Maria Edgeworth's Letters from Ireland E-Book

Maria Edgeworth

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 851

Beschreibung

Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849), one of the most celebrated authors of her day both in Ireland and England, is best known for her novels 'Castle Rackrent' (1800) and 'The Absentee' (1812). A contemporary of Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, her prolific correspondence, penned largely from her home at Edgeworthstown, County Longford, is filled with her vibrant personality, warmth and wit. Marking the 250th anniversary of her birth, this is the first time Maria Edgeworth's letters from Ireland, many hitherto unpublished, have been revisited in any depth. Her letters span sixty years of momentous political change in Ireland -- the heady time of Grattan's Parliament and the perils of the 1798 Rebellion, the rise of O'Connell, the struggle for Catholic Emancipation, and the Great Famine for which she provided relief. Her storytelling and descriptive powers reveal an extraordinary personal understanding of the era. The wealth of detail in these letters is astonishing. They engage with science and literature, history and high-level European gossip, and the domestic concerns of life at Edgeworthstown itself. Maria, a proto-feminist, helped educate her siblings and became sole manager of the family estate. Humphrey Davy, William Rowan Hamilton, Madame de Stael, Francis Beaufort, Wordsworth and the Duke of Wellington stroll through these pages as the Edgeworth story unfolds. The reader is also granted privileged access to her ever-expanding family circle of three stepmothers and twenty-two siblings – most of whom Maria outlived. Among these were gifted artists, whose previously unseen drawings and sketches embellish this volume, while the editor's extensive commentary lends crucial context to this cultural treasure trove.

Leseprobe

MARIA

EDGEWORTH’S

LETTERS

FROM

IRELAND

SELECTED & EDITED BY

VALERIE PAKENHAM

THE LILLIPUT PRESS

MMXVIII

Dedication

To my sister, Linda.

Introduction

I first came across Maria Edgeworth more than fifty years ago. The Pakenham family into which I had just married were the Edgeworths’ neighbours and also relations. Maria’s grandfather had been brought up by Thomas Pakenham, the first Lord Longford, after his parents died and her father Richard Lovell Edgeworth had been a close friend of the next two generations. In his Memoirs he claimed to have been cured as a wild young man of a passion for field sports and card playing by being given the key to the library at Pakenham Hall and encouraged to serious reading. The second volume (partly written by Maria) described the family’s frequent journeys from Edgeworthstown to Castlepollard, seventeen miles away, across a ‘vast Serbonian bog’ with a perilous crossing of raft or ‘float’ across the River Inny en route.

I did not know much about Maria herself but several friends had already pressed on me copies of Castle Rackrent (perhaps as a warning!). And in a bedroom I discovered a charming illustrated set of her novels, reissued in 1832, and read my way through the ones set in Ireland, Ormond, Ennui and The Absentee. Then in the library I found a modest clothbound three-volume Memoir of Maria Edgeworth by her stepmother, Mrs Frances Edgeworth. Privately printed in 1867, it was made up largely of Maria’s letters to her family. To my delight, they included detailed descriptions of our house in the early 1800s, when the 2nd Earl of Longford was busy transforming it inside and out to a Gothic Revival castle, complete with a hot air central-heating system designed by Maria’s father. Maria seemed to have hadrather a tendresse for ‘dear hospitable Lord Longford’, and did not like his English wife when he finally married aged forty in 1816.

In the 1970s my interest in Maria Edgeworth received another boost. We were given two magnificent volumes, Maria Edgeworth’s Letters from England, 1813­­­­­­­­–1842 and Maria Edgeworth in France and Switzerland, edited by Christina Colvin, a direct descendant of Maria’s youngest half-brother, Michael Pakenham Edgeworth; and a brilliant new literary biography of Maria Edgeworth by Marilyn Butler, married to Christina Colvin’s brother, David. Both had drawn on the private Edgeworth family papers, which Christina Colvin had only recently catalogued in full. Then, twenty-five years later again, my daughter Eliza embarked on a composite biography of the Pakenhams of Maria’s generation. It involved her reading through many of Maria’s original letters, now accessible in the National Library of Ireland, and in the New Bodleian library in Oxford. Reading Eliza’s notes reminded me just what a delightful letter writer Maria was, full of stories and wild humour and affection ­­– and also of how many of her letters remained still unpublished and unknown. Partly this was because of Maria’s own strong disapproval of the publication of private letters. How could she write ‘naturally with any ease or pleasure’ with ‘one eye squinting at the public and celebrity and the other pretending to look only to my dear friend or correspondent’. Even Augustus Hare, who published The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth in 1894, had not been granted access to Maria’s original letters but simply shortened and re-printed those from the Memoir of 1867, which, as Christina Colvin pointed out in the preface to her own books, had already been heavily cut and sanitized from the originals by Maria’s younger sisters so as not to offend the living or their descendants

Nearly 170 years after Maria’s death, there seemed to me an overwhelming case for a book of Maria’s unbowdlerized letters from Irelandif only to redress the balance of Christina Colvin’s two large volumes of Maria’s letters from abroad. Christina Colvin had dismissed Maria’s letters from home as largely of ‘domestic interest’ only. But Maria had always proclaimed herself as above all a ‘domestic being’, happiest living at home among her beloved family. Ireland was the country she knew and loved and where she lived for nearly all her adult life, and Edgeworthstown, away from the social whirl of London, Paris or Dublin, was the place where, she wrote, she could best find time to write and think.

How to go about it? From the beginning it was clear that, as in the original Memoir, many of her letters could be printed in part only. Some of them run to thirty pages of close writing, punctuated largely by dashes. (Like her contemporaries, Maria preferred the dash to the comma or full stop.) During his lifetime her father was constantly reproving her for writing long letters instead of directing her energies to useful work for publication. And even when not engaged on composing stories for children or novels (or ‘Moral Tales’ as she preferred to call them), Maria was expected to act as his secretary and bookkeeper for estate business. However he grudgingly acknowledged Maria’s letters were ‘excellent’ and came to rely on her to relay the family news. After his death in 1817, released from discipline as his literary ‘partner’, she wrote if anything twice as many letters. Exchanging news and ideas was essential to her being. As she wrote to her aunt in 1830, ‘I really think if my thoughts or feelings were shut up completely within me, I should burst in a week – like a steam engine without a snifting-clack …’

Sending letters was expensive – Maria’s later letters are full of grateful references to those who could provide her with free franks: officials, peers and MPs (one favourite much-exploited provider was the Earl of Rosse who served as Irish postmaster general from 1809 to 1831). Letters were paid by weight so it was often important to cram as much as possible onto each page. Mercifully for later readers, Maria seldom went in for the dreadful practice of overwriting at right angles to the original lines to save money, and her handwriting is nearly always legible.

