Maria Edgeworth and Abolition: Critiquing Character 3031120779, 9783031120770

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Maria Edgeworth and Abolition Critiquing Character

Robin Runia

Maria Edgeworth and Abolition

Robin Runia

Maria Edgeworth and Abolition Critiquing Character

Robin Runia Department of English Xavier University of Louisiana New Orleans, LA, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-12077-0    ISBN 978-3-031-12078-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12078-7 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities Awards for Faculty initiative as well as Xavier University’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Faculty Development Travel funding, through which I was able to examine Maria Edgeworth’s correspondence at the National Library of Ireland. I am especially indebted to the incredibly generous and helpful anonymous reviewers for Studies in Romanticism who read a version of the second chapter.

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Contents

1 Edgeworth and Abolition  1 2 Upstaging  Abolition—Enlightened Hypocrisy in Whim for Whim 23 3 “The Appearance of Virtue”—Reading Abolition in Belinda 43 4 “The Good Aunt”—An Education in Abolition 65 5 Parodic Intervention in “The Grateful Negro” 85 6 Erasing  Slavery in “The Two Guardians” and Harry and Lucy Concluded103 Index119

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About the Author

Robin  Runia  is Professor of English at Xavier University of Louisiana. She is the editor of The Future of Eighteenth-Century Feminist Scholarship: Beyond Recovery (Routledge 2018) and Moral Tales: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Amelia Opie (Broadview 2021). She has published numerous essays and articles exploring gender, sexuality, and race in literature of the long eighteenth century. She is an editor of the Maria Edgeworth Letters Project and editor of the Early Modern Feminisms series with University of Delaware Press.

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CHAPTER 1

Edgeworth and Abolition

In the last two decades, interest in Maria Edgeworth has grown consistently among scholars of literature focused on the long eighteenth century. Susan Manly and Joanna Wharton’s recent guest editing of the special issue “Worlds of Maria Edgeworth” for European Romantic Review testifies to the range of topics available for study in Edgeworth’s work, including but not limited to her relationship to the Scottish Enlightenment, to Irish Romanticism, to Whig politics, to Rousseau and children’s education, to private theatricals, to mechanical and technological innovation, and to the literary canon itself. This issue pays homage to the pioneering work of Marilyn Butler1 in establishing the complexity and range of Edgeworth’s writing and alludes to the deeply contested nature of Edgeworth’s writing and politics. Edgeworth and Abolition offers new readings of Edgeworth’s contributions to abolitionist debate across multiple genres. It pays particular attention to how Edgeworth ironically reworks source material and showcases how attitudes toward slavery and abolition are key to understanding and expressing personal virtue. Maria Edgeworth and Abolition aims to complicate scholarly debate about Edgeworth’s representation of slavery and abolition by demonstrating how in multiple works and in various genres over the course of her career, Edgeworth repeatedly indicts hypocritical 1  Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Runia, Maria Edgeworth and Abolition, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12078-7_1

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and hyperbolic misappropriation of abolitionism. In Edgeworth’s texts, characters’ evaluation of one another’s virtues according to their use and misuse of abolitionist rhetoric necessarily involves taking positions on the ethical and political dimensions of slavery.

Debate Dichotomies The history of scholarly attention to Edgeworth’s “Irish” fiction epitomizes the nature of the ongoing and lively debate surrounding much of her work, specifically according to examination of Edgeworth’s colonial complicity as a member of the Protestant land-owning class.2 Much of this debate has focused on Edgeworth’s narrative technique, with Tom Dunne concluding that Edgeworth uses her narrators to avoid dealing with Irish history and Mitzi Myers deducing that Edgeworth was, instead, highlighting the challenges of writing Irish history.3 Brian Hollingworth has argued that Edgeworth’s Irish fiction reflects her “growing unease concerning [her] ultimate place and legitimacy within Irish society,” and Heidi Kaufman and Chris Fauske’s edited collection entirely focuses on how Edgeworth’s religious, economic, and gender position made her an uncomfortable authority. 4 Cliona O Gallchoir’s Maria Edgeworth: Women, Enlightenment, and Nation has usefully intervened in this debate by considering “the persistent positioning of Edgeworth as a ‘belated’ Enlightenment figure in a Romantic, nineteenth-century Ireland.”5  I return to the work of many of these scholars in subsequent chapters.  Tom Dunne, “Representations of Rebellion: 1798 in Literature,” in Ireland, England, and Australia: Essays in Honour of Oliver MacDonagh, ed. F.B. Smith (Cork: Cork University Press, 1990), 31. Mitzi Myers, “‘Completing the Union ’: Critical Ennui, the Politics of Narrative, and the Reformation of Irish Cultural Identity,” Prose Studies, 18, no. 3 (1995), 41–77. Mitzi Myers, “‘Like the pictures in a magic lantern’: Gender, History, and Edgeworth’s Rebellion Narratives,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 19 (1996), 373–412. See also Mitzi Myers, “Goring John Bull: Maria Edgeworth’s Hibernian high jinks versus the imperialist imaginary,” in James Gill (ed.), Cutting Edges: Postmodern Essays on EighteenthCentury Satire (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 367–94. In this work, Myers complicates Edgeworth’s representation of elite versus popular culture in colonized Ireland. 4  Brian Hollingworth, Maria Edgeworth’s Irish Writing: Language, History, Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), p.  4. Heidi Kaufman and Chris Fauske, eds., An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and Her Contexts (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2004). 5  Cliona O Gallchoir, Maria Edgeworth: Enlightenment, Gender, and Nation (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005), 2. 2 3

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O Gallchoir’s work uncovers how scholars’ attitudes toward Irish nationalism have perpetuated a focus on religious exclusion from the promise of an equal public culture, to the detriment of understanding women’s exclusion from that same promise. These biases in the context of Enlightenment as an ideology that, when viewed through a postcolonial lens, becomes a tool of oppression have prevented scholars from recognizing that Edgeworth’s precarious position as an Irish woman writer enabled her unprecedented authority. Susan Manly follows O Gallchoir’s example to argue that Edgeworth’s Enlightenment intellectual commitments can be read in her representation of Hiberno-English “to reflect the quick-­ thinking wit and invention, the spirit of enquiry, which Edgeworth associates with a progressive modern society.”6 On the other hand, Susan Egenolf examines how Edgeworth’s use of glosses in her Irish fiction “reveals the curious attraction and repulsion, desire and fear that characterize the relation between the colonizer and the colonized.”7 Most recently, Dermot Ryan has argued that Edgeworth’s technologies of fiction serve an imperial imperative.8 Debates about Edgeworth’s feminist credentials have taken a similar form. Audrey Bilger has argued that Edgeworth’s fictions use comedy to fight patriarchy,9 and Julie Nash’s collection New Essays on Maria Edgeworth offers pieces by Mona Narain, Frances R.  Botkin, and Irene BaseyBeesemeyer, exploring Edgeworth’s rejection of women’s sequestration within the domestic sphere and her celebration of women’s community.10 More recently, Anne Chandler has contrasted what she calls the “feminist pessimism” in Edgeworth’s educational writings with that of her novels to complicate claims of Edgeworth’s feminist politics. Meanwhile,

6  Susan Manly, Language, Custom, and Nation in the 1790s: Locke, Tooke, Wordsworth, Edgeworth. (Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing Co.: 2007), 162. 7  Susan Egenolf, The Art of Political Fiction in Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson(Alderson, England: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2009), 72. 8  Dermot Ryan. Technologies of Empire: Writing Imagination, and the Making of Imperial Networks, 1750–1820 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2013). 9  Audrey Bilger, Laughing Feminism: Subversive Comedy in Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998). 10   Julie Nash, ed. New Essays on Maria Edgeworth (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2006).

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Slaney Chadwick Ross argues that Comic Dramas (1817) offers “women a new position of power outside the domestic sphere.”11 Such dichotomies have also characterized scholarly approaches to Edgeworth’s representations of slavery. George Boulukos has argued that Edgeworth’s joining of sentimental abolitionism with paternalism proves her interest in merely ameliorating the practice of slavery.12 Similarly, Alison Harvey concludes that Edgeworth repeats plantocratic fears of slave revolt to maintain domestic femininity.13 In contrast and more recently, Carmen Maria Fernandez Rodriguez concludes that Edgeworth is an “egalitarian writer because the black man is no longer a luxury object or commodity and becomes instrumental to reveal deception and restore social order.”14 Similarly, Conny Cassity determines that Edgeworth may be read as in “defiant opposition to, the horrific legacy of slavery and racial intolerance.”15 Edgeworth and Abolition contributes to this debate by exploring how Edgeworth brought her various readers to consider the relationship between abolitionist professions and behavior by highlighting the importance of the very act of reading that she models in her work. Key to such models is assessing the relationship between reading and the action or inaction it prompted. Edgeworth’s texts present discourses of abolition as sites rife with hypocrisy and inconsistency. Part of this can be attributed to the ubiquity of sentimentality in abolitionist rhetoric that has continued to interest scholars. Markman Ellis’s The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel has  thoroughly established the prevalence of slavery themes within the sentimental novel and explored 11  Anne Chandler, “Maria Edgeworth on Citizenship: Rousseau, Darwin, and Feminist Pessimism in Practical Education. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 35, no. 1 (2016), 93–122. Slaney Chadwick Ross, “Maria Edgeworth’s, The Rose, Thistle, and Shamrock: Symbolic Unification, Women’s Education, and the Marriage Plot.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 55, no. 4 (Winter 2014), 377. 12  George Boulukos, “Maria Edgeworth’s ‘Grateful Negro’ and the Sentimental Argument for Slavery, “Eighteenth-Century Life 23, no 1 (1999), 12–29. 13   Alison Harvey, “West Indian Obeah and English ‘Obee’: Race, Femininity, and Questions of Colonial Consolidation in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” in New Essays on Maria Edgeworth, ed. by Julie Nash (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2006), 1–29. 14  Carmen Maria Fernandez Rodriguez, “Enlightened Deception: An Analysis of Slavery in Maria Edgeworth’s Whim for Whim (1798),” StudiIrlandesi: A Journal of Irish Studies 7 (2017), 258. 15  Conny Cassity, “Caught by the Throat: Anti-Slavery Assemblages in Paul et Virginie and Belinda.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 31, no. 1 (Fall 2018), 115.

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how the spectacle of the suffering slave was frequently used to represent inequality.16 Subsequently, Brycchan Carey in British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility has  detailed Ellis’s general observations about the use of sentimentality by abolitionist and ameliorationists alike according to contemporary rhetorical trends. Carey proves how writers deliberately depicted enslaved suffering to elicit reader sympathy and motivate their own brands of reform.17 Lynn Festa also establishes the slipperiness of sentimental texts in their simultaneous invitation of identification with the enslaved and consolidation of difference.18 Similarly, George Boulukos focuses on the sentimental object of the silent suffering “grateful slave,” identifying it as a dehumanizing trope that reinforced racial stereotypes.19 These observations about the use of sentiment in pro- and antislavery writing register the skepticism with which abolitionist rhetoric—as a real and effective tool of positive social reform—has been and continues to be viewed by scholars of the long eighteenth century. This is even more the case with assessment of women writers’ treatment of slavery. Moira Ferguson has argued that women writers manipulated antislavery discourse in service of their own feminist goals, displacing women’s subjection to patriarchy onto enslaved peoples, thus misrepresenting them.20 Charlotte Sussman, even in her focus on the power of women to protest colonialism and slavery, acknowledges that middle-class British women’s sympathy for enslaved women hinged on the erasure of the historical specificity of their lived experience.21 In addition, Eamon Wright’s British Women Writers and Race extends Ferguson’s work to detail how for women writers, slavery was “a popular and readily hijacked metaphor in late eighteenth-century radical circles.”22 Maria Edgeworth and Abolition 16  Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 17  Brycchan Carey, British Abolition and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery 1760–1807 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 18  Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in England and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). 19  George Boulukos, The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 20  Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834. (New York: Routledge, 1992). 21  Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 22  Eamon Wright, British Women Writers and Race, 1788–1818: Narrations of Modernity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 27.

