No, she was not destined to grow old; and either on that account, or owing to some more subtle attraction, even the broad comedy of Mr. Day's love-making, even Mr. Edgeworth's elaborate comments upon that love-making, fail to dissipate a certain impression of charm which hovers still about her name. That by all romantic precedent, the lover of her choice ought to have been, neither Mr. Day, whom she rejected, nor yet Mr. Edgeworth, whom she married, but Major André, will be clear to every reader of sentiment. Unfortunately such matters are, as he is aware, governed by no reasonable or ascertainable laws. Moreover, as between the man she married, and the man whom we consider that she ought to have married, we must remember that we are looking at both of them to-day in a monstrously unfair light. In the one case we see Major André in all the halo of an early and a tragic [Page 30] death, a death so tragic that even the driest, the most hostile, of historians melts a little when he comes to speak of it. On the other hand, we mentally behold the excellent Mr. Edgeworth throned for another fifty years as the very type of the prosperous moralist; "giving his little senate laws," and crowned with a crown of indisputably well-deserved self-esteem. In the year 1770 all this was entirely different. The "young and gay philosopher," as his friends affectionately called him, was then only twenty-six years of age. As for his fascination, a short while before this date, he tells us himself that it was found absolutely necessary by his hostess to take an opportunity of publicly drinking Mrs. Edgeworth's health, in order to dissipate any unwarrantable hopes which might have arisen on his account. At what precise period he fell in love with Honora Sneyd, and how far, at this early stage of their acquaintance, she reciprocated that sentiment, we do not know, and in his own memoirs he is, for once, too discreet to inform us. All we know for certain is that it was upon the earnest expostulations of his austere-minded friend and quondam rival, Mr. Day, that he shortly afterwards left Lichfield, the two friends betaking themselves together to France, Mr. Edgeworth having under his charge his eldest child, and at that time only son, Richard, who was being brought up upon the strictest principles of the school of Rousseau.
OF Mr. Edgeworth's life in France a great deal is told in the memoir of him, but a great deal need not upon that account be repeated here. Everywhere, we are assured, he was enormously successful; everywhere he was courted, invited, and requested to prolong his stay. A lengthened account is given of his engineering feats in endeavouring to divert the course of the river Rhone, an attempt which seems unfortunately to have come to sudden grief during a wholly unlooked-for flood. To a modern reader the most entertaining part of his experiences will, perhaps, be found to be his meeting in Paris with Rousseau, whom he was anxious to consult upon the education of Richard Edgeworth, the younger. With the assistance of his own report, we can still picture to ourselves the luckless little lad being solemnly led up and introduced by his father, the "young and gay" philosopher, to the elder and more famous one, who then and there marched him off for a walk, by way of testing his character and general capabilities. It is impossible to read without a smile of the eminently unphilosophic wrath expressed by the sage, because each time that a handsome horse or vehicle passed them on their walk, his temporary [Page 32] charge–a child of seven–invariably cried out, "That's an English horse !" "I am quite sure that's an English carriage !"–a view which he solemnly pronounced to be due to a sadly early "propensity to party prejudice," an explanation of the matter which, strange to say, the boy's father unhesitatingly and admiringly adopted.
The stay of the party in Paris was, however, a short one. It was at Lyons that all three settled down to remain for some time, and it was there that Mr. Day's calisthenic purgatory was so gallantly undergone. At Lyons Mr. Edgeworth was joined for a short time by his wife, but the French society which she found there did not, it is intimated, suit her, a fact which we can readily believe. She returned in any case to England for her expected confinement, and there, in Great Russell Street, as already stated, she died. When this event occurred, Mr. Edgeworth was still in France, but the news of it sent him flying back to England. How far relief was mingled with a certain amount of compunction we do not know, and are not told. All that we know for certain is that he was met by the faithful Day, who had preceded him to England by some months, and who now came a distance of several hundred miles expressly to tell him that Honora Sneyd, "although surrounded with lovers, was still her own mistress."
Upon this pregnant hint, Mr. Edgeworth at once acted. He hastened to Lichfield, where, by a most singular chance, he and Miss Sneyd met the very day of his arrival, at the house of Doctor Darwin. There was apparently no more hesitation upon her side than upon his own, and the result was that within [Page 33] four months of his wife's death, in August 1773, they were married, by special licence, in the Ladies' Choir of the Cathedral of that town. What happened to the ci-devant pupil of Rousseau at this juncture of the family affairs we have no information. One very interesting point with regard to him Mr. Edgeworth, with his customary frankness, does reveal to us, which is that, as the result of these various experiments, the boy contracted so marked a loathing for education of every sort, that it was found impossible to induce him to learn anything, or even to remain at a school. It was a relief therefore to all concerned when he exhibited a willingness to go to sea. From the sea, to which he was then and there sent, he apparently drifted to America, where–to finish his adventures–he in due course of time married, and after a single visit to his family at Clifton, returned to America and died there; the only one of Mr. Edgeworth's many children to whom Edgeworthstown seems never at any time to have been a home.
The three little girls, on the other hand, were at once sent for from Great Russell Street, and seem to have received from Mrs. Honora Edgeworth the fullest motherly care, if also an occasional touch of that motherly austerity which was then regarded, not merely as becoming, but indispensable. That Mr. Edgeworth was sincerely devoted to his new wife, and that his second marriage was, unlike its predecessor, a thoroughly successful one, there can be no question. When, not many years later, the seeds of consumption, checked for a time, once more began to reveal themselves in the poor young woman, her husband at once left Ireland, and took her first to [Page 34] Lichfield, to consult their friend Dr. Darwin, afterwards to a succession of temporary homes, in hopes that a drier climate, if it did not effect a cure, might at least cause some delay in the course of the disease.
Few efforts, perhaps, are more puzzling in this rather puzzling world than the effort to judge dispassionately of the strength of an emotion, when that emotion is expressed in language the reverse of anything we could ourselves even imagine using under similar circumstances. That, in spite of this hindrance, in spite of his elaborate rhetoric and stilted utterances, we are able to perceive that Mr. Edgeworth was genuinely fond of his wife, and genuinely sorry to lose her, must be set down to his credit. There are even one or two incidents recorded in his autobiography–such as the dropping of the wedding-ring from off her thin finger, and its falling with a light sound to the ground–which are quite the sort of incident which a man under the circumstances might note, and might afterwards recall. On the other hand, what are we to say with regard to the following letter, written to his daughter Maria, while he was actually sitting beside the poor young woman's dead body? Mr. Hare, in the Life and Letters, describes it as "a very touching letter." "Touching," like "elegant," "poetic," "gentlemanlike," and some other words, seems to mean absolutely different things to different minds. The only fair course, therefore, seems to be to give the letter itself, and to leave it to be judged. Here it is:–
"MY DEAR DAUGHTER,–At six o'clock on Thursday morning your excellent mother expired in my arms. She now lies dead beside me, and I know I am doing what would give her [Page 35] pleasure, if she were capable of feeling anything, by writing to you at this time to fix her excellent image in your mind.
"As you grow older and become acquainted with more of my friends, you will hear from every mouth the most exalted character of your incomparable mother. You will be convinced by your own reflections on her conduct, that she fulfilled the part of a mother towards you and towards your sisters, without partiality towards her own, or servile indulgence towards mine. Her heart, conscious of rectitude, was above the fear of raising suspicions to her disadvantage in the mind of your father, or in the minds of your relations . . . .