Nearly all the letters I have chosen are to her immediate family, to whom she wrote most freely in a delightful conversational style. When she wrote to those outside it, she usually became more prolix and sometimes, when writing to men, rather heavily flirtatious. Her family was very large. Richard Lovell Edgeworth had provided Maria with three stepmothers in turn and twenty-one mostly much younger siblings. (Some of Maria’s biographers have treated him as a kind of Irish Bluebeard but he appears to have become an affectionate husband except in his first marriage to Maria’s unfortunate mother, which he described in his all-too-candid Memoirs as a folly he ‘had brought upon himself’.) There were also several aunts and cousins: Maria’s favourite correspondent was her father’s younger sister, Margaret Ruxton, a sprightly, clever and highly sociable lady who had been one of the first to show Maria affection as a child. (It was she who encouraged Maria’s stories and imitations of John Langan, the Edgeworths’ steward, who was the original for Honest Thady in Castle Rackrent.) Aunt Ruxton lived about forty miles away outside Navan in Co. Meath in a delightful cottage orné beside the Boyne, and there was much coming and going between there and Edgeworthstown. There were three Ruxton daughters and the middle one, Sophy, became Maria’s particular friend. Maria used her as a sounding board for most of her novels and children’s stories, and also as confidante in matters of the heart. (Maria was plain – or believed herself so – and seems to have had only one serious suitor, a Swedish diplomat, the Chevalier Edelcrantz whom she met in Paris in 1802. She turned him down, unable to bear the thought of leaving her father and living abroad, but she remained obsessed with him for many years after and painted an idealized version of him in one of her longest novels, Patronage.)

Frances Beaufort, Maria’s last stepmother, became her chief confidante and correspondent after the death of Maria’s father, whom she had married in 1798. Frances, two years younger than Maria, was highly intelligent and well read, and by her warmth and tact had earned all her stepchildren’s devotion. Maria came to see her as her greatest friend and happily shared the task of bringing up Frances’ own six children, the youngest of whom was forty-three years younger than herself and still only five years old when Richard Lovell Edgeworth died. After his death she took her young half-sisters at her own expense to London, France and Scotland to introduce them to a wider and more glamorous social circle than Edgeworthstown could provide. She wrote long bulletins of family news to Frances whenever they were apart, and after the collapse of Lovell Edgeworth, the oldest son, into debt and alcohol, worked closely in tandem with her for twenty years to keep the family home and Edgeworth estate afloat.

Two of Frances Edgeworth’s daughters, Fanny and Harriet, also became Maria’s main correspondents in her later life. Fanny, the oldest, born in 1799, was her adored favourite / quasi child. After Fanny herself married in 1837 and went to live in London, Maria wrote to her regularly every week. She shared Maria’s interest in science and literature, and was serious and prudent, with a stockbroker husband who could advise Maria on financial affairs. Harriet, two years younger, was bright and funny and married one of Maria’s favourite young men, Richard Butler, the clever bookish rector of Trim in Co. Meath. Unlike most of Maria’s siblings, Harriet did not suffer from chronic ill health, and was able to cheer everyone with her high spirits. The threat of consumption runs like a black thread through Maria’s letters. Her first two stepmothers, Honora and Elizabeth Sneyd, had died from it – and five of their children died in their teens or early twenties. Two more of Frances Edgeworth’s children succumbed to it in the 1830s, though their mother lived to be ninety-five. Many of Maria’s letters begin with a bulletin on the family’s health. The damp cold winters of Co. Longford were a perpetual hazard and Maria’s father would not allow his daughters to travel to healthier climates for lack of suitable chaperones. After his death, however, his widow Frances spent much of her time taking her daughters to English spas such as Cheltenham and Clifton. Numerous other ills of the flesh are recorded in Maria’s letters, and treatment was usually worse than useless – calomel (or mercury) was a favourite prescription, as was Blue Pill (probably a purgative). Maria herself mainly enjoyed good health – apart from toothache and occasional bouts of erysipelas – thanks to a regimen of brisk early morning walks and reliance on her three favourite doctors, Dr Quiet, Dr Diet and Dr Merryman. In later years, she became a close friend of a famous Dublin surgeon, Dr Philip Crampton, and sought advice from him for all the family’s ills.

Maria’s letters show an extraordinary range of interests. Anyone going through them will be struck first by the sheer breadth of her reading. She was encouraged by her father to read everything from history and belles lettres to philosophy and political economy. Not many fathers would have pressed their teenage daughters to read Adam Smith’s TheWealth of Nations. Novels were initially discouraged; the fifteen-year-old Maria describes them primly as ‘acting on the constitution of the mind as Drams do on that of the body’ but she could not resist Fanny Burney’s Evelina (described later by Macaulay as ‘the first novel a lady could admit to reading’) and, like Jane Austen, adored Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison. The family assembled every evening in the library after dinner (at 6 pm) to read aloud and discuss the latest books sent from Dublin or London. ‘In this house’, reported Charles Kendal Bushe in 1810, ‘literature is not a treat for Company upon Invitation days but is actually the daily bread of the family’ – to which he attributed the excellence of their conversation. Maria’s letters read like a rollcall of the most famous authors of the day. By the early 1800s she was already famous herself and in October 1814 had the gratification of finding herself referred to as the inspiration for Sir Walter Scott’s first novel, Waverley, as the family read it around the library fire. (He later became a close friend and correspondent.)

Maria’s letters are initially dismissive of another contemporary, Jane Austen (published anonymously at first). She found Northanger Abbey silly, approved of Mansfield Park, but gave up on Emma, which Jane Austen had sent her, as lacking a story. Jane Austen by contrast much admired Maria and wrote to her aunt half-jokingly in 1814, ‘I have made up my mind to like no novels really but Miss Edgeworth’s, yours and my own.’ Jane’s first love and dancing partner, Tom Lefroy, was later to make a fortune at the Dublin Bar and to buy an estate only five miles from Edgeworthstown and it is fascinating to speculate how she and Maria might have got on as neighbours.