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argues that Edgeworth was similarly skeptical about the ability of sentimental representations of enslaved suffering to bring about reform and about the appropriation of slavery as metaphor. Edgeworth and Abolition is informed by the efforts of Ramesh Mallipeddi in Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-­ Century British Atlantic to extend the work of previous scholars by considering how works from the Restoration and mid-century engage “spectatorial sympathy acts.”23 Elahe Haschemi Yekani’s Familial Feeling: Entangled Tonalities in Early Black Atlantic Writing and the Rise of the British Novel is also instructive in its description of white and black authors in conversations about the nature of a British identity essentially shaped by colonialism and slavery.24 Yekani is particularly interested in extending discussions of sentiment’s role in constructing identity beyond the eighteenth century into the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Maria Edgeworth and Abolition attends to the work of these scholars, especially in its evaluation of sentiment in discourses of slavery. It too attempts to provide new insights by bringing neglected texts into conversation with those that have earned canonical status, but where Mallipeddi and Yekani enrich the conversation about the relationship between sympathy and slavery in British writing by extending the timeline back- and forward to enlarge the scope, they occlude the complexities of attitudes toward slavery held by men and women of various economic situations and political commitments over a very long eighteenth century. Similarly, Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and its Colonies, 1760–1838, edited by Carey, Ellis, and Sara Salih,25 while offering a wonderful glimpse into the rich complexity of the range of women’s attitudes toward slavery in the late eighteenth century, fails to provide sustained analysis of any one woman’s engagement with the topic. Edgeworth and Abolition breaks new ground in its thorough examination of slavery and abolition in multiple works by one woman writer, offering an unprecedented deep dive into Edgeworth’s work over the course of her career. Significantly, the bulk of Edgeworth’s literary interventions in the debate come after 1792 and Britain’s war with France, a moment before 23  Ramesh Mallipeddi, Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016),6. 24  ElaheHaschemiYekani, Familial Feeling: Entangled Tonalities in Early Black Atlantic and the Rise of the British Novel (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). 25  Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih, eds., Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and its Colonies, 1760–1838, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

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which the influential studies of Festa, Christopher Brown’s Moral Capital (2006), and Srividhya Swaminathan’s Debating the Slave Trade (2009) all focus. Brown’s examination of abolition’s beginnings focuses on early efforts by Thomas Clarkson and others “when antislavery efforts developed cautiously and haphazardly, without unifying purpose or preset goals, before individual initiatives coalesced into a movement.”26 Similarly, Swaminatha’s examination of how abolitionist debates shaped British national identity focuses largely on the period between 1770 and 1792 when “denouncing or advocating the slave trade on legal and moral grounds required a common conceptual framework that appealed to all audiences.”27 This work, plus that of Ellis and Markman on the sentimental or Romantic literary trends of abolitionist debate must consider how after the House of Lords reversed the House of Commons decision in favor of the gradual abolition of the slave trade in 1792, the abolitionist movement that had taken shape in the second half of the century stalled. New voices and narratives replaced those of Olaudah Equiano and William Wilberforce. The similarities and differences between Edgeworth’s work that emerge upon comparison with those new voices and narratives that emerged between 1792 and the 1807 passing of The Slave Trade Abolitionist Act are significant for extending our understanding of shifting abolitionist discourses and methods. Edgeworth’s texts join those of Charlotte Smith and William Earle, for example, in representing “little hope of resolving the growing tension between the enslaved and the planters” without the will of Parliament.28 Smith’s The Story of Henrietta, first published in 1800 as the second volume of The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer represents the gothic brutality of Jamaican slavery. In it, Henrietta, daughter of a planter but educated in England, is separated from her fiancée during travel to the Caribbean. She, and the other two English narrators throughout focus on the “horror and anxiety experienced … when confronted with the atrocities of slavery and the revolts provoked by it.”29 Similarly and published that same year, Obi or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack, by William Earle 26  Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 2. 27  Srividhya Swaminathan, Debating the Slave Trade: Rhetoric of British National Identity, 1759–1815 (New York: Routledge 2009), 5. 28  Janine Nordius, “Introduction,” The Story of Henrietta, Charlotte Smith. Valancourt Books, 2012, xxxi. 29  Nordius, “Introduction,” xxxi.

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relates through the letters of George Stanford in Jamaica to his friend Charles in England a narrative focused on the historical figure Jack Mansong and presenting a sentimental tale of Jack’s vow to avenge the capture and enslavement of his parents and the death of his father. Despite these works’ new and deepened expression of horror at the failure of British abolition in the wake of the Haitian revolution, they epitomize what Srinivas Aravamudan calls the “generic containment of sentimentalist abolitionism.”30Edgeworth and Abolition examines how Edgeworth’s works push against this containment.

Formative Scene We know from Edgeworth’s biography and correspondence that she was extremely cognizant of and informed about slavery and abolitionism. In early 1792, at the age of twenty-five, Maria Edgeworth, with her family, visited Bristol, a town whose infamy and prosperity was inextricably linked to the triangle trade. In October of that year she also visited a slave ship. Edgeworth’s brother Richard, staying with the family since summer of that year was likely her guide.31 After leaving the city and arriving in London, she wrote to her cousin Sophy Ruxton about this visit: Before I left Clifton I had a budget in my head for a letter to you, which I really had not a moment’s time to write. … I find in half-rubbed-out notes in my pocket-book, ‘Sophy—Slave-ship: Sophy—Rope-walk—Glass-Marine acid: Sophy—Earthquake: Sophy—Glass-house,’ etc.: and I intended to tell you au longue of these. We went on board a slave-ship with my brother, and saw the dreadfully small hole in which the poor slaves are stowed together, so that they cannot stir. But probably you know all this.32

While in this letter Edgeworth admitted to a lag between witnessing the slave ship and recording her thoughts about it, her peculiar repetition of her cousin’s name in between mention of each of the related topics she 30  Srinivas Aravamudan, “Introduction,” Obi or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack, William Earle, (Peterborough: Broadview, 2005), 50. 31  Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 106. 32   Maria Edgeworth, “To Sophy Ruxton,” (October 17, 1792), 10,166/7/98, in Edgeworth Papers, National Library of Ireland.

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planned to discuss suggests the details had been seared into her memory despite being “half-rubbed-out” in her pocket. Her additional mention of the “Rope-walk,” referring to the long tree-lined ropewalk serving Wapping Wharf, and “Glass-Marine acid” reiterate her concern with the city’s great dependence upon slaving ships for its prosperity. Further, her uncomfortable elaboration of the dimensions of the slave ship’s hold, contrasting with her extreme brevity about the dreadful conditions suffered by the “poor slaves,” and combined with her own observation’s dismissal according to her cousin’s presumed previous knowledge suggest Edgeworth was more than a little unsettled by the experience. Finally, Edgeworth’s assertion to Sophy that “you probably know all this” reflects succinctly the massive public interest in the abolition of slavery that had swept Britain by 1792. On October 17, 1792, Edgeworth also wrote Sophy: HaveyouseenanyofthethingsthathavebeenlatelypublishedabouttheNegroes— We have just read a very small pamphlet of about ten pages, merely an account of the facts stated to the H[ouse] of Commons. I wish you could see it—tho’ indeed the cruelties are so extremely shock[ing] that it cannot do the mind good to hear of them, only so far as it tends to excite universal indignation against slave-captains & the slave trade…33

Susan Manly has speculated that Edgeworth may be referring here to A Short Sketch of the Evidence for Abolition of the Slave Trade (1792) as Manly sees in it details reflected in Edgeworth’s “The Grateful Negro.”34 But Edgeworth may also be referring to A Summary of the Evidence Produced Before a Committee of the House of Commons Relating to the Slave Trade (1792). This pamphlet summarizes the evidence Thomas Clarkson had begun gathering since 1787  in order to petition Parliament to end the trade, and in it the testimony of Quakoo—chaplain at the Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast—describes the British acquisition of slaves from Africa, the conditions of the Middle Passage, and the mechanics of sale upon arrival in the West Indies. Alexander Falconbridge presented Quakoo’s evidence to the Members of Parliament, a fact that may have 33  Quoted in Susan Manly, “Intertextuality, Slavery, and Abolition in Maria Edgeworth’s ‘The Good Aunt,’ and ‘The Grateful Negro,’ Essays in Romanticism 20 (2013), 19–21. Manly corrects the text of Augustus J. C. Hare’s Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth through consultation with the MS in the National Library of Ireland, Edgeworth Papers. Augustus Hare, The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, 2 Vols. (London: 1894). 34  Susan Manly, “Intertextuality, Slavery, and Abolition.”

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inspired the name of Edgeworth’s Black character, Quaco, in Whim for Whim and, later, “The Two Guardians” (1817). By the time of Edgeworth’s stay in Bristol, close family friends had also published abolitionist and antislavery works that she had read, including Thomas Day’s “The Dying Negro” (1773) and Erasmus Darwin’s “The Botanic Garden” (1791).35 As the subsequent chapters will detail,  Edgeworth’s editorial notes and allusions throughout her career prove she read other abolitionist and antislavery writing including John More’s Zeluco (1789) and August von Kotzebue’s The Negro Slaves (1796) as well as works detailing colonial slavery including Bryan Edwards’s The History, Civil and Commercial of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1793) and Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782).36

Authorial Intervention The delight Edgeworth personally took in novel reading has been frequently noted by critics since Marilyn Butler recorded how Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791) was one of Edgeworth’s favorites.37 Butler also describes how Edgeworth based Belinda on Frances Burney’s Cecilia (1782).38 Nevertheless, Edgeworth was forever concerned about the excesses novels might inculcate in readers. In a letter to her friend Fanny Robinson, she wrote: “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.”39 Her first publication Letters for Literary Ladies(1795) reflects Edgeworth’s deep skepticism of the sentimental form. In it, in “Letters of Julia and Caroline,” she sentences Julia to death for the emotional excesses and infidelity inspired by her fiction reading. Sadly, Julia ignores her friend Caroline’s warning: But I must not, you tell me, indulge my taste for romance and poetry, lest I waste that sympathy on fiction which reality so much better deserves. My 35  Edgeworth mentions “The Dying Negro” in Belinda (1801) and “The Botanic Garden” in “The Good Aunt” (1801). 36  Edgeworth mentions Zelucoin Belinda (1801), The Negro Slaves and The Histories in “The Grateful Negro” (1804), and Letters in “The Good Aunt” (1801). 37  Butler, Maria Edgeworth, p. 315. 38  Butler, Maria Edgeworth, p. 309. 39  Quoted in Clair Connolly, “Introduction,” in Letters for Literary Ladies (London: Everyman, 1993), xxiii.