"Continue, my dear daughter, the desire which you feel of becoming amiable, prudent, and of use. The ornamental parts of a character with such an understanding as yours necessarily ensue; but true judgment and sagacity in the choice of friends, and the regulation of your behaviour, can be only had from reflection and from being thoroughly convinced of what experience teaches, in general too late, that to be happy we must be Good.
"God bless you, and make you ambitious of that valuable praise which the amiable character of your dear mother forces from the virtuous and the wise. My writing to you in my present situation will, my dearest daughter, be remembered by you as the strongest proof of the love of your approving and affectionate father,
RICHARD LOVELL EDGEWORTH."
What is one to say? Are such sentiments indeed touching ? Is it even conceivable that a man should sit down under similar circumstances to write such a letter ?–to indite, I ought to say, so truly monumental an epistle ? There seems no course open to us but to hold up our hands in amazement, and to pass on to the next little incident in this strange, eventful history. That incident was the marriage of the sorrowing widower to the sister of the wife he had just lost–an arrangement which, he is careful to [Page 36] assure us, had been earnestly pressed upon him by the latter herself.
A feeling of wonder, not unmixed with awe, is apt to steal over the mind of a modern reader as he studies these remarkable self-revelations on the part of a half-forgotten moralist. We of to-day are wont to accuse ourselves–perhaps one another–of a tendency to lay everything bare before an undiscriminating public; to, as it has been more picturesquely worded–"sell our souls for pence; just God, how few!" Yet even to-day, would it be so very easy to find a gentleman who would be candid enough to publish to the world that the lady whom he had decided to marry was upon the whole, of all her sisters, the one least pleasing to his taste, and that he himself is, he is aware, equally little attractive to her, but that they have made up their minds to marry, because the lamented sister of the one, and wife of the other, had advised that step ? Such, in precise terms, is the explanation afforded to the public by Mr. Edgeworth, and the most remarkable part of the affair is, that the marriage so arranged seems to have been an unqualified success, if anything more successful than had been the preceding one. That, apart altogether from the sentimental side of the affair, there was also a legal one to be considered, is a fact which does not seem to have troubled any one, although the law as regards the marriage of a deceased wife's sister being the same then as now, one would have thought some little difficulty might have arisen on that score, especially with a landed property to be inherited. One clergyman, upon an explanation of the circumstances, seems to have shown some [Page 37] little hesitation, and the marriage had in consequence to be for a while delayed. It came off, however, shortly afterwards, and, by way of a small crowning touch of oddity, upon Christmas Day, of all days in the year, at St. Andrew's Church, Holborn, "in the presence," so Mr. Edgeworth is careful to tell us, "of my first wife's brother, Mr. Elers, his lady, and Mr. Day."
That Mr. Day–the rejected suitor of both these Miss Sneyds–should have been present on that auspicious occasion seems to be only natural, and appropriate to the character of the whole proceeding. The friendship between him and Mr. Edgeworth had not, unfortunately, very much longer to run, the poor disciplinarian meeting his death a few years later, under what were at least singularly appropriate circumstances for a disciplinarian, namely, by his being flung from a young horse, which it was his innocent belief that he alone could subdue. Mr. Edgeworth brings his own record to an abrupt end in the middle of a sentence, about the time of his third marriage, and it was left to his daughter Maria to continue the history of the family, beginning with their arrival at Edgeworthstown, an event which took place in the summer of the year 1782.
Unlike the first arrival, this second descent of the family upon its ancestral home proved to be an event of no temporary or provisional character. On the contrary, Mr. Edgeworth arrived on this occasion preceded or accompanied, in true patriarchal fashion, by menservants and by maidservants, by a brand-new wife, by two quite separate sets of children by two previous wives, and–a detail which even the patriarchs [Page 38] themselves do not seem to have found necessary–his circle was further enlarged by two unmarried sisters of his late and of his present wife, two Miss Sneyds, who from that time forward until after his own death, thirty-five years later, were to find their permanent home under his roof.
Such a circumstance may be taken, I think, unhesitatingly as a testimony of the amiability of all concerned, and not least for that of the master of the house himself. In sober truth, Mr. Edgeworth was precisely one of those men whose qualities show their best and most glowing side to the devotees inside their own family, and only become perceptibly spotted with absurdity when confronted by the gaze of a colder and a more critical outside circle. An autocrat he was, and had every intention of being. Wives, sisters-in-law, daughters, tenants, and the like, were all regarded by him as so many satellites, revolving gently, as by a law of nature, around the pedestal upon which he stood alone, in a graceful or commanding attitude. This point conceded, everything else, however, went delightfully, and a more benevolent embodiment of the principle of autocracy has perhaps never flourished since that institution was introduced upon a much-ruled planet.
It was the very benevolence of this autocratic standpoint which made it impossible for him to believe that any one belonging to him–especially a mere daughter, a member of the less important half of his enormous brood–could fail to be the better for carrying on her little pursuits under his direct eye, and subject in every detail to his approval or disapproval. That he was in essentials one of the best-intentioned of fathers is [Page 39] certain, yet few bad, few merely indifferent fathers, have inflicted upon a gifted son or daughter worse injuries, from an intellectual point of view, than he did. He not merely accentuated, he actually lifted into the light of a solemn duty, what was by nature the most serious of Maria Edgeworth's mental failings–a lack, namely, of imagination, one which under his fostering care grew and swelled, until it amounted to something very like a kindly and tolerant contempt for everything which that word conveys.
This, far more than any actual interference with the text of her books, is what arouses the wrath of her admirers, and constitutes the least forgivable of his misdoings as a father. Everything else–even the amazing prefaces, which were, after all, removable, and have, I believe, disappeared from all the later editions; even the deification of the great goddess Utility, and the chanting, in season and out of season, of her arid and scraggy perfections; even the "Fe Fo Fum" objurgations, hurled like brickbats at poor "Puss-in-Boots" and "Jack and the Beanstalk"–all these, and any number of similar peccadilloes, might have been forgiven, if only he would have consented, in the good old nursery phrase, "to keep hisself to hisself." It was his inability apparently to do so which constituted the worst of his indiscretions, and which brings upon him the wrath of the few–for few, I fear, they must nowadays be reckoned–who cherish towards Maria Edgeworth herself something approaching to a genuine enthusiasm.
The harm undoubtedly came chiefly from the mere superabundance of his energy and activity. To such a degree did these qualities overflow in him, that what- [Page 40] ever was being said or done, above all whatever was being written, it was absolutely indispensable that he should be in the thick of it, if not as principal, at least as arbitrator and general overseer. "Edgeworth must write, or he would burst! " was said of him by a contemporary. No one would have desired so painful a domestic catastrophe, and all that could have been wished is that it might have been able to be suggested to him by some prudent bystander that he should write his own books in his own dignified fashion, and should allow his daughter to carry out her own little ideas in such a manner, and with such aims, as benevolent nature might suggest.
