Maria Edgeworth's Writing Classes

Aileen Douglas

I further enjoyed some peculiar advantages:-he kindly wished to give me

habits of business; and for this purpose, allowed me during many years to assisthim in copying his letters of business, and in receiving his rents. 1

When the Irish writer Maria Edgeworth wrote these words shewas already a celebrated novelist, enjoying considerable finan­

cial success and esteemed by peers such as Walter Scott.2 Given theseachievements, her obvious appreciation of the mundane scribal tasksallotted her by her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, seems incon­gruous. True, the famous novelist is recalling her "peculiar advant­ages" in a context that naturally excited expressions of piety: thecontinuation, after his death in 1817, of her father's iVlemoin. Yet,even though Maria Edgeworth had an unusually intense relation­ship with her father-"the first object and motive of my mind"-andvalued everything pertaining to him, her appreciation of the secret­arial work Richard Lovell Edgeworth allowed her to do is not simplythe result of filial infatuation.3

What advantage could a woman famous for her literary achieve­ments derive from mechanical acts of transcription? In fact, theimportance Edgeworth attached to her own role as copyist is en­tirely consistent with her fiction, which rejects the notion that

1 Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth begun by himself and conrluded by his daughter Maria t.'dge­worth, 2 vols (1820; Shannon, Ireland: Irish Universitl' Press, 1968), 2:15.

2 In the "postscript, which should have been a preface" to IVaverleJ (1815), Scon speaks ofhis desire to emulate "the admirable Irish portraits drawn bl' Miss Edgeworth."

3 Richard Lovel! Edgeworth and Maria Edgeworth, lv/emoirs, 2:iv.

El GHTEENTH-CENTURY FI CTI ON, Volume 14, Numbers 3-4, April-Jull' 2002

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"the drudgery of business" is incompatible with literary pursuits,and which insists that "A man of genius ... can become a man ofbusiness."-I A notable achievement of Edgeworth's long and product­ive career is its keen, inclusive account of a society held togetherincreasingly by writing in its myriad forms: legal, commercial, per­sonal, and literary. In the last decade or so, scholars have begun toperceive the evolution of certain literary genres, and even of liter­ature itself, as troubled responses to the permeation of eighteenth­century society by writing. Attempts to project the authority of anoral world, and to separate "literature" from writing generally, canalike be seen as contrasting coun ter-measures to the quickeningof the "long revolution" whereby Britain became a literate society."Edgeworth, because of her ideological commitment to a progressive,commercial, enlightened society, not only largely withstood the nos­talgic allure of an oral tradition, but she also resisted the notion thatliterary works were essentially different from other kinds of writing.

Edgeworth felt privileged to be her father's copyist because for herthe document was the kernel of identity, and access to her father'spapers, even his business letters, was a form of intimacy and trust.To this explanation of Edgeworth 's own activities as copyist we mustadd, ifwe are to understand the frequent and highly charged appear­ances of copyists in her fiction, a preoccupation she and her fathershared: the growing literacy of the labouring classes. Not only areall writers, in the first instance, copyists, but it is with the copy thatthe proliferation of writing in society begins. Over the course offourdecades, Edgeworth manifests, through the copyists in her fiction,an intelligent, evolving, and in some respects prescient fascinationwith the social implications of increased literacy.

4 Thp NovPis and Selec/ed II'0rks ofMaria Edgeworth, vol. 6--7, Patronage, ed. Connor Carville andMarilyn Butler (London: Pickering and Chano, 1999),7:91. References are to this edition.

5 The phrase "long revolution" is borrowed from the title of Raymond Williams's ground­breaking study of cultural change in Britain; The Long Revolution (1961; London: HogarthPress, 1992). Susan Stewart uses the phrase "distressed genres" to refer to genres such asepic, fable, fairy tale, and ballad which respond to the rapid and mechanical disseminationof writing in eighteentll-century society by projecting the authority of an oral world; Crimesof Writing (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 68. In a stimulatingstudy, Clifford Siskin argues that "The proliferation of writing, dming the eighteenth andearly nineteenth centuries in Britain, not only helped to occasion through limitation there-forming of knowledge into disciplines-induding Literatme as the disciplinary homeof writing itself-it also altered work, enabling and valorizing newly specialized forms ofintellectual labor"; The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830(Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 104. See also Penny Fielding, Writing(///(1 Orality: Nationality, Cultllre, and Nineteenth-Centlll)' Scottish Firtion (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1996).

l'vIARIA EDGEWORTH'S WRITING CLASSES 373

From the time of Samuel Richardson, of course, the history ofthe English novel had been intimately bound up with expressivewriting, in the form of the personal letter. One of the most im­portant functions of the novel, as form, was the way it al10wed anemerging middle-class readership to reflect on the possibilities anddangers of self-expression. Edgeworth certainly exploited the epis­tolary form, in Leonom (1806), and elsewhere in her fiction, butalong with contemporaries such as Austen, she evidently felt its lim­itations. Unlike Austen, who shifted the primary definition of char­acter towards dialogue-in the world of her novels characters arejudged by whether or not they are conversable-Edgeworth's in­dex of social being remained writing, but of a rather different kindfrom that which had previously dominated the novel form. Discuss­ing Edgeworth's achievement as a novelist, and concerned to carveout for her a place in the development of realism as a mode, MarilynButler praised the novelist's "almost pedantic interest in documenta­tion from real life. A profusion of detail-facts about customs, dress,above al1 idioms of speech-gives an entirely new richness to theportrait of society." Butler's perception that Edgeworth's charactersare "cogs in the social machine"6 is an important one, but the no­tion that this machine is bound together, above al1, by "idioms ofspeech," rather than by writing, is debatable. Documentation, forEdgeworth, is not simply a novelistic technique (though it is that)but an important social fact. Edgeworth's historical moment was notonly one in which more people were writing, but also one in whichpeople were more written about. Increasingly even the lowest-bornindividual left a paper trace: in the form of public records, school at­tendance books, letters of good conduct, etc. One of the novelties ofthe later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was the extentto which living bodies came to be accompanied, over the course ofa lifetime, by a fragmentary paper double. Edgeworth gave this phe­nomenon serious and sustained attention, and, more ful1y than anyof her contemporaries, represents it in fiction.