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dear friend, let us cherish the precious propensity to pity! No matter what the object; sympathy with fiction or reality arises from the same disposition.40

Eventually, Julia learns her lesson, fortunate only that Caroline is able to adopt her illegitimate child. Edgeworth again warns her readers against sentimental literature in “Angelina” of Moral Tales for Young People (1801). “Angelina” follows its eponymous heroine to a Welsh cottage and Bristol in search of her favorite sentimental novelist. The tale concludes: As for our heroine, under the friendly and judicious care of Lady Frances Somerset, she acquired that which is more useful to the possessor than genius—good sense. Instead of rambling over the world in search of an unknown friend, she attached herself to those of whose worth she received proofs more convincing than a letter of three folio sheets, stuffed with sentimental nonsense. In short, we have now, in the name of Angelina Warwick, the pleasure to assure all those whom it may concern, that it is possible for a young lady of sixteen to cure herself of the affectation of sensibility, and the folly of romance.41

Edgeworth, in replacing Angelina’s guardian, Lady Diana Chillingworth, with Lady Somerset provides commentary on those parents who spend too much time in fashionable company and not enough time monitoring their children’s reading habits. Again, in Leonora (1806) Edgeworth dramatizes the potential for sentimental romance readers to ruin lives other than their own when Leonora invites her friend  Olivia for an extended visit. Olivia’s propensity for German and French novel reading encourages her to pursue an affair with Leonora’s husband. Fortunately, after Leonora’s stress-induced miscarriage, not even Olivia’s threatened suicide can prevent the married couple’s reconciliation. Isabelle Bour has read this as Edgeworth’s response to Germaine de Stael’s Delphine (1802) and a rejection of its dangerous sensibility.42 Maria Edgeworth and Abolition demonstrates how Edgeworth’s concerns about excessive sentiment extend to its role in abolitionist discourse. Edgeworth’s concerns about sentimental novels are not only reflected in her carefully constructed plots. They are also reflected in her application  Maria Edgeworth, Letters for Literary Ladies (London: Everyman, 1993), 40.  Maria Edgeworth, “Angelina,” Moral Tales for Young People, Vol. 2 (London: 1801), 255. 42  Isabelle Bour, “What Maria Learned: Maria Edgeworth and Continental Fiction,” Women’s Writing 18, no. 1 (2011), 34–49. 40 41

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of satirical technique. The two other selections making up Letters for Literary Ladies exemplify her extensive use of parody to illustrate her views on women’s education. In “Letter from a Gentleman to His Friend Upon the Birth of a Daughter,” Edgeworth parodies her father’s friend Thomas Day and the selfish and logically inconsistent misogyny that would deny women’s intellectual equality. “An Essay on the Noble Science of Self-­ Justification” ironically invokes the misogynistic stereotype of women’s “natural genius for the invaluable art of self-justification” in a parody of scientific reasoning to illustrate the perversion of fact by prejudice.43 Similarly in Belinda (1801), as numerous critics have observed, Edgeworth provides the infamous Lady Delacour as a satirical commentary on the conflict between domestic maternity and fashionable excesses even as Lady Delacour herself provides satirical commentary on the other character’s sociable failures.44 Similarly, in Ennui, from Tales of Fashionable Life (1809), Edgeworth caricatures the hypochondriac to argue on behalf of a professional masculinity congruent with domestic values.45 Additionally, Castle Rackrent (1800), An Essay on Irish Bulls (1802), and The Absentee (1812) all feature unstable narrative voice and caricature, although, as mentioned earlier, critics do not agree on the interpretive effect of these satiric elements within the Irish colonial context. Maria Edgeworth and Abolition considers how Edgeworth frequently relied on satirical technique to revise discussions of slavery and abolition. Recognizing Edgeworth’s contributions to the history of satire by women writers of the long eighteenth century also extends our understanding of her importance to feminist and gender studies scholarship of the period, and it furthers the work of Amanda Hiner and Elizabeth Tasker Davis in British Women Satirists in the Long Eighteenth Century. Not only 43  Robin Runia, “Edgeworth’s Letters for Literary Ladies: Publication Peers and Analytical Antagonist,” in “A Tribe of Authoresses”: Women’s Literary Networks and Romanticism, eds. Andrew Winckles and Angela Rehbein (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2017), 226–244. Bour argues that Leonora is also a parody of the anonymous Memoires de Seraphine(1802) and Madame de Vile’s Adolphe et Zenobie (1803). 44  David Francis Taylor argues that Lady Delacour’s caricaturing of Mrs. Luttridge engages her in a masculine cultural practice underlining her transgression of polite femininity and highlighting the problematic association of women with the body. David Francis Taylor, “Edgeworth’s Belinda and the Gendering of Caricature,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 26, no. 4 (Summer 2014), 593–624. 45  Robin Runia, “‘A man must make himself’: Hypochondria in Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui,” in The Male Body in Medicine and Literature, ed. Andrew Mangham and Daniel Lea (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2018), 137–56.

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does this edited collection insist on correcting long-repeated narratives nominating satire a masculine genre, but it also extends the definition of satire beyond formal verse inherited from the classical tradition. Their definition is a useful starting place to think about Edgeworth’s satirical shaping of abolitionist debate: “More inclusively, we define satire as any written performance of imaginative witty, and pointed social critique purposefully delivered from an exaggerated, absurd, and (often ironic) stance.”46 Their claim that the British Enlightenment was an era “in which the identities of satirist and woman could naturally converge in their roles as social critics and moral exemplars”  articulates a central claim of Edgeworth and Abolition.47 However, where Hiner and Davis see satire as a tool of “indirection” that corresponds to the period’s “alignment of femininity with politeness,” we will see how  Edgeworth uses satire as a direct challenge to polite society’s prohibition against conflict. This also means that we must add to Hiner and Davis’s “three key categories” of women’s satiric innovation in the period. While their collection attends to the tendencies of women writers in the: “(1) the ventriloquizing of recognized authors and styles of the satiric tradition, (2) the reverse gendering of masculine satiric personas, metaphors, and devices, and (3) the creative act of feminine-centric invention,” Edgeworth’s contributions can be understood entirely differently.48 She does not rely on the authority of male precedent, nor does she confine herself to “satiric treatment of feminine topoi that distinctly address women’s unique concerns, such as the ethics of female sociability, sexuality, domesticity, and professional access.”49 Instead, Edgeworth’s satiric interventions in sentimental discourses of abolition function as proto-feminist arguments about the intensely personal and domestic nature of global politics.

Methodology and Organization Edgeworth and Abolition examines the role of slavery and its relationship to character in multiple works by considering its relationship to plot, character development, and allusion. It is inspired by Caroline Levine’s recognition that “literary forms participate in a destabilizing relation to social 46  Amanda Hiner and Elizabeth Tasker Davis, “Introduction: Recognizing British Women’s Satire,” British Women Satirists in the Long Eighteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, 2022, 3–4. 47  Hiner and Davis, British Women Satirists, 4. 48  Hiner and Davis, British Women Satirists, 11. 49  Hiner and Davis, British Women Satirists, 11.

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formations, often colliding with social hierarchies, rather than reflecting or foreshadowing them. Literary forms, that is, trouble and remake political relationships in surprising aleatory, and often confusingly, disorderly ways.”50 Edgeworth and Abolition relies on historical contextualization of Edgeworth’s generic experimentation and intertextual allusion. Rather than perpetuate the colonial/anticolonial, feminist/anti-feminist, even racist/anti-racist dichotomies that have dominated the field, Maria Edgeworth and Abolition emphasizes the fact that characters fitting all of these descriptions can be found in Edgeworth’s work and emerge in formal contexts rendering them variously oppressive and liberatory. Nevertheless, this book highlights how Edgeworth’s use of absurdity, irony, parody, and caricature targets her audience’s knowledge of abolitionist discourse to expose the disconnect between those espousing sentimental abolitionist beliefs and the moral will necessary for social change. Thus, the chapters each focus on a primary Edgeworth text, according to Edgeworth’s chronological engagement within the unfolding politics of slavery. I contextualize each according to Edgeworth’s discussions of the works in her private correspondence and the intertextual allusion mentioned therein, as well as in the primary literary works under consideration. In the case of the tales, I also take care to examine them as part of the multi-volume collections in which they appear. Each chapter considers Edgeworth’s generic aims for each piece as a novel, tale, play, or educational text according to her intended audience. Chapter 2 considers Whim for Whim (1798), a work written for home theatrical performance and not published in Edgeworth’s lifetime. In this chapter, I argue that in the play, as in her other works, Edgeworth carefully “contemplat[es] political questions of justice and social progress” through allusion and intertextuality.51 This chapter establishes Edgeworth’s literary aspirations for the dramatic form. After detailing Edgeworth’s previous experimentation with drama and satiric technique as a form of social commentary, I focus on the play’s juxtaposition of the emancipated slave Quaco with her parody of Illuminatism. Edgeworth’s acknowledged source text, John Robison’s Proofs of Conspiracy provides the foundation for an examination of the play’s indictment of hypocrisy in characters’ 50  Caroline Levine, “Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies,” Victorian Studies 48, no. 4(Summer 2006), 627. 51  Susan Manly, “Introduction,” Selected Tales for Children and Young People (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. xxvii.

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claims to enlightenment. I highlight the specific language and detail Edgeworth drew from Robison to sharpen her critique, and I prove how, in juxtaposing the hypocrisy of fashionable elites with the real enslaved suffering of Quaco and emphasizing it through stylized performance and specific stage-direction, Edgeworth identifies one way in which discussion of abolition can function as a test of character. Specifically, by crafting the character of Quaco according to the comic model set by Charles Dibdin’s and Isaac Bickerstaff’s The Padlock (1768) and contrasting it with a black-­ faced harlequin played by the emancipating Opal, Edgeworth questions the efficacy of sympathy in abolitionist activism. I conclude that Edgeworth’s Whim for Whim demands a much more complicated definition of what makes an abolitionist text than that offered by Brycchan Carey. Instead of a simple “declaration of anti-slavery” and “call for the institution to be abolished,” Whim for Whim insists we consider the authenticity of and motives for the antislavery declarations made by certain individuals in certain situations. It asks us to consider whose interests are taken seriously and pursued in repeated calls to abolish slavery. It presents us with a figure that trades slavery for new kinds of racist persecution and prejudice. I am arguing here that none of these complications undeniably prove Edgeworth supported an end to the slave trade, better treatment of slaves, emancipation, or none of the above. Ultimately, however, they do prove that Edgeworth remained interested in interrogating the complex roles of race, class, and gender in revolutionary thought and action and in the opportunities for doing so offered by literary form and convention. Maria Edgeworth’s Whim for Whim represents abolitionist discourse as the lens through which we may see the failures of Enlightenment, the gap between intention and action. Chapter 3 nuances the critical discussion of Edgeworth’s deliberate critique of the manners and morals of fashionable courtship in Belinda (1801) by considering its relationship to abolitionist discourse. Specifically, I argue that Edgeworth anticipates current scholarly critiques of sentimental abolitionist rhetoric in order to present discussions of slavery as a litmus test of characters’ virtue, simultaneously highlighting the anti-intellectual nature of sentiment and, in its most elite and cultivated of forms, taste disconnected from corresponding rational action or reform. First, I establish that in her allusions to John Moore’s Zeluco, Edgeworth acknowledges the political inefficacy of sentimental abolitionism. I go on to demonstrate how Belinda chooses her suitors according to their ability to act in accordance with what they supposedly think and feel about slavery.