Whenever, even for a time, she escaped from his influence, any discriminating eye can perceive the difference at once. We have Mrs. Barbauld's positive assurance that Castle Rackrent was written entirely without his advice or supervision, and even without such an assurance, its intrinsic qualities would have convinced us of the fact. A still clearer case is afforded by the letters. Those written familiarly–especially those addressed by Miss Edgeworth to her aunt or to her cousin, Sophy Ruxton–letters written obviously at top-speed, and without a thought of preservation, far less of publication,–are, to my mind, amongst the best of their kind we possess, perhaps the very best merely descriptive letters ever written by a woman in English. On the other hand, the moment she had anything to write which seemed to require consideration–anything which for some reason clogged her pen–it is curious to note how instantly, as if under compulsion, she reverted to the elaborately complimentary style, to the brobdingnagian phraseology of her father's [Page 41] best and most superior Johnsonese. Having already afforded the reader an opportunity of studying one letter of Hr. Edgeworth's, I feel certain that he must desire to see another. The following–written a few days after the foregoing letter to his daughter–will serve to show how the same domestic affliction would be treated by a dignified moralist when addressing the outside world. It occurs in an unpublished letter from Mr. Wedgwood to Dr. Darwin, which I have been kindly allowed to use, and the allusion to Mr. Edgeworth runs as follows:–
"Upon Tuesday I had a letter from Mr. Edgeworth, addressed to W. and B., 1 which he begins by saying–'One circumstance, and only one, in our connection is disagreeable to me, which is that I am restrained from having things of Etrurian manufacture, because I am not treated in two different characters, as a stranger and a friend. Let me address this letter to the firm of W. and B., 1 to ask whether I can have twelve profiles of my dear Mrs. Edgeworth, done in white or pale blue, from a profile by Mrs. Harrington, and an excellent picture by Smart–I lost her Sunday–and you both know she is a real loss to,–your friend,
RICHARD LOVELL EDGEWORTH.'"
Such a letter cannot fail to please ! The following extracts are from two other letters of Mr. Edgeworth, written about eleven years later. The "Mr. Ruxton" so ceremoniously addressed, it may be as well to explain, was the writer's brother-in-law:
R. L. Edgeworth to Mr. Ruxton.
"PRINCE'S BUILDINGS, CLIFTON.
"MY DEAR MR. RUXTON,–I am impatient to thank you for your great kindness to my young people, and for your [Page 42] sincere and friendly offers of assistance in their journey. I do assure you that there is nobody now in the world from whom I am more willing to receive obligations, or in whose prudence and activity I have more confidence. When life begins to move distinctly downwards, it gives me the greatest present pleasure, and the most certain hopes of future satisfaction, to perceive that the husband of my beloved sister becomes every day more united to me . . . .
"I thank you for the kind manner in which you informed us of the death of poor Thomas: my sister's letters had led us to expect it. Mrs. Day also died suddenly the twenty-first of last month, a few days after she left us. There does not, now that little Thomas is gone, exist even a person of the same name as Mr. Day. Our poor little boy enjoyed all the pleasures of which his short and infant existence was capable. From Sophy he had indulgence, attention, and amusement, and during his painful illness all the tenderness and care of your excellent wife. My compassion and solicitude for them was not less than for the child; but I hope that the remembrance of their own goodness will soon obliterate the painful impressions of his miserable end," etc. etc.
Poor little "Thomas Day" ! It is difficult to resist a momentary sensation of pity for so evidently unnecessary a little item, whose exit from a well-filled planet evoked such remarkably tepid demonstrations of regret on the part of his dignified and sonorous parent. That Mr. Edgeworth may have been wiser in the matter than the more sympathetic aunts and sisters is, however, conceivable. At all events, before condemning him, we must take into consideration the somewhat exceptional nature of his position, seeing that few of us are privileged to enter quite accurately into the sensations of a man who, if he has just lost one small son, has still the consciousness of being the happy father of some fourteen or fifteen [Page 44] living children. The views of the patriarchs have in this respect never been revealed in all their fulness, else we might find that even those unequalled fosterers of the primal affections were in the habit of accepting incidents of the kind when occurring in their own families, with something of the stoicism born of habit !
1 Firm of Westwood and Bentley, Etruria.
WE have now reached what–at any rate to Irish readers–will always be a very interesting point in Maria Edgeworth's life, her arrival, namely, in Ireland in the year 1782, from which date, with the exception of a good many visits, one stay at Clifton, and two rather lengthened sojourns on the continent, she may be said to have practically never left it again.
Even those to whom the ground is fairly familiar will find a considerable difficulty in picturing accurately to themselves Irish social life as it existed towards the end of the eighteenth century. Three enormously important events–the Rebellion of '98, the Union, and the Famine–lie between it and us; all three of these having a marked, and all three in several respects a very disastrous, effect upon that social life. Of those three events the Famine was immeasurably the most revolutionary in its results. The Rebellion, although it wrote itself in blood and horror across a considerable part of the country, would in all probability not have had any very lengthened influence, but for the fact that the memory of it has ever since served as a political rallying-point. When once the panic aroused on one side, when once the bitter resentment which its suppression awoke on the other, [Page 45] had died down, matters would–in fact to a great degree did–resume their wonted course. The Union again, although a much more important event, chiefly affected the upper classes, and the well-to-do citizens of Dublin. It stands before us at the present date rather as a great political, than as a great natural landmark. In spite of the inevitable changes which such a shifting of the seat of government brought about; in spite of what may be called the unnatural increase of population which occurred in the next forty years; in spite of O'Connell and Catholic emancipation; in spite of everything and everybody, up to the time of the great Famine the broad features of Ireland, and of Irish social life, had remained unchanged. When, further on in this book, the reader arrives at the letters of Miss Edgeworth which describe the country of the Martins in Connemara–letters written not many years before that event–he will be able to judge how vast the chasm is which lies between what is there described, and anything which is even remotely conceivable as existing in Ireland at the present time. Compared to such patriarchal chieftains as the Martins of Ballinahinch, the Edgeworths of Edgeworthstown were, of course, small fry. Even there, however–in fact all over the country–the same social tone, the same general ideas of life prevailed. Once settled down in his ancestral dominions, Mr. Edgeworth found himself in what to him must have seemed the very appropriate position of a little local king. Like such a petty monarch he had his levées, his courtiers, his retainers,–more or less ragged:–like such an one he held his courts of justice, and distributed rewards and punish- [Page 46] ments–at any rate of a minor kind–pretty much according to his own ideas of justice or expediency.
Being, as has been seen, a despot, and a benevolent one, the arrangement worked admirably. Nothing can be more harmonious than the picture which comes before us, as we look back from our vantage-ground of over a hundred years, and see that large, variously assorted family party gathered together at Edgeworthstown, during the years which followed their arrival in 1782. Like the majority of Irish residences, the house itself belongs to that rather nondescript type of architecture which depends for its escape from absolute ugliness mainly upon the taste and intelligence of its immediate owners. A wilderness of neglected garden and shrubbery surrounded it at the date of their arrival, which became gradually subdued into order as time went on. In later years Maria Edgeworth was herself the chief gardener, and was, moreover, a keen and practical one, in days when the variety was very much rarer than it has since become. This, however, was long afterwards, and at the date I am speaking of she simply took her share in the various duties, large and small, which fell to the lot of the different members of so multifarious a group of people.