As a landmvning family for several generations, the Edgeworthswere-unlike their labouring contemporaries-no strangers to per­sonal papers. In fact, the family had a very developed sense of theimportance of their legal documents. Richard Lovel1 Edgeworth's

6 Marilyn BUller, Maria Edgeworlh: A Liteml)' Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp.395-96, 398.

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father, another Richard, had inherited an estate with contestedboundaries, encumbered with debt, and he subsequently went togreat pains to establish family titles. The copies he made, in his ownhand, of all relevant papers formed a manuscript treasured by hisdescendants as "the black book." In the preface to this collection,Richard urged his son "not to part with this book for any longertime than may be necessary for taking a copy or extract of whatmay be wanted." Loss of it, he warned, "may be a considerable detri­ment to him and his family."i Maria Edgeworth, copying her father'sletters of business, could see herself as emulating her grandfather,and participating in an important family tradition. The black book,to which Maria Edgeworth herself added records after her father'sdeath, embodied the Edgeworths' claims to their lands, and therebyunderpinned the sense oflegitimate and responsible landownershipso fundamental to Maria Edgeworth's class identity. During the 1798rebellion in Ireland, the Edgeworths were forced to flee their es­tate and seek refuge in the county town of Longford. Despite theirprecipitous flight, however, they still found time to bury the tin boxcontaining the black book in the garden. Edgeworth was capableof satirizing narrow-minded obsession with family records: in Har­1ington (1817), she ridicules a character so taken with her family's"old manuscript Memoirs of the De Bruntfield family" that it was the"only book" she ever looked into.s Yet the object of the satire hereis ignorant snobbery rather than attachment to the documentaryproofs of social status.

Edgeworth's representation of writing has a forensic cast. It wouldbe possible, using the range of her fiction, to construct a model ofthe varying ways in which different classes achieve a public beingthrough the written word. Well-born characters in Edgeworth's fic­tion are defined through their deeds, contracts, and family records.Patronage (1813), Edgeworth's longest and in some ways most ambi­tious novel, analyses, through the contrasting fortunes of two famil­ies, the nature of power in English society. The Percy children rely

7 The Black Book oJ Edgeworthslowll, ed. Harriet Jessie Butler and Harold Edgeworth Butler(London: Faber and Gwyer, 1927), p. 5.

8 71,e Novels and Selected Worils oJ Maria Jidgeworth, vol. 3, Hanil1gtoll, ed. Marilyn Butler andSusan Manley (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), p. 184. Coincidentally, 1817 also sawthe posthumous publication ofJane Austen's Persuasion, a novel which begins with a satiricportrait of Sir Waiter Elliot, who, "for his own amusement, never took up any book but theBaronetage." Persuasion, ed.John Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 9.

MARIA EDGEWORTH'S WRITING CLASSES 375

on industry and merit, and take pains to acquire professions, whilethe Falconers put their faith in aristocratic patronage. The fate ofeach family is radically altered by sensational events involving thewritten word. The Falconers successfully decode diplomatic lettersin cipher which have been washed ashore after a shipwreck, andthereby gain a powerful patron. At the same time, the disappear­ance of a vital deed of conveyance, initially thought to have beendestroyed by fire, not only causes the worthy Percys to lose theirestate, but leads to the imprisonment of the head of the family. Ul­timately, though, it is more routine and mundane forms of writingthat prove decisive. The vital deed is only rediscovered because Al­fred Percy, now a punctilious lawyer, is assisting Mr Falconer withhis affairs and refuses "to take charge of any papers, without givinga receipt for them" (7:221). The carelessness of Mr Falconer's sonhas, in fact, caused the missing deed to be mistakenly placed amongthe Falconer documents, and Alfred's prudence saves his family. Thedownward spiral of the Falconer fortunes is indicated by the fact thatMr Falconer had neglected "the essential care, either of papers orestate ... while he had all his life been castle-building, or pursuingsome phantom of fortune at court" (7:221). The ending of Patmn­

age casts a particularly Edgeworthian marriage of birth and merit interms of different kinds of writing: the deed of conveyance estab­lishes the rightful inheritance and gentle status of the Percy family,but it is rediscovered only through the professional meticulousnessof a receipt-writing younger generationY

The resolution of The Absentee (1812) dramatically exemplifies theimportance Edgeworth attached to legitimation through document­ation. Grace Nugent is beloved by the hero, Lord Colambre, but hefeels unable to marry her as no record of her parents' marriage ap­pears to exist. Fortunately, if improbably, the marriage certificate isdiscovered. On his deathbed in Vienna, Grace's father had ownedhis marriage, and given the certificate to a friend to deliver to hisown father. The friend (happily an acquaintance of Colambre's)had passed the documents on to the English ambassador, who hadnever delivered them. Nineteen years later, a two-day search amongthe "shameful disorder" of the deceased ambassador's papers, "look­ing over portfolios of letters, and memorials, and manifestoes, and

9 Patronage is, in fact, related to Edgeworth's non-fictional interest in matters of profession­alization. She collaborated with her father on Essays in Professiol1al Eduwlion (1809).