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I first provide a close reading of the novel’s discussion of Thomas Day’s “The Dying Negro” (1773) within the context of Lady Delacour’s manipulation of Belinda’s courtship with Mr. Vincent. Then I describe the taste Clarence Hervey shows in his appreciation for sentimental abolitionism according to the novel’s invocation of James Keir’s critical biography of the poem’s author, An Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Day, Esq. (1791). I detail how in this incident, Hervey’s abolitionist sentiments are compared to the cruelties of Day’s attempt to create the perfect wife by adopting two foundling girls. Belinda’s restraint at this moment read alongside her satiric commentary about Vincent’s “Juba, the man or Juba, the dog” faux pas reflects her careful assessment of her suitors according to discussion of slavery and abolition. I then perform a close reading of Hervey’s relationship with Virginia as a manifestation of plantocratic fantasies that indict the sentimental discourses of slavery for their objectifying tendencies. I also argue that through the character of Mr. Hartley, Virginia’s planter father, the end of the novel reinforces the fact that sentimentality in discussions of slavery only poorly masks the greedy self-­ interest driving British slave trading and slave holding, and reveals a lack of character and principled virtue. I then focus on the fact that Hervey’s accompanying Captain Sunderland to the West Indies defers his expected marriage with Belinda beyond the last page of the novel and suggests the need for Hervey’s reform corresponding to the moral vacuity undergirding his appreciation for abolitionist sentiment. The chapter concludes by analyzing how the 1810 revision of one specific passage crucially negates (published after the 1807 end of British legal involvement in slave trading) the important critique of slavery Belinda explicitly offers in the 1801 and 1802 editions. Chapter 4 analyzes “The Good Aunt” from Moral Tales for Young People (1801) according to its situation within the three-volume collection. While the tale similarly fails to prove that Edgeworth was interested in either ending the slave trade, abolishing slavery, or merely ameliorating its practice, it does establish that Edgeworth believed the attitudes and behaviors necessary to the tyrannies of slavery could be blamed upon failures of English childhood education. It begins by drawing attention to Edgeworth’s knowledge of extant abolitionist children’s literature including Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose for Children (1781) and Lessons for Children (1779, 1787, and 1788) as well as Thomas Day’s novel Sandford and Merton (1783–1789). It then traces discussions of slavery and race through each of the tales surrounding “The Good Aunt,”

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including “Mademoiselle Panache, “The Prussian Vase,” “Forrester,” and “Angelina.” I also detail how “The Good French Governess” features a scene of children reading Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), a work in which they would have encountered Smith’s indictment of British slave trading. The argument then turns to focus on the negative examples of poor parenting in the tale and their relationship to racist bullying. Edgeworth contrasts the tyrannical Augustus with the Jamaican creole Oliver to challenge prejudices against Jamaicans like those represented in Bryan Edwards’s History of the West Indies (1792). Through the relationship between these characters, Edgeworth explores the failures of English childhood education, especially those of boys’ public schools, according to the language of slavery. In contrast, she offers the example of Mrs. Howard and her nephew Charles. Not only does Mrs. Howard’s education of Charles fulfill Edgeworth’s commitments as outlined in Practical Education (1798), the boy’s abolitionist reading and writing enable him to become the savior and champion of Oliver. Discussion of this reading’s largely neglected intertexts, including Letters from an American Farmer (1782) and Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia (1794–1796), considers the tale’s presentation of a post-slavery Britain according to enlarged domestic responsibilities. Specifically, Mrs. Howard’s sale of her Jamaican plantation and emancipation of those it enslaved combined with the reunification of Mrs. Howard with the emancipated Cuba suggest domestic relationships can remedy the injustices of slavery only if English education is reformed accordingly. Oliver’s improved education enables him to bring about this reunion. The tale tells its young readers that while they cannot choose their parents or their parenting methods, they can recognize the debts they owe others as evidence of our shared humanity. Racism might try to excuse slavery, but it can never justify it. Racism is learned, and it can be unlearned. Slavery depends upon the education of children in tyranny. Chapter 5 offers a radical new reading of “The Grateful Negro” (1804) according to its situation within Popular Tales, a collection intended for the working class. The argument begins by detailing Edgeworth’s aims according to the collection’s preface by Richard Lovell Edgeworth and according to her own correspondence. A letter of Edgeworth’s to her Aunt Ruxton makes clear her faith in a reading audience above the simplistic “trite mottoes” added to each by printer J. Johnson’s corrector of the press. I then trace invocations of slavery in two of the collection’s other tales, “Lame Jervis” and “The Manufactures.” After establishing how

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these tales encourage readers to form their own views about slavery and abolition, I consider how Edgeworth’s use of irony in “Murad, the Unlucky” demands her readers do so with a keen eye for hypocritical inconsistency. This premise leads to my close reading of August von Kotzebue’s The Negro Slaves (translated 1796). Observing the parodic similarity of Edgeworth’s tale to Kotzebue’s unstageable plot highlights Edgeworth’s skepticism regarding the efficacy of sentimental abolitionist discourse. Edgeworth’s acknowledgment of this intertext, with its dedication to William Wilberforce and the characterization of its ineffectual abolitionist William, highlights the failure of sentimental abolitionism to move political will since Wilberforce’s 1792 abolitionist campaigns and the publication of Edgeworth’s text. I next detail how Edgeworth’s tale conspicuously avoids the pity-provoking violence of Kotzebue’s play to highlight the flawed and contradictory logic of her tale’s planters. I suggest that Edgeworth’s intended non-elite audience would not have found these ameliorationist arguments persuasive and how they, instead, encourage an ironic reading of the tale’s title. Additional close reading of the tale’s presentation of Hector’s persuasive harangue of the supposedly exemplary Caesar, especially in light of the tale’s ending, calls for a reevaluation of the relationship between slavery and justice. After detailing how Hector’s heroism functions as another parodic inversion, this time of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), I contrast the endings of the two texts focusing on Edgeworth’s definition of justice with Hector’s pardon and its precarity with Edwards’s naivete. I also consider this definition within the context of the other tales, and I finally consider its situation within the collection. I conclude that, situated as it is before “Tomorrow,” the final tale of the collection and one that examines the dangers of procrastination, Edgeworth’s “The Grateful Negro” encourages an assessment of the dangers of merely ameliorated slavery and delayed emancipation of enslaved people. Chapter 6 considers two works that Edgeworth wrote after the 1807 end of legal British slave trading: “The Two Guardians” (1817) and Harry and Lucy Concluded (1825). I argue that in contrast to her earlier representations of slavery highlighting how abolitionist discourse functions in character assessment to expose hypocrisy and tyranny, “The Two Guardians”’s representation of slavery hinges on a failed fantasy of British ethnic, economic, and racial unity. I argue, specifically, that Edgeworth’s 1817 revival of the character Quaco and the outdated methods of staging racial difference that she employed in 1798 failed to complicate

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pro-­planter representations of slavery. I first consider Edgeworth’s inspiration by a hitherto unacknowledged source text—Richard Dallas’s History of the Maroons (1803) and its revision of Bryan Edwards’s chronicle of the 1760 Tacky Rebellion. I then detail how while the play does link villainy to racism through characterization and use of detail to subtly allude to the ongoing horrors of the slavery still practised in Britain’s West Indian colonies, without Whim for Whim’s provocative contrast between hypocritical reformers and the suffering of a formerly enslaved Black boy, Quaco’s moral exemplarity proves irrelevant. Its resonance with the sentimental ameliorationist tactics of Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian (1777) undermines its situation within the unionist context of the other two plays in Comic Dramas, “Love and Law” and “The Rose, Thistle, and Shamrock.” Through close reading of Edgeworth’s correspondence about the volume, I also demonstrate that Edgeworth seems to have understood that her simplistic invocation of slavery and abolition undermined the play’s fantasy of racial harmony. This evidence, combined with contemporaneous reviews help explain the fact that when Edgeworth mentions slavery in Harry and Lucy Concluded (1825), she almost entirely avoids the painful realities of slavery, emphasizing instead technological innovation and mechanization. Through close reading of Edgeworth’s representation of Bristol’s sugar manufacturing, I establish that discussions of slavery no longer functioned as sites for character analysis. While Edgeworth’s correspondence also proves her ongoing personal interest in slavery after abolition of British involvement in the trade, Edgeworth’s final published representation of slavery and abolition suggests that dramatic and didactic discussion of slavery and abolition proved irrelevant to people who had, after 1807, washed their hands of their complicity with its injustices.

Bibliography Aravamudan, Srinivas. “Introduction,” Obi or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack, byWilliam Earle, 1–50. Peterborough: Broadview, 2005. Bilger, Audrey. Laughing Feminism: Subversive Comedy in Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998. Boulukos, George. The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-­ Century British and American Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Boulukos, George. “Maria Edgeworth’s ‘Grateful Negro’ and the Sentimental Argument for Slavery,” Eighteenth-Century Life 23, no. 1 (1999): 12–29.

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Bour, Isabelle. “What Maria Learned: Maria Edgeworth and Continental Fiction,” Women’s Writing 18, no. 1 (2011): 34–49. Brown, Christopher Leslie. Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Butler, Marilyn Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. Carey, Brycchan. British Abolition and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery 1760–1807. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Carey, Brycchan, Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih, eds. Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and its Colonies, 1760–1838. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Cassity, Conny. “Caught by the Throat: Anti-Slavery Assemblages in Paul et Virginie and Belinda.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 31, no. 1 (Fall 2018): 99–115. Chandler, Anne. “Maria Edgeworth on Citizenship: Rousseau, Darwin, and Feminist Pessimism in Practical Education. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 35, no. 1 (2016): 93–122. Connolly, Clair. “Introduction,” in Letters for Literary Ladies, xvi-xxvi.London: Everyman, 1993. Dunne, Tom. “Representations of Rebellion: 1798  in Literature.” In Ireland, England, and Australia: Essays in Honour of Oliver MacDonagh, edited by. F.B. Smith. Cork: Cork University Press, 1990. Edgeworth, Maria. “Angelina,” In Moral Tales for Young People, Vol. 2. London: 1801. Edgeworth, Maria. Edgeworth Papers. National Library of Ireland. Edgeworth, Maria. Letters for Literary Ladies. London: Everyman, 1993. Egenolf, Susan. The Art of Political Fiction in Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson. Alderson, England: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2009. Ellis, Markman The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Ferguson, Moira. Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834. New York: Routledge, 1992. Festa, Lynn Sentimental Figures of Empire in England and France. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Hare, Augustus. The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, 2 Vols. London: 1894. Harvey, Alison. “West Indian Obeah and English ‘Obee’: Race, Femininity, and Questions of Colonial Consolidation in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.” In New Essays on Maria Edgeworth, edited by Julie Nash, 1–29. Burlington: Ashgate Press, 2006. Hiner, Amanda and Elizabeth Tasker Davis. “Introduction: Recognizing British Women’s Satire.” In British Women Satirists in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1-25. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.