To a good many girls of her age, the mere size of that ever-growing family–whose numbers are to a biographer, I confess, baffling–would have been no small trial. Not so to Maria Edgeworth. Children were for her, all through her long life, not merely no trouble, but a stimulus, a rest, and an amusement. It was only the peremptory orders of her father and stepmother which hindered her from converting herself [Page 47] into the play-fellow, slave, and maid-of-all-work of her well-nigh countless younger brothers and sisters. One small boy (Henry by name) was made over from the first to her especial care, and retained until his death a particular niche in her large and loving heart. It was for his benefit, and for the benefit of those who came nearest to him in age, that her earliest children's tales were composed–a point to which I shall have to return presently.
It is a curious fact that from the first, and while she was still in years a mere school-girl, her father seems to have associated her with all his own work at Edgeworthstown. She rode her cob or pony "Dapple" beside him, when he went his rounds; she kept the accounts of the whole expenditure under his directions; she even seems to have acted for him as a sort of clerk or sub-agent. Thirty years later, the critic of the Quarterly, wishing to make himself particularly unpleasant, asserted roundly that she had been in the habit of hiding in her father's magistrates' room "for the purpose of taking notes of the peculiar manners or expressions of the litigants." If she did so, the sin would not have struck most of us as great, but there is no reason for supposing that she did anything of the kind. There are people–pace the Quarterly Reviewer–who are able to see, hear, and perceive, without hiding themselves for the purpose, or even listening behind keyholes !
That this early acquaintance with life at first-hand was of immense advantage to her as a novelist there can be no question. It freed her from that rather cramping atmosphere of minute preoccupations which is apt to surround very young girls. Further than [Page 48] this, it brought her into genuine, and not merely into artificial, relations with the tenants and the peasant class generally–a benefit which it is difficult to overestimate.
That she had sustained no slight loss in having spent the irrecoverable years of childhood and early youth in what were not the scenes she was destined to commemorate, I have already stated to be my opinion. This is a point upon which I am so clearly at variance with her previous biographers, that it evidently is one which admits of considerable divergence of opinion. Mr. Hare lays stress upon the great advantage Maria Edgeworth enjoyed in being able to study the country with what were comparatively mature eyes. "Maria was now," he says, "fifteen, and was old enough therefore to be interested in all the peculiarities of the Irish, as contrasted with the English character." In the earlier Life Miss Zimmern is even more emphatic:–"It was her [Maria's] good fortune and ours," she says, "that at an age when the mind is most impressionable she came into these novel scenes, in lieu of having lived in their midst from childhood, when it is unlikely that she would so well have seized their salient traits."
It may be so. The point is not in any case one upon which to dogmatise. To have had the right, so to speak, to a childhood in an Irish country home, and to have been–also, so to speak–defrauded of that right; to have had to spend the chief–it is hardly an exaggeration to say, the only years of true impressionability in Great Russell Street, in Derby, in Lichfield, and Upper Wimpole Street, seems to me, I will confess, for the early years of an Irish romancer, a state of affairs [Page 49] almost too regrettable to contemplate. If now and then, even in the best of Miss Edgeworth's books, a certain sense of unreality presents itself; if now and then a momentary haze of falsity seems to float between an Irish reader and the page, it is, I think, only fair that we should set down such passing slips largely to the fact that she came to the country which she is undertaking to describe almost as a grown-up woman.
That she lost no time when she did arrive is at least certain. Eyes and ears were alike employed, and to the best possible purpose. Long afterwards, in a letter to a correspondent, she entered to an unusual degree into an explanation of the method–or possibly absence of method–which enabled her to place herself at a point of view so extravagantly remote from her own as always to awaken astonishment that she should so nearly have attained it as she did. This is a point which had better, however, be reserved till we are considering her Irish books, especially the best of them, Castle Rackrent –the best Irish novel or story, in the present writer's opinion, which has as yet seen the light.
Nearly a dozen years were to pass after Miss Edgeworth's arrival at Edgeworthstown before she began, even tentatively, to try her hand at an Irish tale. Her first literary efforts were in quite a different direction, partly as her father's assistant–a sort of acolyte under him at the shrine of the great goddess Utility–partly on her own initiative, with the first of that long array of children's tales which, if far from constituting her chief claims to recognition as a writer, at least carried her fame at the date in which they were written further [Page 50] than it has always been the lot of even the highest achievements of genius to carry their creator's fame. Taking her writings categorically, we find the first of them–begun when she was little over sixteen years of age–to have been a translation of Madame de Genlis's Adèle et Théodore. This translation was never apparently finished, Mr. Holcroft, a novelist of that date, having been found to be engaged upon the same task, although, since we hear of its being presented by Mr. Edgeworth to the illustrious author of the original, it must have got into some more or less presentable form. The next of her writings–also undertaken at her father's orders–finally appeared under the title of Letters to Literary Ladies, and is a conscientious little bit of task-work, setting forth the advantages of a mild amount of cultivation as applied to the "female" mind. About the same time Mr. Edgeworth began the earlier chapters of what eventually grew into two substantial volumes as Practical Education, a work in which his daughter's share was avowedly that of assistant and collaborator only. By way of popularising the views therein expressed, and possibly as a relaxation from the labour it entailed, she began to amuse herself by writing down a succession of little children's stories, which were eventually collected under the formidable–to a child, the absolutely incomprehensible–title of The Parent's Assistant.
These tales, and the yet more elementary ones which were afterwards published as Early Lessons, were begun without any idea of publication, simply for the benefit, as has been said, of her particular charge "little Henry," and of such of the small brothers and sisters [Page 51] as came nearest to him in age. They were written out upon a schoolroom slate; were altered; were added to; were approved of, or summarily contemned, entirely according to the verdict of her short-petticoated judges. To say that the latter were safer critics than her redoubtable father is certainly not to assert too much! Moreover, that the stories themselves owe their really extraordinary vitality largely to this method of production we cannot doubt. They are stories for children, written, not from above, but from a level; from the point of view of those to whom they were addressed. If we take up one of these little fat volumes in its earliest and most attractive form, and try to conceive of it as proceeding directly from a child–a somewhat over-drilled and over-virtuous child, such as it was the tendency of that disciplinary age to produce–we shall readily perceive that, with its hard and fast distribution of rewards and punishments; its resolute hold upon concrete fact; its avoidance, not to say detestation, of anything approaching the abstract; it is precisely what such a Georgian or pre-Victorian child might–nay, certainly would–have written for itself, had its powers of composition been equal to such a task.
For–let cynics say what they will to the contrary–children unquestionably do prefer that the rewards and the punishments should go straight; that the nice kind boy should have his cakes and his pony; that the bad, cruel boy should be severely bitten, and have a sound whipping–if possible administered by themselves as Rhadamanthus. They even enjoy, perhaps as a variety, the sensation of being now and then good [Page 52] themselves. Certainly R. L. Stevenson thought so, and there could hardly be a better judge of children. If we open his Child's Garden of Verses, and turn to any of the rhymes which are put into the mouths of children, we shall find that the sentiments therein expressed are, with hardly an exception, of the most irreproachably virtuous cast.