376 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

bundles of paper," yields the long-lost packet. 10 After a further franticsearch for Grace's grandfather, the papers are finally delivered. Thegrandfather, who shares Colambre's belief that without a certificatethere is no marriage, finally owns his granddaughter. The situationof Grace Nugent parallels that of an earlier fictional heroine, alsoyoung and virtuous, Fanny Burney's Evelina, but the recognitionscenes of the two novels provide an instructive contrast. Evelina'sfather has "infamously burnt" the certificate of his marriage. Raisedby a friend of her mother's, Evelina eventually confronts her father,"without any other certificate of my birth" than that which she car­ries "in my countenance."11 Her father, immediately and powerfullyaffected by Evelina's resemblance to her dead mother, accepts heras his daughter. Burney, influenced by the cult of sensibility, allowsthe body to establish its own legitimacy. In Edgeworth's novel, bycontrast, Grace Nugent has no such power. Until her body is legitim­ated through her parents' marriage certificate, Colambre obduratelyrepresses the desire he feels for her, while her grandfather resolutelydenies her very existence.

A major class distinction in Edgeworth's fiction is between thosecharacters with family papers to keep under lock and key and thosewithout. Those characters too low born to have a family archive are,however, ushered into the scribal record through the pens of theirsocial betters. The most detailed example of this occurs in "LameJervas," a story from Edgeworth's collection for newly literate read­ers, POjJUlar Tales (1804), where each step of the hero's social bet­terment is made possible by a letter of recommendation or goodconduct. Upper-class characters in Edgeworth write letters of recom­mendation in the most extreme cases; in "Madame De Fleury," theheroine even writes them when fleeing for her life from revolution­ary France.

It follows from Edgeworth's sense that social position depends onthe ability to produce the proper documents that those stories andnovels most explicitly concerned with class, and more precisely withsocial mobility-Popular Tales (1804), Pat'IVnage (1813), and Helen(1834)-are also the most congested in documentary terms. Many of

10 The Nove/s and Selected Work, of iv/aria t'dgeworth, vol. 5, The Absentee, ed. Heidi Van de Veireand Kim Walker with Maril)'n Butler (London: Pickering and Challo, 1999), p. 176.

11 Frances Burne)', Eve/ina, ed. Edward A. Bloom (1777; Oxford: Oxford ni\'ersit), Press,1982), pp. 15,337.

i\IARIA EDGEWORTH'S WRITING CL\SSES 377

the stories in PopulaT Tales deal with social mobility, upward througheducation, downward through fecklessness; Patronage deals with theloss of fortune through the "revolutions of fate"; Helen debates theproper relationship between an aristocracy of birth and an aristo­cracy of merit. It is commonly observed that Edgeworth, althoughshe lived through revolutionary times, and indeed experienced re­volution directly, was apparently not drawn to the depiction of suchevents. 12 'While her fiction does, in the main, avoid violent con­flict, she nonetheless shares with many of her contemporaries fearsfor the preservation of property in a revolutionary age. Edgeworth,however, primarily understands property not in terms of bricks andmortar, but in terms of the legal documents which establish theirpossession. Just as, during the '98 rebellion, the Edgeworths tookspecial pains to protect their black book, so similar instincts aremanifest in Edgeworth's fiction. There, fears for property are reg­ularly expressed through the vulnerability of crucial documents: tocarelessness, theft, natural disasters-and at times the copyist.

Edgeworth's insistent attention to copying and copyists is itselfa very complicated phenomenon. At one level, it is clear that asa close observer of society, committed to recording her observa­tions in fiction, she understood the copyist as a personification ofa welcome social change: the increased involvement of the lowerclasses in the world of writing and print. In the preface publishedwith PopulaT Tales, Richard Lovell Edgeworth noted that "The art ofprinting has opened to all classes of people various new channelsof entertainment and information."13 The title of PopulaT Tales hadbeen chosen, he explained, "not as a presumptuous and prematureclaim to popularity, but from the wish that they may be current bey­ond circles which are sometimes exclusively considered as polite."

12 That Edgeworth is an intensely political writer, has, of course, been widely acknowledged.Marilyn Butler includes a valuable chapter on Edgeworth inJolle A IIslm alld Ihe War oJ Ideas(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Wj. McCormack's Asrendfllll:Y alld 7/-adilioll ill Allglo-IrishLiteml)' HistoryJrolll 1789-1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) is indispensable for theIrish dimension of Edgeworth's politics. For discussions of Edgeworth and gender politicssee Colin B. Atkinson andJo Atkinson, "Maria Edgeworth, Belillda, and Women's Rights,"J:'in'-h"l'lalld 19 (1984), and Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Their Fathen' Daughters: Halllloh/10101"1', /Iolaria l~'dge1V()r/h, alld Palriarrhal Co Ill/Airily (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).In the past decade, Mitzi Myers has produced an extensive range of articles on Edgeworth,including the political implications of the author's writing for children; see, for example,"Canonical 'Orphans' and Critical Enllui: Rereading Edgeworth's Cross Writing," Childrell'sI.itemture25 (1 ew Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

13 Maria Edgeworth, PO/JIIlar Tales, 3 vols (London, 1804), 1:iii. References are to this edition.

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In the iVlemoin, Maria paid tribute to her father for having "edu­cated and fowarded in the world many excellent servants, workmenand tradespeople." In 1799, in the aftermath of revolution both athome and abroad, Richard Lovell Edgeworth addressed the IrishHouse of Commons. Acknowledging that "some were averse ... toimproving the minds of the working people," he went on to claimthat it was "in countries where the people at large were best instruc­ted, that they were best affected to constituted authority and regularGovernment." Education afforded the working classes a "Knmvledgeof their duty" and made them "virtuous and loyal, useful to them­selves and to the state." Far from precipitating revolution, educationsafeguarded against it. For the Edgeworths, unlike some of theircontemporaries, successful education included teaching the work­ing classes to write. There were, however, limits. In a plan he drewup for a school at Edgeworthstown, Richard Lovell Edgeworth re­quired that each student should be taught a "current, useful, not afine hand. "14 This il~unction captures a crucial feature of working­class literacy, as the Edgeworths envisaged it: that it would operate",rithin clearly defined limits. The handwriting of the students will be"useful" but not "fine." Their literacy will be practical, and mundane;it will allow the labouring classes to fulfil their duties, but not tochange them.