Like all well-educated women of her class, Maria was also fluent in French. She devoured the latest French memoirs and novels and much admired Madame de Staël (whom she just missed meeting). She also was fascinated by Napoleon (whom she had briefly glimpsed, a pale figure on a white horse in Paris in 1802) and much moved by accounts of him in exile. By the 1830s she was reading De Tocqueville and Guizot, and by her seventies, was deep in Balzac’s social realist novels, most of which shocked her by their content. She saw him as a moral Mephistopholes, though a superb writer. She never departed from her father’s view that history and literature, even comedy, should inculcate good morals, and be ‘of use’.

More unusual was Maria’s fascination with science, again inculcated by her father. Richard Lovell Edgeworth had been a founder member of the Lunar Society with such luminaries as Dr Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood, James Watt (pioneer of steam power) and James Keir (the famous chemist), and all his children were encouraged from an early age to undertake simple chemical experiments. In 1792 Maria’s full sister Anna married Dr Thomas Beddoes who experimented with gases in his laboratory at Clifton (hoping they might prove cures for consumption – now known as tuberculosis), and Anna later carried on a prolonged flirtation with Beddoes’ brilliant young Cornish apprentice, Humphrey Davy. They wrote poetry together and went for long moonlit walks. Davy came several times to stay at Edgeworthstown and the family attended his hugely popular lectures in Dublin. Through Davy Maria met the next generation of scientists or ‘philosophers’ as they were still known, John Herschel, Charles Babbage and Michael Faraday. Through Richard Butler, later her brother-in-law, she met and struck up a friendship with William Rowan Hamilton, a brilliant young Dublin mathematician who was the first to suggest there might be a third and fourth dimension. In her old age he made her an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy and regularly sent her his learned articles for comment. (Aged seventy-eight, Maria admitted finding his one on Pure Time hard to comprehend.) In 1842, to Maria’s joy, her youngest half-sister Lucy married another leading Irish scientist, Thomas Romney Robinson, head of the Observatory at Armagh, who was able to gratify her insatiable appetite for scientific facts and discoveries at first hand.

Her practical interests were just as varied: her father had made her her own small garden below her bedroom window, and even in her late seventies she was still directing new planting schemes there and begging exotic cuttings from her botanist half-brother, Michael Pakenham Edgeworth, in India. Another was building: after her father’s death, her letters record her making countless small improvements to the Edgeworthstown cottages and houses as she could afford them and few things gave her more pleasure than outdoor work, directing the laying of a new pavement or gutter or the lowering of the Edgeworthstown river bed. Unlike most Irish big houses, isolated in parks behind high stone walls, Edgeworthstown House was set at the very edge of the town. The house and farm were a busy hive of activities and her notes of conversations with servants, farm workers and tenants appear constantly in her letters: there was John Langan, her father’s steward, Samuel Bristow, the coachman, and his wife Molly and Kitty Billamore, the devoted housekeeeper who looked after a succession of young Edgeworths in turn. Later letters have humorous accounts of the lumbering ‘indoor man’, Cassidy, known by Maria and her stepmother as ‘the hippopotamus’ and of Gahan, the Edgeworths’ gardener, and his battles against invading pigs and turkeys.

Maria’s letters are also full of visits to neighbouring country houses: initially, these were limited. Richard Lovell Edgeworth was too busy and too clever to find many of the Longford squirearchy congenial (they in turn suspected him of dangerously radical views) and to begin with only consorted regularly with two local families, the Granards of Castle Forbes and the Pakenhams of Pakenham Hall, including the rather disreputable Admiral Pakenham (who appears as a thinly disguised villain in two of Maria’s best novels). But Frances, his fourth wife, encouraged him to expand his social circle, and by the early 1800s, after the family returned from Paris, they became in Maria’s phrase ‘great gadders’. There were regular visits to friends and relations in the surrounding counties, and to Dublin. One is struck, however, at how constricted Maria’s movements were before her father’s death. No gentlewoman could travel unaccompanied by public coach (hence her indignation at the General’s treatment of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey). The advent of rail and steamboats transformed her later life. In her old age Maria made two daring expeditions to the west – to the Martins of Ballinahinch in Connemara (where she was inadvertently detained for several weeks) and the Catholic Moores of Moorehall in Co. Mayo. Both families became her close friends and correspondents. There was also a constant stream of visitors from abroad. Edgeworthstown was seen as an oasis of cultured enlightenment in the boggy midlands, and as Maria’s fame grew, it became almost a place of pilgrimage. In the 1820s Maria was also able to offer distinguished guests a visit to her brother Lovell’s new school. Run on strictly non-denominational lines, it was much admired by visiting commissioners and politicians. Maria’s stepmother Frances also contributed nobly to the ongoing hospitality at Edgeworthstown, summoning up excellent meals at the shortest notice and charming visitors with her sympathy. ‘It is witchcraft, positive witchcraft,’ reported a guest when Mrs Edgeworth made even Sir Walter Scott’s shy son open up over the dinner table.

But outside the magic circle of warmth and culture at Edgeworthstown, there was always danger. However enlightened as landlords, the Edgeworths were part and parcel of the Protestant Ascendancy, seen as English settlers who had taken land from its rightful Catholic owners. Popular resentment, aggravated by acute poverty and lack of any subsistence except from the land, was always smouldering beneath the surface. In the 1790s, reignited by the French Revolution, agrarian violence flared up in secret societies known as the Whiteboys or Defenders who raided for arms, burnt houses and mutilated cattle. Maria’s father, though he claimed never to have been threatened himself, helped raise a local militia to keep lawlessness at bay. Three years later in 1798, Ireland exploded into full-blown revolution and in September the Edgeworths found themselves in the direct path of an advancing army of French soldiers and Irish rebels. Though the Edgeworths’ house was left untouched by the rebel army, thanks again to their reputation as benevolent landlords, Richard Lovell Edgeworth was nearly lynched by a mob of Protestant militia as a French spy and seriously considered selling his estate and moving to Wales. But he was persuaded by his father-in-law, Daniel Beaufort, that things would improve after the abolition of the ultra right-wing government in Dublin and Ireland’s Union with England. Pitt had planned a bill for Catholic emancipation to follow the Union, but this was blocked by George III as contrary to his coronation oath – and was shelved for a generation. Richard Lovell Edgeworth erroneously believed the Union would bring trade and manufacturing skills to Ireland (he wrote a heavy preface to this effect in the second edition of Castle Rackrent). It failed to do so, and although the Napoleonic Wars kept agriculture prices high for most of his lifetime, on his deathbed he was prophesying famine and misery for Ireland in years to come.