At all events, and without prejudging the case as regards children in general, there can be no question that the Edgeworth children were not only remarkably virtuous themselves, but preferred that their youthful heroes and heroines should be virtuous also. "I do not think one tear per month is shed in this house," Mr. Edgeworth boasted in a letter to his friend Dr. Darwin. How far so desirable a state of things was entirely due to the admirable system inaugurated by himself, or how far kindly Nature had her share in it, we cannot now know, so the credit had better be divided between them. Turning from these children of fact, long since grown grey and vanished, to those more enduring children of fancy, who were the offspring, not of himself, but of his daughter Maria, personal experience points to the fact that it is the most infantile of them all that has retained the greatest vitality, and equally so whether beloved in the first instance, or the reverse. For personally–and in all these higher altitudes of literature, the personal attitude is admittedly the only one–I will confess to having throughout my own youth nourished a rooted antipathy to "Frank" ! From the moment in which some kindly voice began to read aloud the chronicle of his virtues, and while the page upon which those virtues were inscribed was still an undecipherable mystery, [Page 53] that antipathy began, and must, I imagine, have increased daily:–
"There was a little boy whose name was Frank. . . . When his father or mother said to him, 'Frank, shut the door,' he ran directly and shut the door. When they said to him, 'Frank, do not touch that knife,' he took his hands away from the knife, and did not touch it. He was an obedient little boy."
Even such recitations of his merits might, I think, have been endured, had it not been for his own eternal endorsement of them:–"Mamma, I am useful, I am of great use." "Papa, I never meddle with candles or fire when you or mamma are not in the room." "Mamma, I never touch anything that does not belong to me." "Mamma, I will always ask you about everything, because you can tell whether things are good for me or not."
The italics, it must be clearly understood, were in the voice, and will not be found upon the printed page, but the effect was such as I have described. And the worst of the matter was that, not alone obedience–never, after all, a particularly popular virtue–but even kindliness to animals, even common honesty, became equally unpopular when taken under the pragmatical shelter of Frank:–"Mamma, I am going to behave to this snail as I should wish to be behaved to myself if I were a snail." "Mamma, I was very honest, was I not, when I returned his nuts to him ?" "Mamma, I will always be honest about everything as well as about nuts." There were moments when it seemed hardly possible that any mother of spirit would not have risen up and slain such a boy !
On the other hand, Rosamund was always a much [Page 54] beloved little girl, and even her ghost–poor, dim little ghost !–is beloved still. She and Frank may be called the hero and heroine of these infant tales, although, to the best of my recollection, they never actually met in the course of them. In Rosamund's case, all that vehement wrath which had been previously aroused by Frank, was reserved for her unnatural parents. In the first of the series, we learn how poor little Rosamund was kept for a whole month by her mother in shoes which hurt her dreadfully, entirely too for moral, and not in the least for pecuniary reasons. The tale, as I have recently ascertained, is really quite a brief one, but in those days that I have been recalling, it seemed as if the woes and the endurance of Rosamund had been drawn out to the length of an entire Odyssey! If the reader will kindly study the following recital, and will then please to imagine it being listened to, or spelled out for itself, by a very small child, he will rapidly begin, I think, to realise it from the proper standpoint:–
"Every day her shoes grew worse and worse, till at last she could neither run, dance, jump, nor walk in them. Whenever Rosamund was called to see anything, she was pulling her shoes up at the heel, and was sure to be too late. Whenever her mother was going out to walk, she could not take Rosamund with her, for Rosamund had no soles to her shoes. At length, on the very last day of the month, it happened that her father proposed to take her with her brother to a glass-house, which she had long wished to see. She was very happy. But when she was quite ready, had her hat and gloves on, and was making haste downstairs to her brother and her father, who were waiting at the hall-door for her, the shoe dropped off. She put it on again in a hurry, but as she was going across the hall, her father turned round. 'Why, are [Page 55] you walking slipshod ? No one must walk slipshod with me ! Why, Rosamund,' said he, looking at her shoes with disgust, 'I thought that you were always neat ? Go, I cannot take you with me.'"
If at this climax of her sorrows poor Rosamund "retired and burst into tears," it is hardly to be wondered at; indeed, but for pure wrath, I suspect that the listener would have done so likewise! It was the abominable and the perfectly well understood hypocrisy of the whole affair which aroused such furious resentment, this business of the glass-house having evidently been concocted between the parents wholly with a view to the moral benefit to be derived. A little earlier in the same tale, we find the following conversation between Rosamund and her mother. The Purple Jar has arrived–that fatal Jar, which Rosamund had preferred to her new shoes, and this is what happens:–
"The moment it was set down upon the table, Rosamund ran up, with an exclamation of joy: 'I may have it now, mamma ?'
"'Yes, my dear, it is yours.' Rosamund poured the flowers from her lap upon the carpet, and seized the purple flower-pot.
"'Oh, dear mother !' cried she, as soon as she had taken off the top, 'but there's something dark in it; it smells very disagreeably; what is it? I didn't want this black stuff.'
"'Nor I neither, my dear.'
"'But what shall I do with it, mamma ?'
"'That I cannot tell.'
"'But it will be of no use to me, mamma?'
"'That I cannot help.'
"'But I must pour it out, and fill the flower-pot with water.'
"'That's as you please, my dear.' [Page 56]
"'Will you lend me a bowl to pour it into, mamma ?'
"'That was more than I promised you, my dear; but I will lend you a bowl.'"
The climax is soon reached, and poor Rosamund's despair and disappointment are known to us all ! In vain she now implores for a reversal of her rash choice, and for a bestowal upon her of the uninteresting but useful shoes. The maternal Minos is not to be appeased, and the appointed month of penance has duly to be endured:–
"'No, Rosamund, you must abide by your own choice; and now the best thing is, to bear your disappointment with good humour.'
"'I will bear it as well as I can,' said Rosamund, wiping her eyes; and she began slowly and sorrowfully to fill the vase with flowers."
Breathes there a child with soul so dead, that would not to itself have said–"I hate, I simply detest that mother of Rosamund!" That this was not the impression intended to be conveyed is, however, perfectly certain, which only shows how careful even the cleverest of us ought to be, especially if we cherish a hope of our little inventions reaching–as in this case–to a second, nay, even to a third and a fourth generation. In those remote days which I have been trying to recall, a good deal of the wrath evoked by the virtues of Frank, and by the woes of Rosamund, rebounded, I feel quite certain, upon the head of their creator. In more recent years it has been realised that, whereas Maria Edgeworth herself served as the model of the delinquent Rosamund, in the glorified Frank we are privileged to behold no less an incarnation [Page 57] than the youthful presentment of her illustrious papa–a view which certainly causes the matter to assume a somewhat different aspect.
