Maria Edgeworth's publishing career earned her more than .11,000?an enormous sum. It also made the novel, regularly reviled by critics in the late eighteenth century, a respectable form. After 1804, the editor Francis Jeffrey attended respectfully in the pages of his Edinburgh Review to each of Edgeworth's publications, remarking on how in her hands fiction had become an edifying medium for serious ideas.
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Edgeworth was born in Oxfordshire on New Year's Day, 1768, the second child of Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Anna Maria Elers, who died when her daughter was five. (Richard Lovell Edgeworth married three more times, each new wife younger than her predecessor, and eventually fathered twenty-two children.) Maria Edgeworth spent most of her childhood in fashionable boarding schools in England, until her father, in a spirit of patriotism and optimism about social progress, decided to dedicate himself to the family estate in Ireland that had been his birthplace. In 1782 he sent for Maria to join him, his third wife, and Maria's half-brothers and half-sisters at Edgeworthstown, source of the Protestant Edgeworths' wealth since the early seventeenth century, when the property had been confiscated from a Catholic family. For the rest of her life, that manor house in rural County Longford would remain home for Edgeworth, who in 1802 rejected a marriage proposal from a Swedish diplomat.
Brimming over with children, with books, and (it was reported) with 'ingenious mechanical devices' (some of them Richard Lovell Edgeworth's inventions), this home doubled as a laboratory for her father's experiments in education, up-to-theminute agricultural techniques, and enlightened landlord-tenant relations. From the age of fourteen, Edgeworth assumed a central role in those experiments. She took up the business of estate management. She taught the younger children. At her father's prompting, she began a course of reading in political and economic theory, starting with Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.
Eventually Maria Edgeworth also began to write. Letters for Literary Ladies (1795), a novelistic defense of women's education, was followed by The Parent's Assistant (1796) and Practical Education (1798), treatises on pedagogy she coauthored with her father, and by the first of her influential collections of stories for children (Early Lessons, 1801). In 1800 she published Castle Rackrent, her masterpiece. Rackrent inaugurated Edgeworth's series of narratives memorializing the vanishing ways of life of rural Ireland, a project continued by Ennui (1809), The Absentee (1812), and Ormond (1819). Edgeworth's study of the Enlightenment social sciences is easy to trace in these regional fictions, and these concerns were a factor that helped secure their reputation among the reviewers. Not only had Edgeworth managed to associate the novel with a more intellectually prestigious discourse; by packaging her representations of Ireland's picturesque folk culture in this way, she was also able to tap the authority of a system of economic and political analysis that, in its claims to be scientifically impartial, seemed to many to offer a counterweight to the ugly prejudices that were the legacies of that nation's history of colonial conquest.
The year Richard Lovell Edgeworth settled in Ireland, 1782, seemed an auspicious moment for a reformer like him. The Parliament in Dublin had just won legislative independence, and it appeared as though penal laws targeting Catholics would soon be relaxed. But this confidence that a new era of civil harmony was dawning was quickly shattered. In 1798 armed insurrection, involving both Catholic peasants and middle-class Protestants from the North, engulfed Ireland. The rising was soon repressed, with extreme brutality. Introduced in 1800 as a security measure by a British state horrified at the news that French expeditionary forces had planned to aid the rebels, an Act of Union abolished the Dublin Parliament and incorporated Ireland into the United Kingdom. However, as Byron observed in an address to the House of Lords, to call the ensuing political situation a Union was to abuse the term: 'If it must be called an Union, it is the union of the shark with his prey.' The native Catholic population would long remain without civil rights. Indeed, when Edgeworth died in 1849 at the age of eighty-three, Ireland was once again a scene of violent insurrection as well as of horrendous famine.
An anecdote in Edgeworth's 1820 memoir of her father conveys a sense of the ambiguous position that the Protestant Anglo-Irish?neither English exactly, nor Irish, neither outsiders nor natives?occupied in this tense political context. Edge- worth recounts how, after their family escaped from the Catholic rebels who in 1798
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occupied the countryside around Edgeworthstown, Richard Lovell Edgeworth was nearly lynched by a mob from the Protestant county town where the Edgeworths had taken refuge, who were certain (such were the suspicions aroused by his nonsectarian politics) that he was a rebel sympathizer and a French spy.
The 1802 tale that we have selected as an example of Maria Edgeworth's fiction, 'The Irish Incognito'?part trickster tale from the folk tradition, part philosophical meditation on the precariousness of personal identity?also captures something of this experience of living between cultures. Starting with the first disorienting sentence, which introduces a hero who sports the ultra-English name of John Bull but who is also a native son of Cork, this treatment of cultural difference is distinguished by some slippery ironies. (A town on Ireland's south coast, Cork, of course, is home to the legendary Blarney Stone, which grants Irish people their gift of the gab.) The tale might well have promoted tolerance for British diversity among its original readers: unlike many of his namesakes of the era, this 'John Bull' is eminently likeable. But (as with the more biting satires that Jonathan Swift had penned in Dublin eighty years before) it would also have perplexed these readers' preconceived notions about who exactly was who within that hybrid political entity called 'the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.'
The Irish Incognito1
Sir John Bull was a native of Ireland, bred and born in the city of Cork. His real name was Phelim O'Mooney, and he was by profession a stocah, or walking gentleman; that is, a person who is too proud to earn his bread, and too poor to have bread without earning it. He had always been told that none of his ancestors had ever been in trade or business of any kind, and he resolved, when a boy, never to demean himself and family, as his elder brother had done, by becoming a rich merchant. When he grew up to be a young man, he kept this spirited resolution as long as he had a relation or friend in the world who would let him hang upon them; but when he was shaken off by all, what could he do but go into business? He chose the most genteel, however; he became a wine merchant. I'm only a wine merchant, said he to himself, and that is next door to being nothing at all. His brother furnished his cellars; and Mr. Phelim O'Mooney, upon the strength of the wine that he had in his cellars, and of the money he expected to make of it, immediately married a wife, set up a gig, and gave excellent dinners to men who were ten times richer than he even ever expected to be. In return for these excellent dinners, his new friends bought all their wine from Mr. O'Mooney, and never paid for it; he lived upon credit himself, and gave all his friends credit, till he became a bankrupt. Then nobody came to dine with him, and every body found out that he had been very imprudent; and he was obliged to sell his gig, but not before it had broken his wife's neck; so that when accounts came to be finally settled, he was not much worse than when he began the world, the loss falling upon
I. Although written solely by Maria Edgeworth, volume collected Tales and Novels of 1832. That 'The Irish Incognito' forms the culminating chap-edition provides the basis for the text we give here. ter of a book that was published under both her A 'bull' is a verbal blunder, an expression contain- name and her father's (her Memoir of her father ing a contradiction that goes unperceived by the states that he contributed passages to a few of the speaker. To collect 'Irish bulls' as the Essay does other chapters). This book was the Essay on Irish is, on the face