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Hollingworth, Brian. Maria Edgeworth’s Irish Writing: Language, History, Politics. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 1997. Kaufman, Heidi and Chris Fauske, eds. An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and Her Contexts. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004. Levine, Caroline “Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies,” Victorian Studies 48, no. 4(Summer 2006): 625–57. Mallipeddi, Ramesh. Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-­ Century British Atlantic. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016. Manly, Susan. Language, Custom, and Nation in the 1790s: Locke, Tooke, Wordsworth, Edgeworth. Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2007. Manly, Susan “Intertextuality, Slavery, and Abolition in Maria Edgeworth’s ‘The Good Aunt,’ and ‘The Grateful Negro,’ Essays in Romanticism 20 (2013): 19–36. Myers, Mitzi. “Completing the Union,’: Critical Ennui, the Politics of Narrative, and the Reformation of Irish Cultural Identity,” Prose Studies, 18, no. 3 (1995a): 41–77. Myers, Mitzi. “‘Like the pictures in a magic lantern’: Gender, History, and Edgeworth’s Rebellion Narratives,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 19 (1996): 373–412. Myers, Mitzi “Goring John Bull: Maria Edgeworth’s Hibernian high jinks versus the imperialist imaginary.” In Cutting Edges: Postmodern Essays on Eighteenth-­ Century Satire edited by James Gill, 367–94. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1995b. Nash, Julie, ed. New Essays on Maria Edgeworth. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2006. Nordius, Janine “Introduction.” In The Story of Henrietta by Charlotte Smith, i– xxxi. St. Louis: Valancourt Books, 2012. O Gallchoir, Cliona. Maria Edgeworth: Enlightenment, Gender, and Nation. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005. Rodriguez, Carmen Maria Fernandez “Enlightened Deception: An Analysis of Slavery in Maria Edgeworth’s Whim for Whim (1798),” StudiIrlandesi: A Journal of Irish Studies 7 (2017): 243–260. Ross, Slaney Chadwick. “Maria Edgeworth’s, The Rose, Thistle, and Shamrock: Symbolic Unification, Women’s Education, and the Marriage Plot.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 55, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 377–390. Runia, Robin. “Edgeworth’s Letters for Literary Ladies: Publication Peers and Analytical Antagonist.” In “A Tribe of Authoresses”: Women’s Literary Networks and Romanticism, edited by Andrew Winckles and Angela Rehbein, 226–244. Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2017. Runia, Robin “’A man must make himself’: Hypochondria in Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui.” In The Male Body in Medicine and Literature, edited by Andrew Mangham and Daniel Lea, 137–56. Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2018.

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Ryan, Dermot. Technologies of Empire: Writing Imagination, and the Making of Imperial Networks, 1750–1820. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2013. Sussman, Charlotte Consuming Anxieties: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Swaminathan, Srividhya. Debating the Slave Trade: Rhetoric of British National Identity, 1759–1815. New York: Routledge 2009. Taylor, David Francis. “Edgeworth’s Belinda and the Gendering of Caricature,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 26, no. 4 (Summer 2014): 593–624. Wright, Eamon. British Women Writers and Race, 1788-1818: Narrations of Modernity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Yekani, ElaheHaschemi. Familial Feeling: Entangled Tonalities in Early Black Atlantic and the Rise of the British Novel. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.

CHAPTER 2

Upstaging Abolition—Enlightened Hypocrisy in Whim for Whim

After Edgeworth’s encounter with the horrors of a British slave ship, British abolitionist voices were largely drowned out by the nationalist fervor provoked by the French Revolution, despite France’s abolition of slavery in all of it territories in 1794. Further, the death of Olaudah Equiano in March of 1797 occasioned the loss of one of the abolitionist movement’s most compelling figures. Equiano had visited Ireland upon the 1791 publication of a Dublin edition of his Interesting Narrative. During his subsequent time in Belfast, he stayed with Samuel Neilson, whose paper the Northern Star represented the United Irishman movement and espoused abolition. Marilyn Butler’s analysis of Edgeworth’s later Essay on Irish Bulls (1802) has established the work as “a gesture of intellectual solidarity” with Neilson’s cause following the government’s shutting down of his paper.1 Whim for Whim shows Edgeworth espousing this solidarity four years earlier; her Whim for Whim mocks an Enlightened Britain that continues to condone enslavement. Edgeworth wrote the play to be performed at her home by her family in Edgeworthtown, County Longford, Ireland in 1798. The play is a comedy satirizing Illuminatism and features the 1784–1785 Affaire du collier de la reine, “Affair of the Queen’s Necklace,” in which Marie Antoinette 1  Marilyn Butler, “Edgeworth, the United Irishmen, and ‘More Intelligent Treason,” in Heidi Kaufman and Chris Fauske, eds., An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and Her Contexts, University of Delaware Press, 2004, 34.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Runia, Maria Edgeworth and Abolition, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12078-7_2

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was implicated in a scheme to defraud the Crown’s jewelers. Set in London, the tangled plot follows the schemes of Count Babelhausen to break up a love intrigue between Sir Mordent Idem and Mrs. Fangle. In order to secure Fangle’s fortune for himself, Babelhausen employs a French maid, Mademoiselle Fanfarlouche, and a servant, Felix. Unbeknownst to Fangle, her fortune has already been lost by a villainous stock broker. Significantly, Fangle, as her name implies, is interested in all the newest fads, as is a Mr. Opal. From the moment the play opens, both are obsessed with Illuminatism. Meanwhile, Opal’s uncle, Sir Mordent Idem objects to his ward, Caroline’s attraction to his nephew. Mordent refuses to consent to their union until Opal adopts a profession. Opal, however, refuses to marry Caroline unless she gives up her large fortune to the cause of Illuminatism. When Babelhausen finds out about Fangle’s lost fortune, he next targets Caroline, trying to convince Opal that Fangle, as another Illuminati, is a better match for him. The comedy’s denouement occurs during a masquerade allegorizing the play’s central conflict between tradition and progress through the costumes of Mordent and Fangle: Mordent going as Sir Charles Grandison and Fangle as a “Roman Matron, a Savage, and a Sultana.”2 Mordent is scandalized by Fangle’s trousers, and she is revolted by his old-fashioned wig. A fortunate costume switch exposes all of Babelhausen’s scheming. Mordent proposes to Fangle, Opal agrees to court Caroline, and all pledge to follow “commonsense” (384). Quaco—a young boy, Opal’s servant, and a formerly enslaved person—observes all of this action from the sidelines, discovering Felix and Fanfarlouche’s plan to steal Fangle’s diamonds and recognizing the goal of Babelhausen’s fraud. Quaco’s observations prove essential to uniting the appropriate couples at play’s end. Whim for Whim is clearly a satire of foolish fashionable elites. However, through the character of Quaco and stage direction, Edgeworth reveals how abolitionist discourse is uniquely suited to expose Enlightened hypocrisy. Edgeworth offered this play to Richard Brinsley Sheridan for performance at his Drury Lane Theatre, but he rejected it.3 She did not revise the work, and it was not published until 2003 in the Pickering and Chatto 2  Maria Edgeworth, “Whim for Whim,” in The Works of Maria Edgeworth, eds. Elizabeth Eger, Clíona Ó Gallchoir, and Marilyn Butler, Vol. 12 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), 384. References are to this edition. 3  Elizabeth Eger, “Introductory Notes,” in The Works of Maria Edgeworth, eds. Elizabeth Eger, Clíona Ó Gallchoir, and Marilyn Butler, Vol. 12 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), 279.

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12-volume set begun in 1999, The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth.4 Accordingly, and despite Elizabeth Eger’s introductory reading of the play’s revolutionary political implications, emphasizing its having been written mere months after the 1798 Irish Rebellion and targeting both the French aristocracy and Georgiana the Duchess of Cavendish’s notorious sartorial support of the British in the American War of Independence, Whim for Whim has received almost no other attention from scholars.5 The exception is Carmen María Fernández-Rodríguez, who focuses on Quaco, the play’s Black character, to claim that in Whim for Whim, “From her enlightened post, Edgeworth argues against human inferiority based on race.”6 While I agree with Fernández-Rodríguez that in Whim for Whim Edgeworth explores views and themes regarding individual rights and freedoms that she develops more fully in later works, especially those including Black characters, I disagree with Fernández-­ Rodríguez’s conclusion that Whim for Whim unequivocally champions racial equality. Instead, I argue that in this play, as in her other works, Edgeworth carefully “contemplat[es] political questions of justice and social progress” through allusion and intertextuality.7 She invokes discourses of slavery and abolition to serve as a litmus test of character. Ultimately, here I conclude that Edgeworth’s depiction of a sentimentalized Black African speaking a staged West Indian dialect juxtaposed with the hypocrisy of supposedly enlightened cultural elites critiques the misappropriation and thus failure of abolitionist efforts. Discussion of Edgeworth’s views on slavery and race has so far been dominated by explorations of Belinda (1801) and “The Grateful Negro” (1804). There has been little consensus among scholars about these works, perhaps because of a tendency to read Edgeworth’s status as an Anglo-­ Irish woman as evidence of her support for oppressive colonial hierarchies or her personal understanding of the pain they cause. Regarding slavery, specifically, Frances Botkin, for example, has argued that Edgeworth is 4  Pickering & Chatto is now an imprint of Routledge. Connor Carville, Claire Connolly, Jane Desmarais, Susan Manly, Tim McLoughlin, Mitzi Myers, Heidi van der Veire, and Kim Walker also contributed as editors to the 12-volume collection. 5  Eger, “Introductory Notes,” 287. 6  Carmen María Fernández Rodríguez, “Enlightened Deception: An Analysis of Slavery in Maria Edgeworth’s Whim for Whim (1798).” Studiilrandesi: A Journal of Irish Studies 7 (2017), 258. 7  Susan Manly, “Introduction,” Selected Tales for Children and Young People (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), xxvii.

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“firmly in the progressive, abolitionist camp,” while Suvendrini Perera and Moira Ferguson are unable to reconcile the contradictions they see in Edgeworth’s work.8 In contrast, George Boulukos has written that “Edgeworth sees slaves as dangerously irrational, although she prefers sentimental to physically coercive solutions.”9 Elizabeth Kim’s comparisons between the absentee Anglo-Irish landlords and West Indian planters in Edgeworth’s work support Boulukos’s conclusion that she was an ameliorationist.10 Similarly, other scholars remain polarized in resolving Edgeworth’s attitudes toward race. Sharon Smith refuses Alison Harvey’s claim that Belinda’s exploration of the consequences of white male colonial power for women and people of color functions as a critique of colonialism, and Smith argues, instead, that the novel “is characterized in part by the colonialist impulse to assimilate Juba into English domesticity, to erase the signs of his cultural and racial ‘othernness.’”11 In contrast, Conny Cassity’s recent essay, “Caught by the Throat: Anti-slavery Assemblages in Paul et Virginie and Belinda” reads in Edgeworth’s work a nuanced understanding of Black culture that advocates for racial tolerance.12 In contrast to these arguments about Edgeworth’s didacticism, this essay follows the model set by Cliona O Gallchoir in her reading of the Virginia St. Pierre story in Belinda as a “somewhat uneasy blend of comedy, satire, and essayistic reflection, tinged with darker elements of violence and tragedy.”13 Specifically, I will demonstrate how Edgeworth’s “somewhat uneasy blend” of satire and staging critiques sentimental abolitionist discourse by 8  Frances Botkin, “Questioning the ‘Necessary Order of Things’: Maria Edgeworth’s ‘The Grateful Negro,’ Plantation Slavery, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” in Discourses of Slavery and Abolition, eds. Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 194. Suvendrini Perera, Reaches of Empire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others (New York: Routledge, 1992). 9  George Boulukos, “Maria Edgeworth’s ‘Grateful Negro’ and the Sentimental Argument for Slavery.” Eighteenth-Century Life 23 no. 1 (1999), 20. 10  Elizabeth Kim, “Maria Edgeworth’s The Grateful Negro: A Site for Rewriting Rebellion,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 16 no. 1 (2003), 103–26. 11   Alison Harvey, “West Indian Obeah and English ‘Obee’: Race, Femininity, and Questions of Colonial Consolidation in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” in New Essays on Maria Edgeworth, ed. Julia Nash (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 1–29. Sharon Smith, “Juba’s ‘Black Face’/Lady Delacour’s ‘Mask’: Plotting Domesticity in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 54 no. 1 (Spring 2013), 71. 12  Connie Cassity, “Caught by the Throat: Anti-slavery Assemblages in Paul et Virginie and Belinda,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 31 no. 1 (Fall 2018), 99–115. 13  Cliona O Gallchoir, Maria Edgeworth: Women, Enlightenment and Nation (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005), 41.