Edgeworth's pioneering efforts in children's literature and "pop­ular tales" show her acute sense of a burgeoning, and rapidly chan­ging, reading public; they both acknowledge and give further im­petus to what was in effect a "cultural revolution."l5 Her fiction isnotable for its representation of a newly literate working class whichdoes not merely passively consume print, but actively produces writ­ing. Writing of a certain sort, that is. A social world in which all classeswrite may allow-as it does in Edgeworth-for a degree of socialmobility-but it is also a world in which the social meaning of writ­ing becomes increasingly marked by class. This is because once allclasses can write the ground of distinction between classes shifts to

14 Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Maria Edgeworth, Memoirs, 2:371; 2:246, 248; 2:451.

15 The phrase "cultural revolution" is used by Alan Richardson to describe the growing ac­ceptance during the Romantic era that literacy should be universal, and that schoolingshould be available to all; see Lilemlllre, Edllcation, and Romanlicism: Reading as Social Pmctire,1780-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge Universit), Press, 1994). Richardson's stud}' providesan extremely useful historical context for the reading of Edgeworth.

1\IARIA EDGEWORTH'S WRITING CLASSES 379

distinctions within writing itself. A significant part of Edgeworth's in­terest as a novelist lies in her careful, and class-based, calibrations ofliteracy. She dramatizes in her fiction the belief-shared with manyof her contemporaries-that there is such a thing as a working-classwriter, a writer whose literacy is functional, limited, and completelydetermined by his or her place in the social structure. A story writtenfor adolescents at the start of her own career, "The vVhite Pigeon,"gives an extraordinarily condensed symbolic form to the relation­ship Edgeworth envisaged between upper and lower-class literacy.Brian O'Neill, a poor but literate young man, "writes a good hand."16From his reading, he learns about carrier pigeons, and uses them togive his father (who runs a small shop) a market advantage. Villainskidnap the pigeon and attempt to use it to rob Mr Somerville, a gen­tleman. Brian foils their plan. At story's end, Mr Somerville takesBrian and his father to a building he is renovating, and asks Brianto mount a ladder to remove a cover on a sign. When Brian does sohe discovers "a white pigeon painted upon the sign, and the nameof O'Neill in large letters underneath." Mr Somerville has made MrO'Neill master of his new inn, The White Pigeon. The carrier pi­geon symbolizes literacy itself, a force which makes possible socialmobility, but which may also be abused. Brian's proper use of liter­acy results in a social ascent that is endorsed, in "large letters," by anapproving upper class.

Much of Maria Edgeworth's fiction seeks to reconcile the exist­ence of a literate working class "vith "the connexion and depend­ence, which there ought to be between the different ranks."17 Typ­ically, lower-class writers in her fiction are inducted into literacy bytheir social superiors, for whom they subsequently feel tremendousgratitude, a gratitude, moreover, that reverses in fortune give theman opportunity to express. Lower-class gratitude is the most reiter­ated emotion in Edgeworth's fiction, but even Edgeworth could notspread it quite widely enough. She was too intelligent a writer notto realize that education might occasionally produce ingrates, or in­deed individuals who had nothing to be grateful for. Both the fearthat lower-class literacy might actually challenge rather than supportthe social order and Edgeworth's tendency to equate individualswith their crucial documents find expression in the figure of the

16 "The White Pigeon," in The Parent's Assistant (1800; London, 1845),3:33.

17 Richard Lovell Edgewonh and Maria Edgeworth, AIemoin, 2:26.

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lower-class copyist. How better to convey the monstrous, uncontrol­lable possibilities of working-class literacy than by showing membersof that class using their newly acquired skills to attack the paperson which the identities and social status of their betters depended?From the very beginning of her career, in Castle Rachent (1800),her first and most famous novel, Edgeworth saw that along with theworking-class copyist came the possibility of a world turned upsidedown.

"I began to write a family history as Thady would tell it, heseemed to stand beside me and dictate; and I wrote as fast as mypen could gO."IB Maria Edgeworth's well-known and often quotedaccount of the composition of Castle Rackrent suggests a powerfulintimacy between the novel's narrator, the illiterate Irish stewardThady Quirk, and his young English-born amanuensis. The familyhistory Thady tells is of the decline of the Rackrents, the family hehas lived among for decades. Thady's voice, his "vernacular idiom,"is the most striking feature of this work, and it is on this feature thatthe novel's reputation as one of the first regional fictions in Englishrests. 19 In addition to Thady's narration, the novel also includes anelaborate editorial apparatus: a preface which explains why the ideaof translating Thady's speech into "plain English" has been rejected;a "few notes" to make his idiom comprehensible to English readers;and a glossary. Castle Rackrent's remarkable spoken performance isfirmly contextualized by Enlightenment writing. 20

Edgeworth's salient appropriation of Thady's voice is, however,countered by a more discreet appropriation, by Thady's son, Jason.A;; the literate son of an illiterate parent, Jason Quirke represents aphenomenon that would exercise social commentators for decadesto come: the increasing access of the working class to writing andprint. It is Jason who will slowly but surely gain hold of the Rack­rent lands, and ultimately of Castle Rackrent itself, displacing thefinal Rackrent, Sir Condy. The key to Jason's ascent is his penman­ship, his willingness to attend to the drudgery of business, for, like

18 Frances Edgeworth, A Nlemoir oJ Maria Edgeworlh, 3 vols (1867), 3: 152.

19 The Novels and Selected 1I'0rhs oJ Maria t'dgeworth, \'01. I, Castle Rarhrent, ed. Jane Desmarais,Tim McLoughlin, and Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), p. 6. Refer­ences are to this edition.