Rosamund and Frank both reappear in the later stories, Frank always as the same embodiment of conscious virtue, Rosamund invariably in the same attitude of a rash but affectionate penitent. In the latest of the collected editions of our author's works, The Parent's Assistant, like the rest of the series, has had the great advantage of being edited by Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, whose prefaces abound in the happiest touches. "Fairies," she observes, in one place, "are not much in Miss Edgeworth's line, but philanthropic manufacturers, liberal noblemen, and benevolent ladies in travelling carriages, do as well, and appear at the nick of time, to distribute rewards, or to point a moral." Too true! neither the Edgeworth children themselves, in flesh and blood, nor their representatives in the stories, were ever allowed to have anything to do with fairies, and one only wonders how, under the circumstances, they contrived to hold up their heads, and to look as lively as they did. Lively, indeed, all Miss Edgeworth's heroes and heroines are, or they never would have retained their hold upon at least two generations of critical readers. Of the fairly long list of these heroes and heroines of hers, none are sprightlier or more alive than the very youngest of them. The little group of children in The Orphans; Jim and his Lightfoot; Lazy Lawrence; Maurice and Arthur, in Forgive and Forget; the other two boys in Waste not, Want not –all these look up in our faces with an aspect of credibility which I fail myself always to feel with the same certainty as regards [Page 58] the older personages–the Irish ones always excepted. As for Simple Susan, that small damsel sits–must, while literature lasts, continue to sit–upon the pedestal raised for her by the great and good Sir Walter. "When the boy brings back the lamb to the little girl," Sir Walter Scott wrote to a correspondent, "there is nothing for it but to put down the book and cry." And after such a tribute every later and lower panegyric sinks necessarily to the level of mere surplusage!
THE even flow of life at Edgeworthstown–a flow which to impatient readers of less placid days seems at times exasperatingly even–was destined to be somewhat seriously troubled during the last ten years of the eighteenth century, and by two quite disconnected sources of disturbance. One of these was external, namely "the State of the Country," the other was internal, and resolved itself mainly into a question of health. A grievous heritage of consumption had come into the family from the Sneyd alliances, all the children of the two wives bearing that name having been at one time or other threatened or struck down with the scourge. The first to be so struck down was a girl named Honora, daughter of the original Honora, and described as being even more beautiful than her mother. Strangers on coming up to speak to some member of the family were so struck by her beauty as to be unable, we are assured, to remember what they were about to say. It is likely enough, since it was a beauty, no doubt, of that dazzling type which the scourge, not only encourages, but sometimes seems almost to create. She died at all events while still under sixteen years of age, to the immense grief of her relations, especially [Page 60] of her eldest sister. Another child, Lovell, the only son of the second marriage, was threatened with the same fate, and under the panic of the visitation it was decided in the year 1791 to break up house for a while at Edgeworthstown, and to carry the boy to Clifton–a town in those days boasting of a reputation as a health resort, which it seems in our own to have quite lost.
The task of conveying the younger members of the flock was left to their sister Maria, the father and mother having hurried off at once with the invalid. It was no light undertaking, as will readily be perceived when we consider the size of that enormous family party, the indifferent travelling arrangements attainable, and the distance, little now, but how formidable then!
Several as yet unpublished letters of Miss Edgeworth belong to this period, and will tell their own tale infinitely better than it can be told by any other means. One little incident of the road may be mentioned first, since it occurs, not in her letters, but in Mrs. Edgeworth's memoir. Upon the arrival of the whole party at some inn in which they were to spend the night, we are told that the hostess of it, seeing child after child descend from the coach, and parcel after parcel handed out in an apparently endless succession, at last exclaimed indignantly: "Haven't yez brought the kitchen grates with you too?"
Characteristically enough, this first letter of Maria Edgeworth begins with a loan, or a gift, which is to be accepted by the recipient entirely as a kindness to the donor herself. It is addressed to her cousin, [Page 61] Sophy Ruxton, daughter of the Mrs. Ruxton who was Maria's best-beloved aunt, as well as faithful, lifelong correspondent:–
"MY DEAR SOPHY,–I must, and I will, find time to write one line to you . . . . I hope Tomboy will deliver this with his own hand. How very good you are to take charge of him. He has orders to lay, if he can lift it, a clumsy writing-desk of sister Maria's at your ladyship's feet. Don't let your pride prick up its ears; I am not going to give it to you, I am only going to beseech you to take care of it in my absence, and if you will, dear Sophy, it will be very agreeable to me to think it may sometimes bring me to your thoughts. . . . Wherever I am, I shall always feel as I do now, that a very great proportion of the happiness of my life must depend upon the approbation and affection of the friends I love. I send the story I began for Margaret, merely to prove to you that I had actually begun. It is very badly done, and for my own credit I would not send it, only on the faith that you will not show it to anybody, and return it by Molly."
The next extract is also from a letter written a few months later, to the same cousin Sophy:–
"CLIFTON, March 9, 1792.
"Mr. Seymour, Mrs. Danby's father, is coming to live very near us in Prince's Place; I saw him for a moment, at Miss Place's. Before I have done with Miss Place, I must tell you an anecdote she told us. A very cross, ignorant old lady lodges with a very literary lady. And one day the literary lady had been conversing with some of her companions about Tasso, [Page 62] and forgot the old lady was in the room; the old lady fidgeted, hemmed, stirred the fire, sat down, got up, and giving as much expression as she could to her hips as she crossed the room, fairly flounced out. Presently a visitor after her own heart knocked at the door; she reappeared: 'Oh dear, ma'am!' cried she, 'I am so glad you've come, for here's Mrs. Q. and Mrs. Z. have been talking till I am quite sick of Tarso, and all those leather-backed gentlemen! '"
After this letter there comes a sudden break. The stay of the family at Clifton was nearing an end, and the next set of letters is dated from Edgeworthstown. Events in Ireland were fast becoming threatening. One or two scares about French descents had roused the authorities into acts of repression, the result of which had been to add fuel to the flames. To all who knew that country it was clear that an outbreak was impending, and equally clear that county Longford–and consequently Edgeworthstown–were likely to be in the thick of it. To many men this would have seemed to be an excellent reason, if not for staying away himself, at least for not bringing home with him to Ireland a delicate wife and a crowd of tiny children! Mr. Edgeworth, however, thought otherwise. To be at Edgeworthstown was, he considered, under the circumstances, his duty, and where he was there his wife and all his family had to be also. Home to Edgeworthstown accordingly the entire party trooped. Of the return journey we are not given any details, but, since it was under the control of the dignified head of the house, it is probable that all went smoothly. No sooner were [Page 63] they settled down again at home than Maria's active pen began to get to work. The stories were now accumulating fast, and would shortly form a volume. Practical Education was also being pushed forward by Mr. Edgeworth, in the intervals of his duties not only as a magistrate but also as holding some command in a troop of local yeomanry. What is to us to-day of considerably greater interest, Maria began at once to collect the materials which grew into that wonderful little page of social history, torn direct from life, that was destined to appear anonymously as Castle Rackrent.
These years of revolution and disturbance seem to have had an undoubtedly stimulating effect upon her mental development. Not only was the best of all her books projected then, but even the letters written after this date are distinctly stronger and better than the earlier ones. The following, hitherto unpublished, description of an encounter which took place before their own hall-door is too good to omit, or even to curtail. The whole scene–the perplexity of the English footman; the importance of little Mackin, the newly-enlisted militiamen, in whom "none could dare to see the car-driver through the regimentals "; the ladies crowding the bow-window to look on; the dignified magistrate, helplessly endeavouring to enforce the law; the wild defiance, and final escape of the culprit–it might all have come bodily out of one of her Irish novels.
"EDGEWORTHSTOWN, Sept. 20, 1794.