During her father’s lifetime, Maria’s letters seldom offered political opinions of her own though they faithfully recorded his – to do otherwise would be ‘far above [her] capacity and information’. But after his death she followed politics with breathless interest, fed by newspapers (including the Irish Farmers’ Journal!) and letters from London. By 1818 she had got to know many of the leading Whig families, such as Lord Lansdowne and his Irish protégé, Thomas Spring Rice (later Lord Mounteagle) with whom she corresponded at length on Catholic Emancipation. When the bill was finally pushed through by the Duke of Wellington in 1829 after O’Connell’s triumphant election in West Clare, she hailed it as the dawning of a new age of meritocracy in Ireland: ‘Now everyman may educate his son with the hope he may go forward according to his merits.’1 Maria had been brought up on eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideas and remained firmly agnostic all her life (she was almost equally scornful of Catholic ‘superstition’ and Methodist ‘cant’) but she and her family had many Catholic friends, and were proud of their connection with the Abbé Edgeworth, who had been Louis XVI’s confessor and bravely accompanied him to the guillotine at the height of the Terror. However O’Connell’s subsequent campaign for the Repeal of the Union and his recruitment of the newly nationalist Catholic priesthood to instruct their flock to vote against their landlords rapidly made him Maria’s enemy. From the 1830s, her letters paint him as a dangerous demagogue condoning if not encouraging inflammatory speeches from the pulpit. She was never to give O’Connell credit for his control of his vast audiences and refusal to countenance civil violence. As she saw it, only the Union with England could now guarantee the rights of property in Ireland. Everything depended on good and wise government from Westminster. As she wrote to her stepmother in 1835: ‘All our fate and future and domestic life hang upon this point. Will they [Government] be able to prevent those who have no property and no education from overturning by their numbers those who have some property & some education.’

There is an interesting exchange in her novel of the same period, Helen: the heroine is told ‘Women are now so highly cultivated and political subjects of such high interest to all human creatures who live together in society … You cannot, I conceive, satisfy yourself with the common namby-pamby little missy phrase, “ladies have nothing to do with politics”.’ Maria certainly now did not – and did not hesitate to write to prime ministers such as Peel and Lord John Russell or to the Under-Secretary of State, Thomas Drummond, giving advice on cures for rural distress. However she strongly disapproved of Harriet Martineau’s call for women’s right to vote, which she considered almost as dangerous an idea as democracy itself.

In old age she claimed to belong to no party, but enlightened Conservatism as exemplified by Peel was probably nearest her ideal. And the Whig government’s subsequent failure to deal with the Great Famine confirmed her view. At its onset, she was already a very old lady, and much bowed down by family tragedies at home. But she roused herself to use her fame and name to beg relief for Edgeworthstown and its surrounding districts. She had long before rejected from personal experience the principle preached by Harriet Martineau among others that charity was always wrong and that those ‘who do not work shall not eat.’ There were in Ireland ‘such numbers who had no work – who could not work from extenuation, disease, etc. Humanity could not leave these to perish from hunger – or if humanity had been out of the question, fear could not have ventured it.’2 The Irish peasant knew well enough how to retaliate. Maria had already lived through sixty years when landlords – or their agents – could be shot at from behind a hedge.

Generous and enlightened paternalism, such as her father had practised, was in Maria’s view still the best insurance against social revolution – until education had percolated to the majority. She was not so far off the mark: Edgeworthstown was to survive as the family home for another three generations when many of the neighbouring big houses were burned out or abandoned and left to fall into ruin. The house itself is still immaculately kept, though now a nursing home, and so is the eighteenth-century walled garden where Maria once stamped on the garden frames as a neglected six-year-old and later happily planted her favourite ‘everblowing’ roses. And there is a fine new bronze statue of Maria herself, book in hand, looking down the main street of Edgeworthstown where she once walked briskly in her newly invented waterproof boots to oversee the paving of a footpath, or the building of the new market house …

1. Quoting a reaction to the bill, told to her by Harriet Butler (see letter to Fanny Wilson, 14 February 1829).

2. Letter to Professor Jones, 14 June 1847.

Acknowledgments

When Maria was ten, her father set her as a writing project an essay on Generosity. The result has not survived but it led to an Edgeworth family saying, ‘Where is the generosity’.

This book has been made possible by generosity from many people.

First, I must thank Maria Edgeworth’s great-great-nephew Professor Sir David Butler, who has allowed me to quote extensively from Maria’s unpublished letters now held on loan in the New Bodleian. He has also most kindly allowed me to illustrate them with the drawings and sketches deposited there, mostly the work of Maria’s stepmother Frances Beaufort Edgeworth and Maria’s half-sisters, Charlotte and Honora Edgeworth. Charlotte in particular was a talented artist, dying tragically of consumption at the age of twenty-three.

The National Library of Ireland has also generously allowed me to quote from many of Maria’s letters up to the end of 1817, which are held in their collection of Edgeworth manuscripts.

Dr Rolf Loeber also kindly offered the option of using pictures from two Edgeworth albums now belonging to him, which also consist mainly of sketches by Frances Edgeworth and Charlotte Edgeworth. He and his wife Magda have been hugely helpful over many years, sending me relevant articles, copies of Maria’s letters held in American libraries, and driving me to see some outposts of the original Edgeworth estates.

Dr Edward McParland procured for me the splendid colour print of Trinity’s Museum with its stuffed giraffe – or as Maria called it ‘camelopardel’. Dr Anthony Malcomson arranged for Charlie Clements to send me the picture of Lord Oriel’s temple at Collon. Brendan and Alison Rosse have lent me the magnificent picture of the 3rd Earl of Rosse climbing his telescope at Birr and also showed me Maria’s correspondence with the 2nd Earl of Rosse. Trevor Fitzherbert kindly allowed my husband, Thomas, to photograph three miniatures of Maria’s favourite Ruxton cousins, rescued from their family home at Black Castle (now burnt). Matt Farrell, the moving force behind the Edgeworth Society and the Edgeworth Museum, sent me the sketch of the main street of Edgeworthstown probably made in the 1820s, and the photographs of Edgeworthstown house, c.1880 with Maria’s books still in place, as well as the photo of the Edgeworth vault at St John’s Church. The Royal Irish Academy and the Irish Architectural Archive have both allowed me to reproduce pictures at minimum cost. Many of my other illustrations were photographed by my husband, Thomas, or Bartle Darcy, a helpful neighbour. The London Library staff kindly found me many nineteenth-century or early twentieth-century illustrated books.