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exposing the hypocrisies of individuals who claim radical Enlightenment, human equality, and the right of liberty. In addition to reflecting her interest in slavery and abolition through the Black character of Quaco, Whim for Whim brings together Edgeworth’s early interest in drama and satire as forms of social critique. In 1783, she had attempted a play entitled Anticipation, or The Countess,14 and the next year she described another attempt, this time with “a tragedy founded upon an anecdote in the life of Hyder Ali,” Sultan and ruler of Mysore in intermittent conflict with the East India Company.15 By 1786, she looked closer to home for her subject matter; The Double Disguise was performed for Christmas guests at Edgeworthtown. In this play, Edgeworth wrote for herself the part of an English maid at an inn along the London– Liverpool turnpike and, for her father, the part of a class-climbing former grocer and Anglo-Irishman, Justice Cocoa.16 In so doing, she attempted to improve upon the French drama she enjoyed but with which she found great fault. By this point, she had already explained to her friend Fanny Robinson her preference for realism, especially in representing the interactions between characters of differing rank: Moliere’s [plays] entertained me much. The plots of all I have yet read of Marivaux I think too much alike & too uninteresting; indeed that is a fault I have met with in most French plays—the waiting women & valets are mere machinery to help the author through his plot and to bring their Masters and Mistresses in spite of fate together.17

As Christine Alexander and Ryan Twomey establish in the introduction to their edition of The Double Disguise, Edgeworth was early interested in crafting the dialect and vernacular phraseology of various class and ethnic identities in order to present “pictures of the social flaws and lapses in moral judgment that she discerned in society.”18

14  Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 151. 15  Quoted in Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 152. 16  Maria Edgeworth, The Double Disguise, eds. Christine Alexander and Ryan Twomey (Sydney: Juvenilia Press, 2014). 17  Quoted in Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 150. 18  Christine Alexander and Ryan Twomey, “Introduction,” The Double Disguise (Sydney, Australia: Juvenilia Press, 2014), xi.

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Whim for Whim also reflects Edgeworth’s interest in satire. In Letters for Literary Ladies (1795), Edgeworth critiqued those who would render women “much alike and too uninteresting,” “mere machinery” to help the interests of men. In the introduction to her edition of Letters, Claire Connolly describes the work as representative of the fact that, in her writing, Edgeworth “is rarely overawed by established authority, and always reserves the right to criticize existing institutions.”19 Accordingly, in the volume’s “Letter from a Gentleman to His Friend upon the Birth of a Daughter” and “Answer to the Preceding Letter” she caricatures men, like her own father’s friend Thomas Day, who would deny the value of education for women. In the work’s second part, “Letters of Julia and Caroline,” she parodies Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise (1761) to target women who would render themselves the thoughtless victims of their own unrestrained emotion. She closes the text with “An Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification,” a lampoon of selfish and vindictive women whose claims to rational thought prove intellectually and morally bankrupt. About this effort, Mona Narain has concluded that Edgeworth “circumvents dominant, patriarchal literary authority and actively interrogates aspects of it.”20 More recently, I have detailed the satiric methodology of this interrogation, focusing on its “ironic ventriloquizing of male arguments against women’s education” and its “parody of both literary and unliterary ladies.”21 Whim for Whim represents Edgeworth’s accumulated knowledge of slavery and commitment to satire as social commentary, specifically attacking  those whose claims to intellectual superiority and manifest as moral failure.

Playing at Illuminatism In Whim for Whim, Edgeworth attempts to ensure that her servant character, Quaco, is more than machinery to bring his master and mistress together. She uses his status as an emancipated slave to sharpen the bite of 19  Clair Connolly, “Introduction,” Letters for Literary Ladies, Maria Edgeworth (London: Everyman, 1993), xx. 20  Mona Narain, “A Prescription of Letters: Maria Edgeworth’s ‘Letters for Literary Ladies’ and the Ideologies of the Public Sphere,” Journal of Narrative Technique vol. 28 no. 3 (Fall 1998), 268. 21  Robin Runia, “Edgeworth’s Letters for Literary Ladies: Publication Peers and Analytical Antagonists,” in Women’s Literary Networks and Romanticism: A Tribe of Authoresses, ed. by Andrew Winckles and Angela Rehbein. (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2017), 241.

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her play’s satire against “Illuminati” and Free Masons. She juxtaposes the plight of the enslaved African with the foolish foibles of the English social elite and their grasping servants to denounce their misappropriation of abolitionist discourse. She does so by forcing a contrast between Babelhausen’s version of Illuminatism and Quaco’s history of enslavement and moral exemplarity. Writing to Sophy, Edgeworth makes a point to explain, through her description of the character list, that Illuminatism was her inspiration for the play. Describing Opal, she writes: “A young man—nephew to Sir Mordent—poor—changeable as his name imports—fond of improvements in all things—a democrat—an illuminatus minor—& mad with passion for illuminatism & for Caroline.”22 She contrasts the foolishness of youth with that of mature folly when she describes Count Babelhausen as: “A german of noble extraction—an adventurer—an illuminatus—who is taking in Opal—Babelhausen is well bred—very clever & artful—talks a jargon about pure reason—universal benevolence—cosmopolitanism & c.—.”23 Further, she details her source text as John Robison’s Proofs of Conspiracy (1797), and while she calls the book “tiresome” with “no sufficient proofs given for the facts,” she also recommends her cousin read it.24 In this work, Robison, Scottish physicist and mathematician, details what he believed to be the deterioration of Freemasonry through the influence of Johann Weishaupt’s Order of the Illuminati.25 He denounces Free Masonry as a “cheat” and all Free Masons as “the most insignificant, worthless, profligate men” who “flatter our self-conceit, and which, by buoying us up with the gay prospect of what seems attainable by change, may make us discontented with our present condition.”26 Proofs of Conspiracy also explicitly links Free Mason hypocrisy to Weishaupt’s invocation of slavery. While Weishaupt’s views of slavery have not been examined in any detail by scholars, the elitism of Illuminatism’s selective recruitment and its secretive hierarchical organization jarred with its claims to spread enlightenment values and has perpetuated the organization’s association with conspiracy theories of both radical and conservative bents. Robison details how in 1778, two years after the founding of Weishaupt’s 22  Maria Edgeworth, “To Sophy Ruxton” (19 November 1798), MS 10166/7–212. Edgeworth Papers, National Library of Ireland. 23  Maria Edgeworth, “To Sophy Ruxton” (19 November 1798). 24  Maria Edgeworth, “To Sophy Ruxton” (19 November 1798). 25  John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy, 4th ed (London: 1798). 26  Robison, Proofs,13.

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order and the American colonies’ declaration of independence from the British crown, the growing membership began adopting classical names and “[t]hus Weishaupt took the name of Spartacus, the man who headed the insurrection of slaves,” a fact which Robison finds eggregiously hypocritical.27 Similarly, in Whim for Whim, Babelhausen’s appropriation of revolutionary and antislavery discourse is distinctly hypocritical. He is obviously a conman and thief, and Edgeworth mined Robison’s description of Illuminatism’s disingenuous claims to flesh out Babelhausen’s schemes. Robinson described one ritual in which: The candidate is presented for reception in the character of a slave; and it is demanded of him what has brought him into this most miserable of all conditions. He answers—Society—the State—Submissiveness—False Religion. A skeleton is pointed out to him, at the feet of which are laid a Crown and a Sword. He is asked, whether that is the skeleton of a King, a Nobleman, or a Beggar? As he cannot decide, the President of the meeting says to him, ‘the character of being a Man is the only one that is of importance.’28

The revolutionary implications of this ritual define slavery as an acceptance of unjust hierarchy, inherited or violently tyrannical, but, as Robison points out, the rhetorical play of the question and answer denies the legitimacy of either, insisting instead on an individual’s personal adherence to the principle of universal equality as valuable in and of itself. Edgeworth reworks this critique of hierarchy slightly to press her point about Babelhausen’s criminal rhetoric when Mrs. Fangle asks Babelhausen for details of his secret society, querying: “what is it the great work” of Illuminatism. Count Babelhausen identifies its supposedly revolutionary parameters: To call Christians, Jews, Turks, and Infidels, Hungarians, Sclavonians, the negro slave, the Russian boor, the wild American, the Barbary Corsair, the Tartar Cossack, the outcast Hindoo, the furry Camshatkan and the entrail cinctured Hottentot all to meet at one social board. 29  Robison, Proofs, 103.  Robison, Proofs, 110. 29  Maria Edgeworth, “Whim for Whim, in The Works of Maria Edgeworth, eds. Elizabeth Eger, Clíona Ó Gallchoir, and Marilyn Butler, Vol. 12. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003, 338 emphasis original. 27 28

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Here, Edgeworth caricatures the assertions of Illuminati who would claim not to see difference and offer universal equality by exposing the naivety, if not impossibility, of joining together in amity historical religious and economic rivals of all races. In Edgeworth’s list, the further Babelhausen gets from the inveterate enemies of competing monotheistic societies, the more obvious his prejudicial attitudes become. The dehumanization of “wild,” “furry,” and “entrail cinctured” individuals deny the universal equality of humanity Babelhausen’s “great work” promises. Edgeworth also places this hypocrisy at the center of her satire through her lower-class characters. She does so by naming Babelhausen’s sly servant Felix, after, as Eger has observed, “one of the most notorious freedmen of ancient times, Antonius Felix, Roman procurator of Judea, AD 52-60, who was cruel, licentious and corrupt, and sat in judgment on St. Paul.”30 Edgeworth’s character’s namesake, unlike Spartacus, unfairly persecuted an apostle of Christ; like Antonious Felix, Edgeworth’s Felix is notorious for taking bribes and victimizing the innocent. He is a pawn of Babelhausen and is forced to conflate liberty and economics by convincing Opal’s friend to join the Illuminati at the cost of 13 guineas, a large and apparently unlucky sum. Edgeworth, inspired by the hypocritical naming Robison exposes among Weishaupt’s Free Masons, parodies the trope of adopting slave names as a supposed strike against tyranny in order to expose real tyranny in the cunning employer whose servant can never get out from under the thumb of his master. Nevertheless, as part of his master’s scheme Felix also plays “the slave of Mademoiselle Fanfarlouche” (331). He seduces Fanfarlouche to secure her loyal participation in the diamond theft. Of course, the audience knows Felix is not in love with Fanfarlouche and thus not really her slave (331). Dramatic irony also undercuts Fanfarlouche’s claim that her obsessive love for Babelhausen will raise her social status from that of lowly French maid, “Love dey say equals all conditions and I am a friend of equality” (313). She is Babelhausen’s dupe, and the audience knows he will never share the spoils of the diamond theft with her. These characters play with metaphors of enslavement under delusions of liberty. While Babelhausen’s and his servants’ schemes and hypocrisies are obviously criminal in their connection to the diamond heist, Edgeworth points out the moral culpability of fashionable elites who would subvert professions of equality and liberty to their own romantic or intellectual  Eger, “Introductory Notes,” 282.