"MY DEAREST AUNT RUXTON,–Do you remember an old shoemaker who used to wear a broad black [Page 64] collar round his neck, and who always looked as if he was going to be hanged ? This man, known by the name of 'Old Moor,' has a son called by the name of 'Young Moor.' He is not, however, the captain of a band of robbers, nor yet a hero; but he has made himself a sergeant, and in this character, with all his red, blue, green, and yellow un blushing military honours, he made his appearance in a conspicuous seat at church on Sunday, to the admiration and amusement of a respectable and devout congregation. This morning my father came down to breakfast early, with the intention of being at Longford to attend a secret Committee, and was drinking his chocolate, and talking to Lovell about the composition of certain white lights, when Samuel came in with–'Sir, here are some soldiers, a whole parcel on 'em, Sir, who have had a brawl, if you'd please to see 'em, Sir. I believe they have enlisted my lord's painter.'
"'My lord's painter !' said my father; 'What is his name ?'
"'My lord's painter, Sir,–he as painted my Lord Granard's house, he is at the door.'
"Upon inquiry my father found that 'my lord's painter' was a poor old grey-headed man, who had been made drunk by one Mott Farrell, a man of very bad character in this town, who had first forced a guinea into his pocket, and then robbed him of it, and then insisted upon his being duly enlisted in his Majesty's service. The soldier who presented the poor painter, with his bundle of brushes still tied up in a handkerchief, was little Mackin, who not many weeks ago was a car-driver in his honour's service. But he drew on and off his gloves with so fine an air; called my father [Page 65] 'my dear,' and talked so confidently of his knowing 'too much of military service,' etc., that none could dare to see the car-driver through the regimentals. In spite, however, of little Mackin the quondam car-driver's knowledge of military affairs, my father could not be persuaded that the painter was duly enlisted, and he discharged him.
"A few minutes after, when we thought that the painter and his brushes were at liberty, Samuel reentered with poached eyes. 'Sir, they have seized my lord's painter again, and are forcing him into a house in the town !' My father waxed wrath at this piece of tyranny, and went to enforce justice. Now the person who had seized the painter after his discharge was Sergeant Harry Moor. He made his appearance with a constable,–half yellow wig, half black hair,–Charlie Monaghan, no less, the husband of the celebrated washerwoman. They stood opposite the library window; my father, at the door of the new hall, was reading to the painter his examinations, the ladies were crowding round the bow-window, when lo! they saw Young Moor draw and 'brandish high th' Hibernian sword!' Charlie Monaghan, with a stick in his hand, beat, or seemed to beat, at his coat, but Charlie Monaghan was not a hero, and Young Moor escaped from the arm of the law, and ran off to fight another day. All this passed like a flash of lightning: there was no thunder! My father did not see the flash of the sword, and when he looked up, it was over.
"A warrant was immediately made out to conduct the hero to gaol for a contempt of his Majesty's justices. The constable, and John Langan, and Mr. [Page 66] Lovell Edgeworth went to seize Harry at his castle, whither he had taken refuge. They were to go to the back entrance of the said castle. My father got into his chaise, which was waiting for him to go to Longford, and meant to do himself the honour of receiving Sergeant Moor as he went through the town. In the middle of the street stood the undaunted hero. My father, confident that his emissaries were at the back premises, thought he had the gentleman safe; but the moment he heard my father give orders to a soldier to seize him, he darted into his house. Now, by some mistake, Monaghan was not ready at the back door, and Moor escaped. My father, however, knowing that a sergeant was a man of too much consequence to be entirely lost, determined to send kind inquiries after him to his commanding officer, and so pursued his way to Longford, with Turnor on Crimes and Punishments in the chaise with him."
Turnor on Crimes and Punishments must have been a work in considerable demand, one conceives, just then in Ireland! Hardly a week passed without somewhat similar excursions and alarms, and, as may be seen from the foregoing account, the newly enlisted militia were quite as likely to prove breakers of the law as any of the more officially recognised "rebels," whom it was supposed to be their business to control. Another fragment of a letter is extant, which apparently told of the capture of this hero, "Young Moor." Unfortunately it is only a fragment, and the end of that particular tale will therefore never now be known:–
"About half past five o'clock my father returned, [Page 67] looking extremely tired, and, to our surprise, quite hoarse. 'After I have eaten something, for I have eaten nothing since morning,' said he, 'I will tell you my adventures.' Dinner was soon over, and we drew round the sofa to hear. 'I was reading in the chaise when the stage coach passed me full drive, its driver drunk as usual. I was withdrawing my eyes from this ugly spectacle, when I saw that one of the wheels of the coach was just coming off. I called to the coachman, but he did not heed. As we came up, the coachman whipped his horses into a gallop, and I called and called, till I was so hoarse I could call no more,–in vain, till a jolt came, and crash . . .'"
And with the like crash our tale comes to an end, for the rest of this letter is lost, and we know no further. We leave off, however, with a lively impression of what was likely to befall passengers in a closed coach with a drunken driver. The end of the adventure seems to have been that the coach was overturned, and that "Young Moor," who was upon the top of it, was then and there duly captured.
THE gloom, which was at this date fast settling down over Ireland in general, was accentuated at Edgeworthstown by fresh trouble. Mrs. Edgeworth was visibly failing. After her return from Clifton she began to be ill, and it soon became clear that her life could not be much further prolonged. In a letter written about this date, her step-daughter, after quoting a gay little quatrain of hers about some dyes that the children were concocting, adds–"But though my mother makes epigrams, she is far from well." So kaleidoscopic is the succession of these "mothers" of Miss Edgeworth, that emotion tends to dry up under it, and even the most patient of biographers wearies a little before the duty of chronicling their various arrivals and exits. It was in November 1797 that Mrs. Elizabeth Edgeworth died, and, while the following year was still young, we already perceive preludings pointing to the arrival of another–it is a relief to be able to assert the last wife positively of Mr. Edgeworth! An illustrated edition of The Parent's Assistant was being projected by the publishers, and Miss Beaufort (the daughter of a rector in a neighbouring county) had requested to be allowed to undertake the illustrations. The matter entailed [Page 69] interviews with Mr. Edgeworth, and the interviews led to–their inevitable result! For once the devoted Maria seems to have shown some little dismay over these precipitate proceedings. She held back, and could not immediately be cordial. Soon, however, we find her writing to Miss Beaufort, and in a tone, moreover, the dutifulness of which would to most of us have appeared to be rather beyond what the occasion required.
As had by this time become his habit, Mr. Edgeworth not only married in a somewhat singular fashion, but he selected a particularly singular time and place in which to get married. The country was now rocking in the very throes of rebellion. The marriage took place in Dublin, and the bride's experiences upon her progress from there to Edgeworthstown were more exciting evidently than pleasant. Few people, she tells us, were to be seen along the roads, a fact hardly to be wondered at, considering that at an inn called "The Nineteen Mile House," where they were delayed for a while, a woman, whom they found alone in the kitchen, came up to them and whispered, "The boys (the rebels) are hid in the potato furrows beyond." Mr. Edgeworth, we hear, was rather startled at this intelligence, but took no notice. "A little further on," Mrs. Edgeworth continues, "I saw something very odd on the side of the road before us." "What is that?" "Look to the other side. Don't look at it !" cried Mr. Edgeworth. After they had passed, he told her that it was a car turned up, between the shafts of which a man was hung, murdered by the rebels.
In spite of these and similarly pleasing incidents, [Page 70] they arrived safe and sound at Edgeworthstown, where they found the family perfectly calm as regards their safety, although in a flutter of excitement over the arrival of the hitherto almost unknown stepmother.