For the letters themselves, my thanks go to the long-suffering librarians at the National Library of Ireland (NLI) and the Weston Library in the New Bodleian in Oxford, who brought me up successive folders of Edgeworth letters from the vaults over many months to read and copy. (I tried in vain to read Maria’s letters on microfiche, but nothing can compare with the pleasure and comparative ease of reading the original manuscript letters.) The NLI librarians also kindly directed me to Maria’s correspondence with Thomas Spring Rice, later Lord Mounteagle; with the famous Dublin mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton and with her favourite economist, the Reverend Richard Jones. I am also grateful to the librarians of the Special Collections in Trinity College, Dublin for allowing me to read through Maria’s correspondence with Sir Philip Crampton. All four of these collections gave me valuable background information about the second half of Maria’s life though in most cases I have not been able to quote from them directly for reasons of space.

Many other friends have also given me help and encouragement in my years of reading through and selecting from Maria’s letters. My daughter Eliza, who first reignited my interest in Maria Edgeworth, lent me all her notes and, with Olda Fitzgerald and Barbara Fitzgerald, provided a bed in Dublin while I was working at the National Library. Marianne and Tim Sheehy, and Jane Goddard provided me with many bednights in Oxford while I was reading through the even larger collection of Maria’s letters in the Bodleian. John Fairleigh read through my typescripts at various stages and showered me with early nineteenth-century memoirs and letters, relating to Maria’s life and times. Another Westmeath neighbour, Katharina Dedem-Laurens, lent me her brilliant thesis, ‘Maria Edgeworth: A Sense of Place’, which confirmed my view that Maria’s letters from Ireland and her life as a ‘domestic being’ had not yet been properly explored. Robert O’Byrne, my husband Thomas, and my sister Linda Kelly have also all made hugely helpful suggestions as to narrative themes to follow and shared their much greater knowledge of Irish, English and European history.

Lastly, my thanks to my editor, Bridget Farrell at Lilliput, who has patiently helped with the highly complicated process of putting together letters and illustrations to create this book; and to Fred Krehbiel, whose generosity has made it possible to illustrate it as I had hoped.

Illustrations

The vast majority of black and white illustrations in this book are from the collection of Edgeworth drawings and watercolours in the Weston Library of the Bodleian, Eng Misc, Edgeworth MSS, Folders 901–903, which I have been allowed to reproduce by kind permission of Sir David Butler and his family. These appear on the following pages: 39, 41, 68, 71, 79, 94, 96, 104, 109, 115, 122, 163, 167, 174, 181, 195, 208, 226, 229, 283, 295, 315, 333, 370, 374, 383, 385.

Maria’s picture of herself falling off a ladder, p. 383 and the endpapers of the book can also be found in her letters MS Eng. Lett. Edgeworth in the Weston Library.

The famous portrait of the Edgeworth family by Adam Buck in 1787 is now on loan to the National Gallery of Ireland, but is also the property of Sir David Butler and his family, who have allowed me to reproduce it on the cover.

I am also grateful to the following institutions for allowing reproduction of the following pictures.

Title-pages for Essay on Irish Bulls, p. 74, and Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Esq., p. 214, courtesy of The Lilliput Press.

The Edgeworth Museum for the sketch of Edgeworthstown main street, p.237, and interiors of Edgeworthstown House photographed in the 1880s, p. 424.

The Irish Architectural Archive for the picture of Farnham House, Co. Cavan, p. 247 and the sketch of Maria Edgeworth’s bedroom, p. 420.

The Paul Getty Library for the calotype of Michael Pakenham Edgeworth, p. 407.

The National Library of Ireland for the drawing by Arthur Young, p. 32 and the sketch by Harriet Beaufort of peasants queuing for food, p. 413.

The National Portrait Gallery in London for the mezzotint of Honora Sneyd, p. 27 and the calotype of Maria Edgeworth, p. 407.

The Royal Irish Academy for the frontispiece of Moore’s Irish Melodies, p. 143.

A few other pictures have been kindly made available to me from private collections, viz. the satirical sketch by Caroline Hamilton, p.49 and the Temple at Oriel, p. 176. Pictures from our own family collection include the Gillray cartoon, p. 57, George IV’s triumphal progress down Sackville St, p. 139 and the portraits of Kitty Pakenham and Sir Arthur Wellesley (later Duke of Wellington), p. 103 and Admiral Pakenham, p. 118.

Attributions for the colour pictures used in this book appear beside them.

Note on Text

As far as possible, when copying Maria’s letters, I kept to her original idio­syncratic spellings and punctuation, which largely consisted of dashes, with only an occasional full stop. I sometimes inserted extra commas or quotation marks where I felt sense required it. Indecipherable words I followed with a question mark in square brackets. In other cases I inserted an additional word (denoted by square brackets and italics) for clarification. Many of the original letters were cut for reasons of space and I marked these cuts in all cases by ellipses.

Like most writers of the period, Maria’s use of capitals was more widespread and arbitrary than in the present day and I kept these as she wrote them. She used underlinings both for emphasis and to indicate French or Latin. For clarity, I used the greater freedom available in print to transpose her French phrases and book titles into italics. Titles of publications throughout have otherwise been reproduced in the form in which they originally appeared.

I. March 1776 – May 1798

Maria Edgeworth alwaysclaimed the rackety Irish squires of her famous novel, Castle Rackrent, were pure invention, but it is tempting to draw parallels with early generations of Edgeworths in Ireland. Two Edgeworth brothers had come to Ireland in the 1580s as part of a wave of late Elizabethan ‘adventurers’. Both prospered – one, Edward, became a bishop; the other Francis, Maria’s great-great-grandfather, became Chief Clerk to the Crown in Dublin. In 1619 James I awarded Francis 600 acres of land in Co. Longford, confiscated from a Catholic landowner, and Francis married a neighbouring heiress, Jane Tuite. But their descendants rapidly acquired all the traditional habits of the Anglo-Irish squire – hard drinking and gambling and extravagant hospitality, compounded in the Edgeworths’ case by frequent absences at court in London. Near-bankruptcy was twice staved off by marriage to a rich widow. Maria’s grandfather Richard Edgeworth, who chronicled the family history in The Black Book of Edgeworthstown, was the first to return to prudent ways, brought up by a sober Pakenham uncle. A shrewd lawyer, he fought off rival claimants to the estate and built up his rent roll, though with scant regard for his wretched tenants. He also married a clever well-educated woman, Jane Lovell, from Wales. Between them they carefully supervised their children’s education. Richard Lovell, Maria’s father, the only surviving son, was sent to Trinity College, Dublin, aged just sixteen, but quickly removed when it was clear he had joined a wild hard-drinking set. Instead he was enrolled at Oxford to study law.