20 For a wide-ranging discussion of these issues, see Katie Trumpener, Bm'dir Nationalism: TheRomantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

1vlARIA EDGEWORTH'S WRITING CLASSES 381

Edgeworth herself,Jason derives "peculiar advantages" from servingas a copyist. It is as a writer that Thady first introduces his son:

Seeing how he was as good a clerk as any in the county, the agent gave him his

rent accounts to copy, which he did first of all for the pleasure of obliging the

gentleman, and would take nothing at all for his trouble. (p. 16)

Jason does not own the documents, still less the lands to ""hich theypertain; apparently unacquisitve, he even refuses payment for hisclerking. Yet, copying the rent accounts gives him a kind of intim­acy with the Rackrent lands. Joseph Addison could speak of howtaste gives a man a kind of property in everything he sees, and J asonQuirke shows that a scribe can have a kind of property in what hecopies.Jason's knowledge of the estate is, however, soon accompan­ied by a legal relationship as he colludes with the obliged and obli­ging agent to become a tenant on favourable terms. Subsequently,Jason becomes the estate's agent, thereby gaining further controlover the estate papers. Finally, circumstances are right for Jason totransform his years of copying and account keeping into a sliver ofthe Rackrent estate. In the meantime, he is also buying up Condy'sdebts, and taking possession of his notes of hand.

Jason and the final Rackrent, Sir Condy, are of an age, and the nar­rative deliberately mirrors their experiences. Condy, who belongs toa remote branch of the Rackrent family, is not expected to inheritand so he attends a humble grammar school, where Jason Quirkeis in his class, "and not a little useful to him in his book-learning,which he acknowledged with gratitude ever after" (p. 25). Beforeeither Condy or Jason actually owns the Rackrent estate, each ofthem forms a relationship to it through writing, albeit writing ofverydifferent kinds. Jason's copying does not merely anticipate his even­tual ownership, it also, by providing an inventory and grasp of detail,prepares him for it. He masters the estate in his mind before hebecomes its owner. In contrast, once it becomes likely that he may in­herit, Condy exploits his expectations, and many of the tenants andothers secretly advance him "cash upon his note of hand value re­ceived" (p. 26). As a result, when Condy does eventually come intopossession he cannot, despite a "great nominal rent-roll," commanda penny of his first year's income. "Not willing to take his affairs intohis own hands, or to look them even in the face" (p. 26), Condy canonly payJason and retain his services by leasing him, and eventuallyselling him, land.

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Condy never masters the paperwork, and without it, his real own­ership of the land is vulnerable and incomplete. As his affairs be­come more and more desperate, he generates more and more billsand bonds, many of which Jason comes to possess. In the final con­frontation between the two men, Condy literally cannot look at the"load of papers all gathered on the great dining-table" (p. 42) andcovers his eyes. '''Well,' says he, joking like with Jason, 'I wish wecould settle it all with a stroke of my grey goose quill'" (p. 42). Itis, of course, strokes of the pen that have been at issue all along.Jason, by the deliberate use of his quill, and by his initial willing­ness to copy the documents of others, finally has a great deal to puthis name to; Condy, through the precipitate and unthinking use ofhis quill, has debased his own signature.

In Ireland, in the years preceding the publication of Castle Rack­rent, "the connexion and dependence between classes" that Edge­worth favoured was threatened by violent revolution. Of course,Edgeworth's story, ostensibly concerning "the manners of the Ir­ish Squires, before the year 1782" (the year in which Ireland hadachieved a degree of legislative independence from England), issafely set in the past. She thereby avoids any direct treatment of the'98 rebellion (although she does refer to one of its most significantconsequences: the Act of Union of 1800). The apocalyptic aspectsof Castle Rack-rent are further contained by the fact that the fate ofthe Rackrents is clearly avoidable. All the Irish squires have to dois to take their affairs into their hands, resume control of their es­tates, and live on their lands. In a properly managed estate, aJasonQuirke would have no room to manoeuvre. In subsequent novels,such as The Absentee, Edgeworth purported to show how it was to bedone. In marked contrast to Condy, the hero of The Absentee, LordColombre, not only travels incognito through Ireland to see how hisfather's (and his own) estates are administered, but also makes amad dash back to England to prevent his father being duped by amiddle-man and signing leases much to his disadvantage. The rad­ical implications of Castle Rack-rent are not, however, so easily dissip­ated. The setting of the novel, and its obvious importance in terms ofnational and colonial identities, have obscured one of its most subtlethemes: the way in which intellectual property-literalized in the actof copying-can be transformed into real property. The potentiallydestablizing effects of this transformation concerned Edgeworth un­til the very end of her writing career.

~IARIA EDGE"'ORTH'S WRITING CLASSES 383

Castle Rackrent established Edgeworth as an author, but it also lefther with a problem. How could one argue against the ascendancy ofthe ]ason Quirkes of the world? How, if one accepted that intellec­tual property might come to have a real equivalent, could one pro­tect the status quo? Part of the answer, as indicated above, was thatthose in possession would reinscribe themselves (as it were) as own­ers, equipping themselves with the detailed knowledge that would,even if retrospectively,justify possession. The awkwardness of this ad­justment was softened by having it occur, as it does in The Absentee,between generations. Edgeworth not only, in the Irish Tales writtenafter Castle Rackrent, developed one route of retreat from the rad­icalism of that novel, but she also found, in other types of fiction,additional opportunities. In the years after her first novel, the cre­ation and control of the working-class writer and the social benefitsof a circumscribed working-class literacy were significant themes inEdgeworth's writing.