Nothing, perhaps, strikes outsiders more forcibly than the light-hearted fashion in which the peril of situations such as these is apt to be treated by the people most concerned, a fact which those who have passed through similar, if milder, ordeals in later years in Ireland, will be able to bear out from their own experience. Maria Edgeworth's letters, written at this date, positively brim over with jests, both as regards the situation at large, and her own share in it.–"All that I crave for my own part," she exclaims in one of them, "is that if I am to have my throat cut, it may not be by a man with his face blackened with charcoal ! I shall look at every person that comes here very closely to see if there be any marks of charcoal upon their visages. Old wrinkled offenders I should suppose would never be able to wash out their stains; but in others a very clean face will, in my mind, be a strong symptom of guilt–clean hands proof positive, and clean nails ought to hang a man."
In another letter, written to her cousin Sophy about a month after her father's marriage, the following picture of absolute domestic tranquillity occurs:–"So little change has been made in the way of living, that you would feel as if you were going on with your usual occupations and conversation amongst us. We laugh and talk, and enjoy the good of every day, which is more than sufficient. How long this may last we cannot tell. I am going on in the old way, writing stories. I cannot be a captain of dragoons, [Page 71] and sitting with my hands before me would not make any of us one degree safer . . . . I have finished a volume of wee-wee stories, about the size of the Purple Jar, all about Rosamund. Simple Susan went to Foxhall a few days ago for Lady Ann to carry to England. 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."
The word "French" in this letter introduces us to what was by far the most exciting public event with which Maria Edgeworth was ever destined to be connected. Not many historic incidents are less tempting to dwell upon as a whole than is the Irish Rebellion of 1798. It had been so long foreseen, and so completely had the commonest precautions to avert it been neglected, as to give colour to the suspicion that it had been actually desired by those in authority at the time in Ireland. When, moreover, the long expected happened, and the rising broke out, it is difficult to say upon which side the weight of condemnation for sheer brutality, or wanton cruelty, deserves to press most heavily. From its first beginnings–from the picketings and the half hangings in the north; from the pitch-cappings and floggings in the Ridinghouse of Beresford; afterwards through the whole of the proceedings of the rebels in Wicklow, Wexford, and Kildare–the hideous business of the burning of the barracks at Prosperous, the daily massacres of prisoners on Vinegar Hill, the horrors of the barn of Scullabog, and of the bridge of Wexford,–these followed in their turn by a series of executions, one at least admittedly [Page 72] unjust, several dictated by personal malice or the merest caprices of panic–the whole scene positively reeks with horror, a horror which hardly a gleam of humanity arises to temper. One episode indeed to some extent redeems the distasteful story. Unfortunately the heroes of that episode were neither Irish heroes, nor yet English ones. Few historical occurrences are more striking, and at the same time less familiar to even fairly well read students of history, than is this descent upon Ireland in the year 1798 of a mere handful of French soldiery, led by a group of officers of that indomitable type which it is the pride and glory of the French Revolution to have brought to the front.
A more visibly hopeless attempt than this probably never was imagined, yet rarely has any expedition so ludicrously ill provided gone nearer to success than it did. The entire incident is so unique as to be worth a moment's dwelling on, the more so since it has a direct connection with the subject of this little book, it having been Maria Edgeworth's singular fortune–mounted upon her faithful "Dapple," that remarkable war-horse !–to have assisted at the last scene of this ill-starred, but most gallant of adventures.
Before glancing for a moment at the larger incidents of the time, it will be better first to follow the adventures of the Edgeworth family, as we find them given in their own letters. Those letters are so graphic that, although not new, they ought not, I think, to be entirely omitted. The first part of the tale is told by Maria, in a letter to Mrs. Ruxton, a letter sent off evidently in hot haste, to relieve the latter's mind. It is dated from the inn at Longford, where the [Page 73] family had temporarily taken refuge, after clinging to their home to the last moment–in fact until the rebels were reported to be in sight.
"Sept. 6, '98.
"MY DEAREST AUNT,–We are all safe and well, and have had two most fortunate escapes from rebels, and from the explosion of an ammunition cart. 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. My father's yeomanry were at this moment gone to Longford for their arms, which Government had delayed sending. We were ordered to decamp, each with a small bundle; the two chaises full, and my mother and Aunt Charlotte on horseback. We were all ready to move, when the report was contradicted; only twenty or thirty men, it was now said, were in arms, and my father hoped we might still hold fast to our dear home.
"Two officers and six dragoons happened at this moment to be on their way through Edgeworthstown, escorting an ammunition cart from Mullingar to Longford: they promised to take us under their protection, and the officer came up to the door to say he was ready. My father most fortunately detained us; they set out without us. Half an hour afterwards, as we were quietly sitting in the portico, we heard–as we thought close to us–the report of a pistol, or a clap of thunder, which shook the house. The officer soon afterwards returned, almost speechless; he could hardly explain what had happened. The ammunition cart, containing nearly three barrels of gunpowder, packed in tin cases, took fire and burst, half way on the road to Longford. The man who drove the cart was blown to atoms–nothing of him could be found; two of the horses were killed, others were blown to pieces, and their limbs scattered to a distance; the head and body of a man were found a hundred and twenty yards from the spot. Mr. Murray was the name of the officer I am speaking of: he had with him a Mr. Rochfort and a Mr. Nugent. Mr. Rochfort was thrown from his horse, one side of his face was [Page 74] terribly burnt, and stuck over with gunpowder. He was carried into a cabin, and they thought he would die, but they now say he will recover. The carriage has been sent to take him to Longford. I have not time or room, my dear aunt, to dilate, or tell you half I have to say. If we had gone with this ammunition, we must have been killed.
"An hour or two afterwards, however, we were obliged to fly from Edgeworthstown. The rebel pikemen, three hundred in number, actually were within a mile of the town. My mother, Aunt Charlotte, and I rode; we passed the trunk of a dead man, bloody limbs of horses, and two dead horses, by the help of men who pulled on our steeds; all safely lodged now in Mrs. Fallon's inn."
Mrs. Edgeworth here takes up the tale:
"Before we had reached the place where the cart had been blown up, Mr. Edgeworth suddenly recollected that he had left on the table in his study a list of the yeomanry corps, which he feared might endanger the poor fellows and their families if it fell into the hands of the rebels. He galloped back for it–it was at the hazard of his life–but the rebels had not yet appeared. He burned the paper, and rejoined us safely.
"The landlady of the inn at Longford did all she could to make us comfortable, and we were squeezed into the already crowded house. Mrs. Billamore, our excellent housekeeper, we had left behind for the return of the carriage, which had taken Mr. Rochfort to Longford. But it was detained, and she did not reach us till the next morning, when we learned from her that the rebels had not come up to the house. They had halted at the gate, but were prevented from entering by a man whom she did not remember to have ever seen; but he was grateful to her for having lent money to his wife when she was in great distress, and we now, at our utmost need, owed our safety and that of the house to his gratitude. We were surprised to find that this was thought by some to be a suspicious circumstance, and that it showed Mr. Edgeworth to be a favourer of the rebels! An express arrived at night to [Page 75] say the French were close to Longford; Mr. Edgeworth undertook to defend the gaol, which commanded the road by which the enemy must pass, where they could be detained till the King's