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desires. This becomes clear in the play’s depiction of Illuminati ritual. In the stage directions, we are told that an “Altar to the Goddess of Reason” has been constructed, and: On one side of the Altar stand six female novices swathed in various colored silk scarfs like Egyptian mummies—On the other side of the Altar stand 6 men dressed like slaves in chains—All the figures have the right arm at liberty and each holds an unlighted torch. (353)

The disturbing pageantry of these enthusiasts, ostensibly six white men in blackface and chains and six white women in exotic costumes, stands in stark contrast to the real suffering of the enslaved, but when the Count asks Opal “Why are those in chains?”, Opal’s response, “They are slaves in the chains of vulgar opinion,” the Count’s slick response, “Right—Right,” betrays a certain skepticism about the ham-fisted misappropriation of liberty and equality he has modeled for them (353). The comparison of their own situations to that of real slaves is truly coarse. Their representation of chains and death-shrouds as spectacular fashion accessories is truly ill-­ bred. As the ceremony continues, its absurdity is heightened when the women are unwrapped and the men de-shackled only as they, according to the stage direction, “prostrate themselves—rise—Each shakes a purse— lays it on the altar” (354). Babelhausen says to Fangle, after her self-­ subjection and self-commodification: “Now lady is the moment to make your choice—Make it in silence—Illuminated freedom—or Worldly slavery” (354). In silencing her, Babelhausen reveals a false dichotomy between his proffered choices, and while Fangle unsurprisingly signals her choice by seizing the torch of Enlightenment, her payment implicates her utterly in the very worldly “slavery” she is supposedly. When Opal too buys in, he insists that “he who never bent the knee to pride or prejudice kneels to Socrates & Science,” but the dramatic irony of Babelhausen’s shamming reinforces the fact that Opal is the victim of his own prejudice (354). Babelhausen’s Illuminatism offers neither wisdom nor truth, only participation in an elite club of hypocritical fools. Edgeworth further critiques superficial invocation of enslavement as an intellectual and emotional trope when Babelhausen accuses Opal of being “the slave” to his passion for Caroline (357). Opal protests: “My fortune—my life—I would hazard for the good of my fellow creatures—for the great work” (357). However, Opal’s insistence that he is a slave, not to love but to Illuminatism begs the question of his abundant agency. A

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slave does not own himself or any fortune of his own to hazard, a fact to which Babelhausen slyly alludes in shifting Opal’s focus back to the fact that if Opal’s not a slave to love, Caroline “is a slave to the customs of the world” because she disapproves of Opal’s intellectual enthusiasms (358). This plays out further when Caroline refuses to become an Illuminati, and Opal insists he cannot marry her. Their dialogue offers important conflicting definitions of “liberty.” For Caroline, the only reasonable explanation for Opal’s unwillingness to marry her is his entanglement with another woman. The suspicion of which leads her to “free” him from their engagement: “You are at liberty Sir” (365). While Caroline’s assumption that he could be unfaithful stings Opal, his pledge to reveal nothing of his commitments to the secret society and thus of his recent behavior necessitate his retort: “I acknowledge nothing—I am not at liberty” (365). He is not free to explain himself, and she doubts his claims of fidelity. At the end of the play, Opal’s anxiety over these conflicting definitions of liberty leads him to adopt “the character of a slave” for Fangle’s masquerade. Despite the misunderstandings outlined above and the characters’ willingness to explain them according to the “slavery” of the gendered behaviors expected in courtship and marriage, the play ends happily with Opal and Caroline reunited. Effectively, Edgeworth depicts the hyperbolic prostituting of abolitionist discourse by insecure suitors as a misguided misdirection that unhelpfully masks their mistaken pride and only prolongs their mutual misunderstanding.

Staging Slavery In stark contrast to her satire of these characters, Edgeworth presents Quaco, a young boy who has suffered real enslavement. At one point, when he is asked to deliver Fangle’s diamonds. He describes in song how they bring back his memories of slavery, De ugly, ugly, ugly white diamuns grow Poor little negro work in de mine Lash from de whip Black skin all strip White and rich lady for to make fines. (352)

Quaco juxtaposes his black skin and the darkness of the mine in which he toiled with the white diamonds and the white women they adorn.

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Haunted by the blood and scars of his violent past, Quaco confronts the audience with its complicity in the atrocities of slavery. Not only do blood diamonds become a synecdoche for the morally repugnant white women who wear them, Quaco is repeatedly called upon to highlight white people’s culpability for the injustices of slavery. When Felix equates a dark complexion with enslavement in order to assert his own superior status, “That’s right my little black chap! I like your spirit— Why it’s a pity you’re not an English man,” Quaco refuses him (320). He righteously insists: “Me no slave!—Dere be no slave in Englan—Massa Opal said dere be no slave in Englan … but Massa Opal took me from de cruel mens, and carry me to Englis men’s land where be no slaves—Fine country Englan!” (320). In a clear invocation of the 1772 Somerset case, Edgeworth reiterates the idea that Quaco might have found freedom on English soil, but, ironically, only through the intervention of his new white “Massa.” In contrast to the foolish, hypocritical, and criminal white characters, Quaco simultaneously combats racism while functioning as the play’s only moral exemplar. While Felix calls Quaco a “Blockhead” and a “dunce,” Quaco immediately recognizes Felix’s degraded character; as Felix exits the stage, Quaco points at him and says, “Quaco hate dat man” (321). Later, Felix’s celebration of the imminent success of his diamond heist involves his contention that he has been “emancipated by the force of his own genius” (360). However, Quaco’s behind-the-scenes singing foreshadows Felix’s impending imprisonment by his own nefarious schemes, “Quaco wrong nobody, nobody Quaco wrong/ Work and song all day long, all day long work and song” (360). Felix is puzzled by Quaco’s singing and muses, “There’s something in a light heart that I never could understand!” which hints at the nature of the play’s denouement (360). Quaco’s justified suspicion of Felix leads Quaco to check on the diamonds Felix has given him to return to Fangle. Quaco discovers they are fake, finds the real jewels in Felix’s possession, and returns them to their rightful owner. Caroline too, for all her reasonable common-sense rejection of Illuminatism falls prey to racial prejudice. When Quaco reveals Felix’s diamond scheme to her, she says in an aside “I thought you were too simple to have any secrets” (366). Of course, she’s the fool for having misunderstood him, since the “big, big secret” he reveals to her is the most serious of the play (366). At the same time, Edgeworth’s representation of Quaco provides another kind of critique. Specifically, through her depiction of Quaco, she

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highlights the consequences of abolitionist discourse’s tendency to sentimentalize the enslaved in ways that reflect Brycchan Carey’s conclusions about the disappearance of sentimental rhetoric in abolitionist discourse from the 1790s on because, as emotion was deployed in dramatic depictions of slavery, it “contributed little either to the development of the discourse or to the progress of the campaign in parliament.”31 In other words, by the end of the eighteenth century, authors and spectators began to recognize that excesses of sentimentality undermined the ability to sympathetically identify with the enslaved and rendered them mere objects offering spectators the pleasures of superiority. Edgeworth depicts this very process. Despite this pathetic scene, Felix asks Quaco why he does not return to his homeland, we read: Quaco(sighs). Ahi! Quaco no happy now when you talk of his fader and his moder. (Quaco sits down on the ground and puts his head between his hands) Quaco no happy now!—(320)

Nevertheless, Felix calls Quaco a “Blockhead” and a “dunce” (321). Further, Quaco’s singing adds an infantilization at apparent odds with the depths of his sufferings. When he tells us that when Opal purchased him from the African diamond mine for the price of a pipe, Quaco breaks out in song: Happy little Quaco has now a massa kind. ‘Quaco!’ said he— From dis day be free’—– May every little Quaco such a massa find. Happy little Quaco has now a massa kind. To Quaco he cry—(319) ‘No slaves by and by’ May every little Quaco such a massa find. (319–320, emphasis original)

31  Heather Nathans argues the opposite with respect to American dramatic performance and explores how staged representations from the later eighteenth century of Black characters suffering encouraged audience sympathetic identification. Heather Nathans, Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787–1861: Lifting the Veil of Black (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Brycchan Carey, “To Force a Tear: British Abolitionism and the EighteenthCentury London Stage,” in Affect and abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1770–1830, ed. Stephen Ahern (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing), 110.

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This invocation of emancipation and grateful mastery is a contradiction. Quaco repeats this grateful slave trope, conflating liberty and loyal service, when he muses: “Me hate to clean shoes!—More me hat to clean boots! But Quaco rader clean all dese—all dese—all dese—and your massa’s and all sooner danQuaco run away from Massa Opal … No—No Quaco—No run away from Massa—Good massa Opal …” (319–321). In her introduction to Edgeworth’s later Comic Dramas, Fernádez-­Rodrírguez explains this: “Quaco accepts his slavery by internalizing a paternalistic sentimental contract and faces incomprehension.”32 Certainly, the rest of the characters cannot comprehend him, but, importantly, Edgeworth presents Quaco’s incomprehension as a result of Opal’s failure to follow through on his professions of liberty and equality. In Opal’s first speech, he celebrates Sir Mordent Idem’s taking of Felix as a servant, despite the man’s lack of skill or work ethic, upon the motive of “Universal philanthropy, and the cause of humanity” (308). When Mordent eschews such new-fangled “jargon,” Opal reacts: “Absurd—Surely you don’t call my scheme for the education of the negroes absurd?” (309). In the face of his uncle’s skepticism at the impossibility of individual action “towards the reformation of the world,” Opal insists, “An individual cannot do all, but he can do something” (309). Nevertheless, Edgeworth exposes Opal’s intellectual and philanthropic causes as empty promises. He does nothing for Quaco throughout the play. Edgeworth further critiques empty invocations of human rights through Opal’s refusal to obey his uncle’s demand that he choose a profession. Opal argues, “What privileges of consanguinity, What prerogatives of seniority can justify this unqualified breach of the imprescriptable [sic] unalienable rights of man” (333). By whining about the presumption of an uncle who would ask him to get a job and work for money, Opal invites scrutiny of the “liberty” he gives Quaco in working for wages. Edgeworth again represents the incomprehension Quaco faces but again represents it less as a function of his internalizing a paternal sentimental contract and more as a moral failure of white Englishmen when Mordent asks him about Opal’s whereabouts. Mordent cannot understand Quaco’s response, and he “angrily” reflects, I wish to God my nephew Opal with his universal philanthropy would keep a man who could speak English or some language or other, and not such a 32  Carmen María FernándezRodríguez, “Slight Productions: An Introduction to Maria Edgeworth’s Comic Dramas (1817),” EstudiosIrlandeses, 7 (2012), 39.