The most detailed working out of this theme is "Lame ]ervas"from Popular Tales. ]ervas, a child labourer in a Cornish tin-mine,is like]ason Quirke animated by desire for "a little garden and prop­erty of [his] own" (1:15). By alerting the owner to a plot againsthim,]ervas not only gains his liberty from the tin-mine but also theO"wner's interest in his education. Helped on by his "good master'sletter" (1:35) to another benefactor, MrY,]ervas is soon benefitingfrom the instruction of a writing-master and progressing throughhis "spelling-book, and copy-books" (1 :37). At this poin t,]ervas getscarried away and starts to write poetry. His danger is, however, spot­ted by his benefactor, who shows ]ervas the many volumes of poemsin his library. ]ervas perceives "the vast distance" between himselfand these writers, and accepts Mr. Y's assertion that he is unlikely, inliterary pursuits, ever to equal those who have "enjoyed greater ad­vantages of leisure and education" (1:39). ]ervas travels to Madras,initially to work as a tutor in Andrew Bell's Madras Asylum.~1 Eventu­ally,]ervas puts his mining experience to use in the service ofroyaltyand the moral of the story is made clear: "an obscure individual, in acountry like England, whose arts, sciences, and literature, are open

21 Bell's highly influential All E"pPrimPl11 ill Edllralioll, made al Ifte Male Asylllm of Madras (Lon­don, 1797) introduced the monitorial system to England, and is footnoted in Edgeworlh'stext. Bell repaid the compliment several years later when he reproduced lellers fromRichard Lovell Edgeworlh in his All A 11 alysis oI/fte £xperimell/ ill J~'rlllwlioll tv/ade al Egmore,llear Madras.

384 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY fICTION

to all ranks, may obtain a degree of knowledge which an eastern des­pot, in all his pride, would gladly purchase with ingots of his purestgold" (1 :93). The detailed accounts ofJervas becoming a writer andof his social rise are one and the same. As Jervas's abilily lo writeincreases, however, so does the scribal activity of his various bene­factors, each of whom provides him with a letter (1:35), a certificateof "good conduct" (1 :44), or a "recommendation" (1 :71) which en­ables his further progress. The story of how Jervas came to be ableto write his name in "more intelligible characters" than was the casewhen, as a child labourer, he cut his name in the rock (1 :37) is sim­ultaneouslya story of his becoming the object of upper-class writingand control. When he praises England as a country in which "arts,sciences and literature" are open to all ranks, he ignores his own ac­ceptance of the "vast distance" between himself and those fitted byeducation and leisure for the world of literature.

While Edgeworth's Popula.,. Tales deal with movement up the socialscale, several of the stories in Tales of Fashionable Life, for example"Emile De Coulanges" (1812), and "Madame De Fleury" (1809), in­volve revolutionary dispossession: "In these times, no sensible personwill venture to pronounce that a change of fortune and station maynot await the highest and the lowest."22 The eponymous heroine of"Madame de Fleury" has established a school for lwelve students inwhich they learn various skills including "drawing out bills neatly,keeping accounts, and applying to every-day use their knowledge ofarithmetic" (p. 226). Imprisoned by the revolutionaries, Mme Fleuryis rescued by her pupil Victoire, and makes her escape to England.Despite her circumstances, Mme Fleury is able, before she leavesParis, to 'write letters to her friends "recommending her pupils totheir protection" (p. 239). In her exile, she receives letters of grat­itude from them all, "even the youngest, who had but just begun tolearn joining-hand." Victoire has found employment in the serviceof a woman who is "glad to find that we can write tolerably, and thatwe can make out bills and keep accounts; this being particularly con­venient to her at present, as the young man she had in the shop isbecome an oratm; and good for nothing bu t la chose publique" (p. 241).

In keeping with the precepts of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, "Ma­dame de Fleury" represents illiteracy as a social danger. On her flight,

22 The Novels and Selecled II'or!<s oJ Mar;a Edgeworlh, "Madame de fleury," ed. Heidi Van deVeire and Kim Walker with Maril)'n Butler (London: Pickering and Chauo, 1999), p. 253.References are to this edition.

:'IIARIA EDGEWORTH'S WRITING CLASSES 385

the heroine discovered that it "seldom happened" that more thanone of the "petty committees of public safety" could read (p. 239).As in "Lame Jervas," however, the kinds of writing in which charac­ters engage are class-specific. Victoire had early shown signs of beinga talented poet, but Mme Fleury had not encouraged her, as she"refrained from giving any of her little pupils accomplishments un­suited to their situation" (p. 226). The education presided over byMme Fleury is, as the narrator approvingly notes, one which teachesthe poor to write but also impresses upon their minds "sentiments ofjust subordination and honest independence" (p. 230). In the finalwords of the novel, Mme Fleury, restored to her lands through theintervention of those whom she has taught, exclaims: "No gratitudein human nature! No gratitude in the lower classes of the people!... How much those are mistaken who think so." The ideas at theheart of "Madame de Fleury" are found throughout Edgeworth's fic­tion. In an ideal social order, a responsible upper class provides a(carefully circumscribed) working-class literacy, and, in return, theworking classes, infused with gratitude, labour on. At the very endof her career, however, Edgeworth confronts once more the fearof an uncontrollable working-class literacy, which, once again, sheexpresses through the figure of the working-class copyist.