Unfortunately, Richard Edgeworth had introduced his son to an old legal acquaintance, Paul Elers, who lived within easy riding distance of Oxford. Richard Lovell, who was highly attractive to women, proceeded to flirt with (and possibly seduce) one of Elers’ pretty daughters, Anna Maria.

Anna Maria Elers, Maria’s mother. She had eloped with Richard Lovell Edgeworth aged seventeen.

Aged nineteen, he eloped with her to Gretna Green and almost immediately regretted it. Anna Maria was domesticated and prudent but barely literate. Richard was clever, restless and enthralled by Enlightenment ideas. He also had a distinct talent for mechanical invention. Soon after Maria, his second child, was born in 1768, he was introduced to the brilliant circle of writers, inventors and manufacturers headed by Dr Erasmus Darwin at Lichfield, which later formed the so-called Lunar Society (they met regularly at the full moon). At Dr Darwin’s house, he met the beautiful intellectual eighteen-year-old Honora Sneyd, daughter of a local landowner, and fell passionately in love with her.

Unable to offer Honora marriage, he fled to France, taking his first child, Dick, with him and leaving his wife in England with two small girls. When Anna Maria died giving birth to a third daughter, Edgeworth almost immediately returned and declared his love to Honora. She accepted him and Maria found herself with a new stepmother at the age of five. Unlike poor Anna Maria, Honora shared fully in Richard’s intellectual interests and together they set out to plan a new system for children’s education – Richard Lovell Edgeworth had been an enthusiast for Rousseau’s system of ‘natural’ education and had already tried it out on Dick with disastrous results: Dick, left to roam free without shoes or instruction until the age of seven, had proved quite ungovernable and finally had to be sent away to sea to serve under the Edgeworths’ cousin, Captain Lord Longford. (He ran away from his ship and soon after emigrated to America.)

The beautiful Honora Sneyd, painted by Romney before her marriage.

In 1775 Richard Lovell Edgeworth brought his children, now three small daughters and an infant son by Honora, back to the family estate at Edgeworthstown in Co. Longford. His father had died three years before and it was clear the place was going to rack and ruin under an agent’s care. He threw himself into reclaiming it, remodelling house and gardens, clearing ditches, planting and draining. ‘He has 40 men constantly employed and thinks of nothing but his duty,’ wrote Honora admiringly. She and Richard were wholly absorbed in each other. Six-year-old Maria, largely ignored, remembered later her unhappiness, and trampling on the garden frames in the walled garden and the delightful sound of breaking glass.

But Honora was already showing symptoms of consumption, and the damp Irish climate was seen as a danger. In 1777 Richard Lovell Edgeworth brought her and the children back to England, and Maria was packed off to a boarding school at Derby, run by a Mrs Lataffiere. Maria’s earliest surviving letter, written from school in careful copperplate to her stepmother, shows her pathetically eager for approval.

Maria(aged eight) to Mrs Honora Edgeworth

Derby, 30 March 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 dear Papa are well. School now seems agreeable to me. I have begun French and dancing and intend to make [great – crossed out] improvement in everything I learn. I know it will give you great satisfaction to know I am a good girl. My cousin Clay sends her love; 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.

Some of her stepmother’s chilling responses to Maria survive, which cannot have given much comfort, and her father’s are hardly better.

Northchurch, 5 February 1778

Dear Maria,

Your father and I begin to think it long since we heard from you and beg you will write to us to inform us how you have gone on since your Father saw you at Derby. I hope Mr and Mrs Lataffiere will authorise you to inform us that your behaviour has merited their esteem [?] and that you have endeavoured to improve yourself in everything which you have an opportunity of learning – your being taught to dance may enable you to alter your common method of holding yourself if you pay attention to it & I must say you wanted improvement in this respect very much when you were here …

Great Berkhamsted, Herts, 1778

My dear Maria,

I have delayed answering your letter that some time might elapse to put your resolution of perseverance to a trial. I hope most sincerely that your answer to this will be accompanied with such an account from Mrs Lataffiere as will confirm me in my hopes of your becoming an amiable girl, a character which is of all others most desirable – With a benevolent heart, complying temper and obliging manners, I should make no doubt that by your mother’s assistance you might become a very excellent and highly improved woman – Your person, my dear Maria, will be exactly in the middle ground between beauty and plainness – handsome enough to be upon a level with the generality of your sex, if accompanied by gentleness, Reserve & real good sense – Plain enough to be contemptible if unattended with the good qualities of the head and heart – These you have in your own power to attain and your behaviour this summer gave me hopes that your Ambition is excited towards the true perfection of the female character – … What the French call Pretension can never please in any English woman – Perfect beauty cannot make it agreeable to people of sense & good taste; anything short of that species of personal perfection becomes the object of criticism to your sex if … placed too forward in a female … – Adieu, my Dr daughter, (write) to me in English and believe me to be your affectionate father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth.

[Postscript by Honora]

I cannot add anything, my dear Maria, to the advice of such a father as you are blessed with, except my most earnest wishes that you may be everything he approves & then I am sure your character will be such as (were you a stranger to me) would make me want you for the Friend of your affect. Mother, Honora Edgeworth.

You asked me many times to let you write to me; I am always glad to hear from you when you have inclination to write, but I wish you never to consider it a task.

By 1778 Honora’s consumption had been confirmed, and she and Edgeworth were desperately moving from one location in England to another in search of any treatment that might delay her death.

Richard Lovell Edgeworth to Maria

Sheffield, 2 November 1779

My dear Maria,

I am very sorry that I cannot give such an account as will please you of your mother’s health. She still continues in a very dangerous situation but has her usual cheerfulness and serenity – Your last (letter) appeared to me more en fille d’école than your former letters. Indeed it is impossible to write without having something to say; at least it ought to be impossible. I send you part of an Arabian fable which I beg you to finish & am with great affection, your father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth

Subsequent letters to his younger sister Margaret, who had married a retired soldier, John Ruxton, gave anguished bulletins on Honora’s decline and begged her frantically to come to England. She finally arrived too late. In the meantime, Maria became the immediate recipient of her father’s grief – and another remarkable moralizing letter. There was at least a hint that relations had seen Honora’s treatment of Maria as over-harsh.

