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HARRINGTON
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the edgeworth family,watercolour by adam buck,1789
From left to right:Maria Edgeworth,aged about (wearing hat);Emmeline;
Henry;Charlotte;Sneyd (just visible beneath the outstretched arm of Lovell);
Lovell (bending towards Charlotte);Richard Lovell Edgeworth (seated facing
Maria Edgeworth);Anna (standing next to Lovell);Elizabeth Sneyd,RLE’s third
wife (seated behind RLE,with baby William on her lap);Bessy (standing at
Elizabeth’s knee);Honora (standing,extreme right)
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HARRINGTON
Maria Edgeworth
edited by Susan Manly
broadview editions
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© Susan Manly
All rights reserved.The use of any part of this publication reproduced,transmitted in any form or
by any means,electronic,mechanical,photocopying,recording,or otherwise,or stored in a retrieval
system,without prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying,a licence
from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency),One Yonge Street,Suite ,
Toronto,ON —is an infringement of the copyright law.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Edgeworth,Maria,–.
Harrington / Maria Edgeworth ;edited by Susan Manly.
(Broadview editions)
Includes bibliographical references.
---
I.Manly,Susan II.Title. III.Series.
pr4644.h3 2004 823'.7 c2004-901446-3
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Contents
Acknowledgements •
Introduction •
Maria Edgeworth:A Brief Chronology •
A Note on the Text •
Harrington •
Appendix A:Correspondence between Maria Edgeworth and
Rachel Mordecai Lazarus •
Appendix B:From John Toland’s Letters to Serena () and
Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews () •
Appendix C:From Isaac D’Israeli’s Monthly Magazine article on
Moses Mendelssohn () •
Appendix D:Contemporary reviews of Harrington •
. From the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine
(August ) •
. From the Edinburgh Review (August ) •
Select Bibliography •
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to the University of North Carolina Press for permission
to use extracts fromThe Education of the Heart:The Correspondence
of Rachel Mordecai Lazarus and Maria Edgeworth,edited by Edgar
E.MacDonald (c) .Thanks to Michael Butler for permission
to reproduce the portrait of the Edgeworth family.
Many thanks to Marilyn Butler for introducing me to the work
of Maria Edgeworth and for generously sharing her expertise with
me.I am grateful for the intellectual and moral support of the
following:Zinaida Lewczuk,Rhiannon Purdie,Katya Benjamin,
Gill Plain,and Nicholas Roe.Thanks to James Schmidt,for a help-
ful correspondence about Moses Mendelssohn.Special thanks to
Adrian and Celia Mitchell for their friendship.Thanks to Lilias
Fraser for assisting with the preparation of the text.Special thanks
to Angus Stewart,for his love and practical support.
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Introduction
Sources and origins
On August th,,a young Jewish-American woman sat down
to write a letter to Maria Edgeworth,the celebrated author—
together with her father,Richard—of Practical Education (),
and sole author of several volumes of stories for children,as well
as of several successful novels for adult readers.In the letter,
Rachel Mordecai thanked Edgeworth for her ‘benevolent inten-
tion’in thus paying attention to ‘the important business of educa-
tion’and its significance in the creation of good,wise and happy
citizens.But she went on to question how an author ‘who on all
other subjects shows such justice and liberality,should on one
alone appear biased by prejudice:should even instill that preju-
dice into the minds of youth! Can my allusion be mistaken? It is
to the species of character which wherever a Jewis introduced is
invariably attached to him.Can it be believed that this race of
men are by nature mean,avaricious,and unprincipled? … [T]his
is more than insinuated by the stigma usually affixed to the name.’
Rachel Mordecai’s allegation was justified.Edgeworth had
used stereotypically hostile depictions of Jews in three of her most
successful novels for adults,Castle Rackrent(),Belinda()
and The Absentee ().In Castle Rackrent,Thady Quirk,the
garrulous narrator,describes how his master used to call his bride
‘my pretty Jessica’,recalling for the reader the seduced daughter
of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice,and although it is never made
clear whether Kit Rackrent’s wife really is Jewish,she behaves
with all the avariciousness of anti-Semitic stereotype,clinging to
her jewels to the bitter end of her struggle with her unscrupu-
lous husband. Belinda features a character named Solomon,a
Jewish money-lender who takes advantage of a Christian placed
Letter from Rachel Mordecai to Maria Edgeworth, reproduced in Edgar E.
MacDonald (ed.),The Education of the Heart:The Correspondence of Rachel Mordecai
Lazarus and Maria Edgeworth(Chapel Hill:U of North Carolina P,) ,.
Castle Rackrent,ed.Tim McLoughlin,Marilyn Butler and Jane Desmarais,vol.of The
Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth(London:Pickering & Chatto,) .
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at his mercy,Mr Vincent,by driving a hard bargain.Mr Mordicai
in The Absentee is equally unsympathetic:a cunning and ruthless
London coachmaker who threatens a son with the arrest of his
father,who is on his deathbed,if the son does not pay his debts.
As Frank Felsenstein comments,Mr Mordicai’s demand—‘the
bond or the body,before I quit this house’—is an unmistakable
allusion to Shylock’s demand for his ‘pound of flesh’.Because of
this coincidence of names,the Edgeworths at first doubted the
authenticity of Rachel Mordecai’s letter,since,in an attempt to
protect his sister,her brother,who carried the letter across the
Atlantic,had erased all indication of her true identity.