Helen (1834), Edgeworth's first work of fiction for adults in sev­enteen years, has important affinities with fiction from the evenearlier period of the revolutionary 1790s. Like Godwin's Caleb Wil­

liams (1796), Helen is explicitly concerned with the relationship ofknowledge and class to social organization. Edgeworth's work is alsoindebted, in its representation of a conflict between female viva­city and male absolutism, to another novel of the 1790s, ElizabethInchbald's A Simple SlOTY (1791), praised by Edgeworth as "the mostpowerfully interesting tale I ever read."23 Finally, Helen also containsone of Edgeworth 's few significant Gothic scenes. The male absolut­ist of the novel, General Clarendon, deeply distrusts progress. Whenhis ward, Granville Beauclerc, echoesJervas's eulogy of England as acountry open to merit of all kinds, Clarendon demurs, and he sub­sequently checks Beauclerc's enthusiastic account of "education andthe diffusion of knowledge" by endorsing only knowledge that is

23 Frances Edgeworth, A Memoir oJ Mari" Edgeworth, 1:229.

386 EIGHTEENTH·CENTURY FICTION

"safe."24 In the course of the novel, working-class literacy is exposedas profoundly unsafe.

Even by Edgeworth's standards, Helen is obsessively concernedwith writing and copying. This is a novel saturated with the writtenword: copy-books, autograph albums, business letters, personal let­ters, portfolios of original letters, manuscript copies of letters, adul­terated copies of letters, printed versions of adulterated copies ofletters, annotated printed copies of letters. In addition, the illicitcopying which features in both plot and subplot concerns differentmaterials, so one is dealing (for instance) with two different sets ofmanuscript copies of letters. As one might expect given the above,the novel's various characters spend a significant portion of theirtime either writing or responding to writing, and this even beforeone considers their leisurely reading of newspapers and books. Themonstrous irrepressibility of the written word is the major theme ofthe book, one articulated early on by a character who will herself be­come a copyist's victim: "what is written remains, and often for thoseby whom it was never intended to be seen" (p. 21). As a novel dealingwith the nefarious activities of an ungrateful and disloyal working­class copyist, Helen is a direct, and disillusioned, rewriting of workssuch as "Madame de Fleury."

The plot of Helen is comparatively simple. The orphaned heroinegoes to live with her newly married old friend, Cecilia Clarendon.Here she meets, and is courted by, her future husband, Beauclerc.This strand in the novel is, however, completely overshadowed bythat concerning Cecilia. Before her marriage, Cecilia had been in­volved with a Colonel D'Aubigny, and halfWay through the novelletters from her to him, which she had believed destroyed, resur­face. In order to protect Cecilia, Helen unwillingly accepts the lettersas her own. In the meantime, adulterated copies of the letters havereached an unscrupulous publisher, and are printed. After frantic ef­forts to repress publication, their true authorship is discovered andCecilia's husband disowns her. Only the intervention of Cecilia's dy­ing mother, Lady Davenant, reconciles the couple.

Lady Davenant is, like her daughter, a victim of illicit copying,which, in her case, only comes to light when she learns (by letter)that she is herself suspected "of having suffered a copy of a letter

24 The Novels alld Seler/ed 1I'0rks oJ Mar;a L'dgewor/h, vol. 9, He/en eel. Susan Manl)' and Cliona6Gallchoir (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), p. 83.

MAR!A EDGEWORTH'S WRITING CLASSES 387

from an illustrious personage to be handed about and read by sev­eral people" (p. 216). The discovery of the perpetrator is renderedin Gothic terms. It takes place in the middle of the night, and in­volves locked doors, suspense, and a fearful heroine too terrified tolook behind a curtain. When the locked door is finally opened, thecopyist has escaped but the signs of his activity remain:

The lamp was still burning, and papers half burnt smouldering on the table.

There were sufficient remains to tell what they had been. Lady Davenant saw,

in the handwriting of Carlos, copies of letters, taken from her desk. (p. 223)

The betrayal is all the more bitter as Carlos, the Portuguese orphan,is not only Lady Davenant's servant, but her pupil:

As she fixed her eyes upon the writing, scarcely yet dry, she repeated. "It is his

writing-I see it, yet can scarcely believe it! I who taught him to write myself­

guided that little hand to make the first letters that he ever formed." (p. 223)

Carlos's activities in his illicit copy-shop recall those in a muchmore infamous early nineteenth-century workshop. Like Franken­stein, Carlos works at night, in secrecy, and his acts are seen as abetrayal of others and a transgression of nature. The papers "halfburnt smouldering on the table" and the "sufficient remains" withwhich Carlos had been engaged are similar to the grisly body partsout of which Frankenstein created his monster. Frankenstein's trans­gressive and unnatural act of creation infused dead remains with life.By his illicit copying, Carlos has given Lady Davenant's papers a lifeand circulation beyond their owner's control. Edgeworth conveysthe transgressive nature of his acts by describing them as a kind ofdeath-dealing: the writing "scarcely yet dry" recalls a corpse, scarcelyyet cold.

For all the Gothic trappings, however, it is important to recognizethat Carlos is not, in fact, reanimating bits of dead bodies, but simplycopying bits of paper. His activities, although surreptitious, are alsoperfectly mundane. vVhat the scene succeeds in highlighting, there­fore, is the way in which writing may survive its authors to persist ina world over which those authors have no control. When Lady Dav­enant remarks early in the novel that "what is written remains, andoften for those for by whom it was never intended to be seen" (p.21), she is thinking of confidential writing and personal papers. Thetruth, however, applies to writing of all kinds; and, as the rest of the

388 EIGI-ITEENTI-I·CE:\TURY FICTION

novel demonstrates, it is a truth given an added dimension by theoperations of the market.