Richard Lovell Edgeworth to Maria

Bristol [?], 2 May 1780

My dearest daughter,

At six o’clock on Sunday morning your mother expired in my arms – She now lies dead beside me and I know I am doing what would give her pleasure … 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 exalted character of your incomparable Mother.

You will be convinced by your own reflection that she fulfilled the part of a mother towards you & towards your sisters without partiality for her own or servile indulgence towards mine.

Though her timely restraint of you and steadiness of behaviour, yielding fondness towards you only by the exact measure of your conduct at first alarmed those who did not know her, yet now, my dearest daughter, every Person who has the least connection with my family is anxious to give sincere testimony of their admiration of those very circumstances which they too harshly associated with the idea of a second wife –

Continue, my dear daughter, the desire you feel of becoming amiable, prudent and of Use. The ornamental parts of a Character with an understanding such as yours … necessarily ensues. But true judgement and sagacity in the choice of friends and the regulation of your behaviour is to be had only 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 the valuable praise which the amiable character of your dear Mother forces from the virtuous & 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

Honora on her deathbed had urged Richard Lovell Edgeworth to marry her younger sister Elizabeth Sneyd – rather to his surprise and to Elizabeth’s, who was not at all in love with him. However, when he proposed a few months later, she accepted him. The engagement, though legal (the bill banning marrying a ‘Deceased Wife’s Sister’ only became law later), shocked both her family and Richard’s sister, Margaret Ruxton. The Sneyds forbade the bans and the couple were eventually forced to find a clergyman in a London parish to marry them. But Elizabeth was to be a far kinder and more congenial stepmother to Maria than the ‘incomparable Honora’. And Richard’s letters began to show more open affection for his eldest daughter.

Shortly afterwards he decided to send Maria to a fashionable boarding school in London to give her polish – a vain attempt as Maria showed no aptitude for music or drawing or dancing and remained painfully shy. But she entertained her fellow pupils with ghost stories at night and made one close friend, Fanny Robinson, daughter of a Northamptonshire baronet. Fanny teased her for her sedateness and bookishness (Maria was already showing strong bluestocking tastes encouraged by her father), but gave her the affection she craved.

By 1782 Richard Lovell Edgeworth was already a father of eight children. It was clear from his intermittent visits to Ireland that his estates in Edgeworthstown were being hopelessly mismanaged by an agent, and he had already decided before Honora’s death that he must return to Edgeworthstown himself fulltime, not only as his duty but from financial necessity. Maria, aged fourteen, was removed at short notice from her finishing school to return to Ireland, much to her delight. Nothing could have been better than to be allowed to live with her beloved father again.

The family reached Dublin in early April. Maria’s first impressions of the extraordinary mixture of squalor and grandeur of the city and the dilapidated state of Edgeworthstown House and its swarming retainers were to be brilliantly recalled in her later novel, The Absentee.

Maria’s earliest surviving letters from Ireland are to her old school friend Fanny Robinson. They begin, not surprisingly, with school gossip and Maria’s admiration for Fanny Burne (whose romantic novel Evelinahad been published three years before to huge acclaim), but they also show her interest in letter writing as an art – she cites two famous English models – and her first literary endeavour, given to her by her father, translating from French Madame de Genlis’ letters on education (Madame de Genlis was governess to the French Royal family). Unfortunately this came to nothing as a rival translation appeared when Maria’s was half done.

To Fanny Robinson

Edgeworthstown , 15 April 1782

… So there have been wonderful revolutions in Wimpole Street, the rebel Angel is “fallen, fallen, fallen from the blest abode.” But seriously how does Miss Denis, Miss Masin and Miss E. Dent do? All x-x-x w I hope.

This present day is one of the hottest we have had this summer, but I defy the sun and all its wicked works for I am seated in a shady arbour on the stump of an old tree – Do you envy me? – But perhaps you are insensible to the heat. I am sure you must be if you could sit baking in a playhouse to see Miss Siddons.

It is the utmost I would do to see Miss Burney for I am not, as you seem to be, Siddons mad, having only a likeness of her in a Review … You are acquainted with Miss Burney, pray tell me all you know of her … I read Evelina over twice, once with a malicious view of discovering a fault, but alas before I had read it half through, I forgot my intentions. Lord Orville is a man after my own heart – his character did not want a title to give it dignity; it is saying a great deal for the Hero but when I say the Heroine thought so too perhaps I say still more for her. It was the character of the man and not the lord she loved – Why then did Miss Burney give him a title – was it to recommend it to titled Readers? If so she did their taste or her Book great injustice … And I may be so bold to say of her young Plebiean admirers some injury … It is preparing for them Disappointment and Ennui at least … Evelina had not title & but small fortune and she married an Earl! Will no conclusion be drawn from this? Will no hopes be raised?3

… As for the Book you are so kind as to enquire about – Alas, it is only a humble translation of Madame de Genlis’ letters. I had just finished the third volume when a rival translation appeared in all its Glory – one volume however is printed and my father thinks of compressing the other two into one & publishing them in Dublin.

… What easy sprightly letters Grey’s are (published by Mason) – I dare say you have read them – They are not the stiff performance of an author written under the rod of criticism and of a Presentment that they would be published as authors’letters usually are – All that I have seen of Pope’s give me that idea, the style is too correct to be free … Don’t you think so? You hear I am asking trifling questions across the British channel with as little ceremony as if you were in the same room with me. I hope you will transport me, or at least my ideas, on return to Crawford … If I should meet Miss Burney there – I should be completely happy – If there is any resemblance between her own character & her amiable Evelina, I should not only be desirous but ambitious of her friendship4…

Maria’s subsequent letters to Fanny Robinson show her becoming happily absorbed in her new life at Edgeworthstown, though still devouring a formidable number of books. Her father, impressed by Maria’s intelligence and willingness to learn, decided to make her his bookkeeper and secretary for estate business and she rode out daily with him on her pony Dapple to inspect fields and outlying tenant farms. It was also a time of intense political excitement in Ireland: the Volunteer movement had sprung up ostensibly to ‘defend’ Ireland against a French invasion in the wake of the American revolution but in fact to put pressure on England to grant the Irish Parliament more political independence. Shortly afterwards it fizzled out, dissolved by its leader Lord Charlemont as it became apparent it could lead to more dangerous strains of insurrection.