As a consequence of this detail,it has sometimes been supposed
or implied that it was the hostile depictions of Jews in Edgeworth’s
novels for adults—especially in The Absentee—for which she felt
that she had to atone, her conscience pricked by Rachel
Mordecai’s letter.But it is in fact clear that the latter was much
more troubled by the anti-Jewish stereotypes deployed in stories
meant for children,such as ‘The Prussian Vase’and ‘The Good
Aunt’,both in Moral Tales ().Both of these stories feature
greedy,dishonest and vengeful Jewish characters.Edgar Rosenberg
indeed suggests that the plot of ‘The Good Aunt’is deliberately
evoked and revised in Harrington in order to counter the
unfavourable depictions that the earlier story had included.
See Belinda,ed.Kathryn Kirkpatrick (Oxford:Oxford World’s Classics,) .
Frank Felsenstein,Anti-Semitic Stereotypes:A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular
Culture,–(Baltimore & London:Johns Hopkins UP,) .The very
name of Mordecai would have called up the associations of vengefulness and malice
so often linked to stereotypical representations of Jews,of which Shylock is the
English epitome.In the Bible,Mordecai was the favourite and chief minister of King
Ahasuerus,who succeeded Haman,the would-be extirpator of the Jews.Frank
Felsenstein comments of the Biblical Mordecai that ‘[t]he revenge meted out by the
Jews under [him] … against Haman and his supporters,whereby “they put to death
in two days ,of those they were pleased to call their enemies,without either
judge or jury”is evoked as a timely reminder of the resentment and cruelty with
which they may treat others when put in a position of power’(Felsenstein ).
In her next letter to the Edgeworths,written on September ,Rachel Mordecai
tells them that the letter was ‘signed at full length to my letter,but Rachel,as well as
Mordecai,formed so striking a coincidence,that,believing it would give an idea of
my character being an assumed one,my brother erased both’(MacDonald ).
Edgar Rosenberg,From Shylock to Svengali:Jewish Stereotypes in English Fiction
(London:Peter Owen,) –.
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Written to show the ‘advantages of a judicious early education’
upon children and to suggest that ‘previous domestic instruction’
is the necessary moral foundation on which boys sent to public
schools,those ‘large nurseries of youth’,achieve their highest civic
and ethical potential,‘The Good Aunt’tells of the adventures of a
boy, Charles Howard, who overcomes the temptations of
gambling,lying and bullying to become the friend and mentor of
a less fortunate schoolmate,all thanks to his early instruction at the
knee of the eponymous good aunt.He is finally rewarded for his
courage and moral probity,uncovering an attempt to defraud his
aunt of her fortune,a plot in which Mr Carat,a stereotypically
deceitful and unctuous Jewish jeweller,is heavily implicated.Early
moral instruction and good example is thus shown to secure the
future of the family and to ensure the moral safety of the young
Englishman against the corrupting blandishments of bad influ-
ences,particularly those which involve Jews and their supposed
preference for gold above all other less material values.
That Edgeworth herself felt that she had erred in propagating
stereotypes such as these in stories meant for the impressionable
minds of children is clear.Her responding letter spoke of her pain
at recognising the justice of Rachel Mordecai’s mild but firm
reproof,and of her hope that ‘you will sometime see that it has
excited me to make all the atonement and reparation in my
power for the past [….] the candor and spirit of tolerance and
benevolence you shew,you have a right to expect from others.’
The form that this ‘atonement and reparation’ took was
Harrington,which was to appear in June ,together with
Ormond,in a three-volume edition.Edgeworth wrote Harrington
over the autumn of ,finishing her first complete draft by the
last week of November.As the text and its footnotes show,she
had gathered in a formidable range of material on Jews,their
status in Britain and Europe,their struggle for emancipation and
their representation in literature,in a very short time.
Edgeworth’s determination to expose,explore and apologise
Maria Edgeworth,Vol.I.II:Moral Tales,in Tales and Novels(London:Baldwin &
Cradock,–)vi.
Letter from Maria Edgeworth to Rachel Mordecai,August ,in MacDonald .
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for her previous unthinking use of anti-Semitic stereotypes is
given a very public expression in the allusions to her own work
that appear in the sections of her novel dealing with Harrington’s
early life.Michael Ragussis,one of the most acute of the recent
critics of Harrington,remarks upon ‘the special self-reflexive qual-
ity that informs her novel’.Through what is presented to the
reader as Harrington’s own reflections on his noxious early read-
ing,Edgeworth comments that ‘even in modern tales of very late
years’written by ‘authors professing candour and toleration—
books written expressly for the rising generation,called if I
mistake not,Moral Tales for Young People’—even here,‘wher-
ever the Jews are introduced,I find that they are invariably repre-
sented as beings of a mean,avaricious,unprincipled,treacherous
character’. Closely echoing Rachel Mordecai’s own words,
Harrington remarks that these powerfully influential narratives
injure the minds of children,‘confirming … childish prejudice
by what I then thought the indisputable authority of printed
books’.But,as Ragussis points out,‘[i]n the act of reviewing her
role as a reader and a writer of anti-Semitic portraits,[Edgeworth]
was able to recognize a tradition of discourse that she had at once
inherited and perpetuated’. In the analysis of the rich allusive-
ness of the novel which follows,I will argue that Edgeworth
further seeks to replace a corrupt inheritance,the anti-Semitism
of English culture typified in the identification of Jewish men
with Shylock and Jewish women with Jessica,with a vision of a
society which,if still not entirely free of such prejudice,is at least
more open to influences from beyond the established borders
of ‘Englishness’.
Before I go on with this,however,I want to look a little more
at the circumstances surrounding the composition of Harrington.
In a novel that is so preoccupied with the transmission of false
knowledge or error,and with the need to detach oneself from
the immediate influences of family and friends—the known—
in order to replace destructive influences with true knowledge
Michael Ragussis,Figures of Conversion:‘The Jewish Question’and English National
Identity(Durham & London:Duke UP,) .
Harrington,below,
Ragussis .