That what is written remains is only one of several truths aboutwriting that Lady Davenant articulates but only partially under­stands. Elsewhere in the novel, she acknowledges her belief in theaphorism, "which is now come down to the copy-books"; that "know­ledge is power" (p. 67). In the con text of a copy-book, Bacon's as­sertion becomes self-referential. We are not told, in "Lame jervas,"what aphorisms jervas's copy-book contained, but certainly "know­ledge is power" would have been appropriate to his narrative. Inev­itably, these words gloss Lady Davenant's own activities, as a teacherwho, by guiding "that little hand to make the first letters that he everformed," transferred the power of writing to the servant who sub­sequently betrayed her. Seeing "in the handwriting of Carlos, copiesof letters, taken from her desk" (p. 223), Lady Davenant confrontsthe fact that Carlos's ability to write is also a species of "writing over."Replication is also a usurpation. She gave him the power to write,but cannot control how he uses that power. The Gothic episode inHelen represents a monstrous working-class literacy veering out ofcontrol, thereby rejecting Richard Lovell Edge"worth's comfortableassertion that working-class education will result in a "loyal and vir­tuous" populace. In addition, Helen suggests that the time for directsupervision of working-class learning by a philanthropic upper classmay be over. fu Lady Davenant's reference to copy-books reminds us,the world of print is one in which it is no longer necessary for upper­class patrons to guide the hands of novice writers. With the aid ofa mass-produced copy-book, cheaply available, the student can gainthe power of knowledge all by him or herself.

Helen is a novel in which the language of paternalism-obligation,responsibility, and gratitude-is jostled by the newer language ofcommercialism-merit, industry, and talent. Over many decades,Edgeworth's view of an ideal society was of different ranks, boundtogether by obligation and gratitude. One way she expressed herfears for such a society was in the figure of the lower-class copyist,who had been served well by his superiors but responded with in­gratitude. Helen, as we have seen, contains a version of such classbetrayal. Yet, in Helen, Edgeworth's fears over lower-class literacy,lurid as they may be, form only part of a larger nightmare. In her fi­nal work, Edgeworth confronts the suspicion that not even the mostperfect execution of class-based duties, as she has understood them

"IARIA EDGE\\,ORTH'S \I'RITI:-lG CLASSES 389

all her career, will result in social health. Helen is a book in whichresidual and emergent anxieties are overlaid, as the fear surround­ing lower-class literacy (suitably expressed in the old-fashioned formof the Gothic) mingles with Edgeworth's anxieties surrounding thecommodifying force of the market.

Helen represents a world in which newspapers offer a constant re­cord of the marriages, movements, and other activities of the up­per class. Helen first learns of her friend's marriage in a newspapercolumn; the whereabouts of her lover can be traced in lists of hotelpatrons. Early in the novel, Lady Davenant remarks on how scan­dalous some of the newspapers have become (p. 109), but her ownsocial circle evidences a considerable appetite for print. Appropri­ately, it is a newspaper paragraph which first alerts Cecilia to theimminent publication of Colonel D'Aubigny's manuscripts, amongwhich her own letters feature. Even though the original letters are re­turned to Cecilia, and burnt by her, copies have been made and overthe remainder of the novel copies proliferate. In a climactic sceneof the novel, Helen is confronted by the published adulterated let­ters and asked by Clarendon to identify which are hers and whichforgeries. Cecilia, marking up the volume, cannot bring herself toacknowledge some of her fonder expressions to D'Aubigny. The res­ult is that Clarendon, who has gained "actual copies of the originalletters" (p. 307), detects the deception and refuses to support themarriage of Helen to his ward.

Edgeworth's writing in these sections of Helen creates, as Car­oline Gonda observes, "an atmosphere of urgency and tension un­matched by anything else in her works. "2'; Further observing thatthe letters in Helen do not reappear by magic-they are copied, ed­ited, adulterated, and published out of a whole range of ignoblehuman emotions-Gonda concludes that the source of monstros­ity in the novel is writers, rather than writing itself. One might re­spond, however, that Edgeworth's attempt to apportion blame is aweak recuperative effort. The critical point is that what is written re­mains. vVhether or not writings are compromising, whether or notthey fall into the hands of unscrupulous copyists, they may well re­main in circulation long after their author's death. The papers onvvhich identity rested become a commodity, available for a price inthe marketplace.

25 Carol ine Gonda, Rmding Dallg!ltrr5' hrlium: 1709-1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge Universi tyPress, 1996), p. 229.

390 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

It is not surprising that Edgeworth, already in her late sixties whenHelen was published, should be concerned with the ghostly afterlifeof writing, and with the division death inevitably effects between thecorporeal body and its paper double. It would be a mistake, however,to conflate this concern of Edgeworth's with the more general op­postion in Western metaphysics, as adumbrated by Derrida, betweenliving body and dead letter. 26 Notwithstanding the powerful exampleof Helen, Edgeworth more usually insists on an identity, not an op­position, between the written document and the living individual.Edgeworth brought to the English novel, which had exhausted thenovelties of expressive writing, a new emphasis on public writing inall its forms. Her characters are objects of writing, invigorated by thedocuments on which their identity and social status depend. Thesignificance of this should not be lost on modern readers who them­selves live in societies in which to be "undocumented" is a terribleplight, and in which the relationship between documents and iden­tity (now in cyber form) is the stuff of both popular entertainmentand social analysis.

Edgeworth's acute apprehension of the importance of the docu­ment may have been prompted by, and, in any case, was certainlyaccompanied by, her awareness of the increased permeation of hersociety by writing. Her commitment to popular literacy was un­doubted, yet her fiction for the newly literate negotiates new formsof class distinction. Working-class writing, as lame Jervas learns, canhave no pretension to literature. Edgeworth's fear that a literateworking class might refuse such limitations finds expression in thefigure of the working-class copyist whose replication of upper-classdocuments carries with it a possible replication, or displacement,of upper-class power. We cannot know to what extent Edgeworth'sacute understanding of writing in her society was one of the "pe­culiar advantages" she derived from being her father's copyist. It iscertainly among the most original aspects of her fiction.

Trinity College, Dublin

26 Jacques Derrida, DJ Crallllll(l/ology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and Lon­don:Johns Hopkins Universit)' Press, 1976).