To Fanny Robinson

Edgeworthstown, 15 September 1783

… You desire me to read JuliadeRoubigne5 … I won’t promise you I will, though I am as fond of Novels as you can be I am afraid they act on the constitution of the Mind as Drams do on that of the body … But your recommendation will induce me to read any other species of books – Have you finished Rollins’ Ancient History yet and how did you like it? I am reading the History of the only conqueror I will ever like – Peter justly called the Great. I shall read the life of Charles the Twelfth as soon as I have finished but I am afraid all Voltaire’s Eloquence will not prevent my wishing his hero to lose every Battle … I have finished Moliere’s and begun Marivaux’s Theatre … – You see I read several Books on different subjects at a time …

Now indulge me in talking to you of a subject which … fills my whole mind (except when it is empty) – the present state of Politics here. What should you think of a Civil War? Upon my word there is danger – The people are in a state of universal fermentation. The Counties, Corps, Provinces are all sending Delegates and making what they call SpiritedResolutions– a free Parliament is the cry – a free Parliament they will have or none at all – There is to be one of the greatest and most respectable meetings held on Monday next (to decide on some plan to be supported by the united exertions of the Volunteers of Ireland) that was ever seen in this … Country. My father went up to Town this morning to speak at it … They say your Ministry in England means to oppose with all their strength & the Catholics here hint that if they are not allowed the right of voting they will join them – But I cannot believe it, the ministers of England must be too well informed to think the Volunteer army nothing but a name, or to venture to trifle with several 1000 men in arms with a Charlemont, an Ogle and a Flood at their head – I tell you what, my dear Fanny, I am not too proud to be vain & so let me praise my father … His speech to the Leinster delegates was received with the greatest applause … Pray look sometimes at our Irish papers to see what’s doing here … Cast your eye over a map of Ireland now and then that you mayn’t be frightened when I talk of Drogheda & Dungannon & Tipperary & Carrickfergus & a few other such names …

It is unlikely that Fanny Robinson, fresh from a London season, responded to Maria’s interest in Irish politics. Meanwhile, Maria, remote from balls in rural Co. Longford, convinced herself that Fanny’s social life in London would not have suited her and offered a further long lecture on Ireland, reflecting her father’s views.

To Fanny Robinson

Edgeworthstown, Autumn 1783

… You have mentioned in several letters that you are going to Balls. I have an odd opinion to ask you – are you happier at a Ball than anywhere else? You will laugh & say to be sure I am; or perhaps you will ask me why I make such a curious enquiry? I will tell you why – because I am inclined to believe that it is all the preparations, the Music, the dress, the praise & the bustle which constitute the charms of a Ball … Our tastes do not in these aspects Ibelieve agree but I see the obvious cause for their disagreeing – you have a very agreeable person, agreeable manners & many external accomplishments which I want – You are active, nimble & dance well. I am awkward & dance very ill, it is not therefore the least surprising that you should be happy in a ballroom where you are praised … or that I on the contrary with every personal disadvantage … should feel myself much less at my ease in company than amongst friends who set little comparative value on such qualifications … I know their value for I know the want of them, and the pain arising from that want is certainly the most exact measure of that worth …

I promised you my dear Miss Robinson that I would give you some account of the manners of the people I live amongst and that I would communicate all the observations I have an opportunity of making on the peculiarities of … the climate etc.

The Irish are perhaps the laziest civilised nation on the face of the Earth. To avoid a moment’s present trouble they will bring on themselves real misfortunes. When urged by necessity (for without that spur they would never exert themselves) they work with excessive violence for a short space of time and then sink again into a species of torpid inaction – for this indolence peculiar to the Irish peasantry several reasons may be assigned … the most powerful is low wages of labour, 6d a day in winter and 8d in the summer … every day labourer has about 3 acres of land sown with potatoes enough to afford a subsistence to him and his wretched family. He does not covet or even seem to relish the luxuries and conveniences of life – they live in a hut whose mud built walls can scarcely support their weather beaten roofs, you may see the children playing before the abris sans shoes, sans stockings, sans everything – the father of the family on a fine summer’s day standing in the sunshine at his door, while his house is ready to fall upon his head … You go up to him and tell him he had much better set about repairing his house – he would answer you Oh faith Honey, when it falls it will be time enough to think of picking it up …

… To conclude their character, the Irish are remarkably hospitable to strangers, friendly and charitable to each other; à propos about charity I must observe to you that the charity of the higher class of people is one of the greatest checks to industry. It encourages idleness amongst the Poor and increases the number or rather the swarms of Beggars, which invest the streets of Dublin. Let the rich raise the wages of labour, the rewards of industry, that would be true charity … The lower class of Irish are extremely eloquent, they have a volubility, a fluency and a facility of delivery which is really surprising … and they are good lawyers … necessity obliges them to exercise their abilities for fraud and artifices. The Irish language is now almost gone into disuse … except in their quarrels with each other. It is a remarkably harmonious language … the Irish claim their origin from the Phoenicians.

There are finer lakes in this country … than you could have any idea of; the face of the country is disfigured by large tracks of bog. It is supposed that these bogs were originally formed by the leaf and bark of immense forests of trees. A peasant who was working in bog owned by my Father found several feet below the surface a coat, a basket full of arms and a wooden bowl … the coat was neither knit or woven – it was of a manufacture quite unknown – my father has sent it over to the Royal Society …

You think my dear Fanny that I change my employments, my tastes, my pursuits every four months – I must tell you what I am about in my own defence; well I’m writing a book – a Book – yes a book and in six volumes, I began it a month ago and I have written two volumes, but I will tell you neither the title or the subject until it is published …

The book mentioned was probably Maria’s first attempt at a novel. But her father encouraged her instead to apply her storytelling talents to the project begun with him and his second wife Honora – providing simple moral tales for children to replace the usual diet of fairy stories and nursery rhymes. All his children were now to be educated at home without governesses or tutors, and he allotted each of his younger children in turn to the care of an older one. Maria was made responsible for Henry, her stepmother Elizabeth’s second child, born in 1782. Her next surviving letter is to her stepmother’s sister, Charlotte Sneyd. Charlotte and another sister, Mary Sneyd, had taken over the care of the younger Edgeworth children in the aftermath of Honora’s death and were soon to come to live permanently at Edgeworthstown to help with Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s ever-expanding family.

An Irish family outside their cabin, drawn by Arthur Young in 1776 to illustrate his Tour of Ireland