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helpless urchin as this—He tells me this black boy is a friend, and a brother— I only wish I had my gloves. (325)

This reference to Josiah Wedgwood’s 1788 abolitionist medallion and its dramatization of Black submission to whites reflects Opal’s inability to sway Mordent’s preference for an English servant over a Black friend. The play further links the failure of sentimental abolitionist efforts to see Black humanity to Quaco’s linguistic unintelligibility as part of a complex history of stage comedy. Specifically, Edgeworth crafts his lines according to the dialect model made popular in Isaac Bickerstaff and Charles Dibdin’s incredibly influential play The Padlock (1768).33 As Virginia Mason Vaughan has demonstrated, it was possible for English actors impersonating Black Africans through blackface to arouse audience sympathy with heroic characters like those of Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko (1696), but The Padlock was different. In this play, the black house-slave Mungo defies the tyrannical Don Diego to enable the romantic union of the poor young Leonora and her suitor Leander. Throughout Bickerstaff and Dibdin’s work, Mungo not only repeatedly calls attention to and denounces the injustice of his position, but his drunken antics also provide comic relief. Despite the crediting of Mungo’s West Indian speech to John Moody, an Irish-born dramatist who had established a theater in Jamaica,34 speech that Marianne Cooley argues “can thus be identified as based on Caribbean varieties, including pidgin and creole, with an actor’s considerations for stage presentation and audience perception,”35 J.R. Oldfield has argued that in The Padlock, Bickerstaff represented white British racism.36 The play was an instant success.37 Performed 212 times  Isaac Bickerstaff, The Padlock (London, 1768).  J.R.  Oldfield, “The Ties of Soft Humanity’: Slavery and Race in British Drama 1760–1800, Huntington Quarterly 56, no. 1 (Winter 1993), 14. Philip Highfill, et al., A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, Vol. 10 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 289. 35  Marianne Cooley, “An Early Representation of African-American English,” in Language Variety in the South Revisited, eds. Cynthia Bernstein, Thomas Nunnelly, and Robin Sabino, (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014), 54. 36  J.R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery (London: Routledge, 1998), 38. 37  Oldfield, Popular Politics, 38. He also notes that Bickerstaff first represented colonial slavery on the stage in Love in the City (1767). Oldfield notes that “Bickerstaff’s obvious intention was to provoke and unsettle his audience. Priscilla’s disregard for Quasheba, for instance, is set in sharp contrast to her guardian’s attention to his servant Margery” (29). 33 34

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between 1768 and 1776 at Drury Lane and Covent Garden, The Padlock “quickly became part of provincial repertoires and was still being performed regularly in London as late as 1790–1791,”38 and its popularity continued through the nineteenth century. Nicholas Evans notes that the famed Ira Aldridge first played Mungo in 1826,39 and Herbert Marshall and Mildred Stock, in their biography of Aldridge, explain that Mungo was “the one role, apart from Othello, that he played the whole of his life, without a break.”40 The play was a “popular obsession” with Mungo adopted for masquerade costumes and appearing on china.41 As Jenna Gibbs observes, Mungo’s comic dimensions embodied white Londoner’s discomfort with real-life Black people, and Mungo became a prototype for comic blackface performances of servants or slaves in London.”42 Julie Carlson, reiterating Gretchen Gerzina’s conclusion about The Padlock’s powerful effect upon the British imagination, explains: “The model black male shifts from Othello to Mungo, the comic, and frequently intoxicated servant.”43 While Felicity Nussbaum, in her exploration of the interaction between Bickerstaff’s words and Dibdin’s music, argues that the play’s comic dimensions defy easy moralizing about slavery,44 these scholars make clear that English audiences failed to see Mungo’s dialect in Bickerstaff’s comedy as a critique of the racial othering upon which slavery relied. Instead, they appropriated it along with his black face for their entertainment. Thus can we see how Edgeworth reinforces the play’s depiction of dialect as provocation to laughter and illegibility rather than sympathy through Fanfarlouche. Her first lines, “Wretch dat I am!... Dis is not de  Oldfield, “The Ties,” 13.  Nicolas Evans, “Ira Aldridge: Shakespeare and Minstrelsy,” in Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius, ed. BernthLindfors (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2007), 161. 40  Herbert Marshall and Mildred Stock, Ira Aldridge: The Negro Tragedian (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1993), 57. 41  J.R. Oldfield, ‘“The Ties,” 8. 42  Jenna Gibbs, Performing at the Temple of Liberty (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 59. 43  Gretchen Gerzina, Black England: Life Before Emancipation (London: John Murray, 1995), 10. Quoted in Julie Carlson, “Race and Profit in the English Theatre,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730–1830, eds. Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 180. 44   Felicity Nussbaum, “‘Mungo Here, Mungo There’: Charles Dibdin and Racial Performance,” in Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture, eds. Oskar Cox, David Kennerley, and Ian Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 23–42. 38 39

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first trick you have play me—nor de one, two, tree, four, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen,” proves she has been and will likely be the dupe of many a plot and scheme (302). She is a dupe for thinking Babelhausen actually loves her and doubly a dupe for thinking blackmail an appropriate or effective mechanism to ensure Babelhausen will marry her. Fanfarlouche’s French accent adds emphasis, along with her count, to her own lack of self-awareness: “You would make me tink you are ashame, but I am no dupe—if I had not by my own wit, by my own cleverness, by my own understanding—by my own knowledge of de world—tank my stars found out one of your secret in Paris, you would never have made love to me Scelerat! Would you?” (303). Her heavily accented English undermines her repeated claims to knowledge and understanding. Fanfarlouche’s willingness to be Babelhausen’s fool, “play[ing] all your roles,” while never securing the marriage he had promised her ensures we read her nonstandard speech as part of Edgeworth’s jest.

Sentimentality and Satire In the last scene of the play, Edgeworth further references the history of dramatic representation of slavery as an impediment to Black recognition. It opens with Opal at the back of the stage in blackface and dressed as a Harlequin.45 Quaco laments, “Me tinkmens and womens all mad dis night—me see all de white peoples wid de negro face—black! Black! Me know nobody—nobody knowQuaco” (378). While in Harlequin Mungo; or Peep into the Tower (1787) a suicidal black slave is transformed into Harlequin by a wizard and marries the wizard’s daughter, as we’ve seen, Opal is no slave. Instead, Quaco explains how his black skin has precluded any of the other characters from listening to his words, hearing his story of an unjust enslavement, and recognizing his moral and intellectual agency. Meanwhile, Opal’s struggle with his heart, the conflict between his devotion to Caroline and his Illuminatism, is ironized by his costume. In blackface, he laments his inability to abandon Caroline, “Prejudice of constancy am I your slave in despite of pure reason” (381). Here Edgeworth suggests that Opal’s gotten it all wrong; the “pure reason” that led him to Illuminatism blinded him to his moral responsibilities. He has claimed to have justice and humanity on his side according to a universal right to equality and liberty, but he has failed to live up to his professions. This  William Bates, Harlequin Mungo; or, a Peep into the Tower (London: 1787).

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failure is the target of Edgeworth’s satire. By claiming these rights in the face of Quaco’s enslaved suffering, Opal’s hypocrisy, prejudice, and laziness deny the universal application of liberty and equality that would ensure abolition and emancipation. Brycchan Carey defines abolitionist writing as that in which there is a “declaration of anti-slavery,” a “call for the institution to be abolished,” and emancipated characters by the play’s end.46 Edgeworth’s Whim for Whim demands a much more complicated definition. The work insists we consider the authenticity of and motives for the antislavery declarations made by certain individuals in certain situations. It asks us to consider whose interests are taken seriously and pursued in repeated calls to abolish slavery according to sentimental rhetoric. It presents us with a figure that trades slavery for new kinds of racist persecution and prejudice. Ultimately, Whim for Whim proves that Edgeworth remained interested in interrogating the complex roles of race, class, and gender in revolutionary thought and action and in the opportunities for doing so offered by literary form and convention. Maria Edgeworth’s Whim for Whim represents abolitionist discourse as the lens through which we may see the failures of Enlightenment, the gap between intention and action.

Bibliography Alexander, Christine and Ryan Twomey, “Introduction.” In The Double Disguise by Maria Edgeworth, xi–xxxiii. Sydney, Australia: Juvenilia Press, 2014. Bates, William. Harlequin Mungo; or, a Peep into the Tower. London: 1787. Bickerstaff, Isaac. The Padlock. London, 1768. Boulukos, George “Maria Edgeworth’s ‘Grateful Negro’ and the Sentimental Argument for Slavery.” Eighteenth-Century Life 23 no. 1 (1999), 12–29. Botkin, Frances. “Questioning the ‘Necessary Order of Things:’ Maria Edgeworth’s ‘The Grateful Negro,’ Plantation Slavery, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade.” In Discourses of Slavery and Abolition, ed. by Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih, 194–208. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Butler, Marilyn. “Edgeworth, the United Irishmen, and ‘More Intelligent Treason.” In An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and Her Contexts, edited by Heidi Kaufman and Chris Fauske, 33–61. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004. Butler, Marilyn Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972.  Carey, “To Force a Tear,” 120.

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Carey, Brycchan “To Force a Tear: British Abolitionism and the Eighteenth-­ Century London Stage.” In Affect and abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1770–1830, edited by Stephen Ahern, 109–28. Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate Publishing. Carlson, Julie. “Race and Profit in the English Theatre.” In The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730–1830, edited by Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn, 175–88. Cambridge University Press, 2007. Cassity, Connie. “Caught by the Throat: Anti-slavery Assemblages in Paul et Virginie and Belinda,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 31 no. 1 (Fall 2018): 99–115. Edgeworth, Maria. “Whim for Whim,” in The Works of Maria Edgeworth, eds. Elizabeth Eger, Clíona Ó Gallchoir, and Marilyn Butler, Vol. 12. London: Pickering &Chatto, 2003a. Connolly, Clair. “Introduction.” In Letters for Literary Ladies by Maria Edgeworth. London: Everyman, 1993. Cooley, Marianne. “An Early Representation of African-American English.” In Language Variety in the South Revisited, edited by Cynthia Bernstein, Thomas Nunnelly, and Robin Sabino, 51–8. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014. Edgeworth, Maria. The Double Disguise, edited by Christine Alexander and Ryan Twomey. Sydney: Juvenilia Press, 2014. Edgeworth, Maria. Edgeworth Papers, National Library of Ireland. Edgeworth, Maria, “Whim for Whim” in The Works of Maria Edgeworth, eds. Elizabeth Eger, Clíona Ó Gallchoir, and Marilyn Butler, Vol. 12. London: Pickering &Chatto, 2003b. Eger, Elizabeth. “Introductory Notes.” In The Works of Maria Edgeworth, edited by Elizabeth Eger, Clíona Ó Gallchoir, and Marilyn Butler, Vol. 12, 279–98. London: Pickering &Chatto, 2003. Evans, Nicolas. “Ira Aldridge: Shakespeare and Minstrelsy.” In Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius, edited by BernthLindfors, 170–192. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2007. Ferguson, Moira. Subject to Others. New York: Routledge, 1992. Gerzina, Gretchen. Black England: Life Before Emancipation. London: John Murray, 1995. Gibbs, Jenna. Performing at the Temple of Liberty. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Harvey, Alison. “West Indian Obeah and English ‘Obee’: Race, Femininity, and Questions of Colonial Consolidation in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.” In New Essays on Maria Edgeworth, edited by Julia Nash, 1–29. Burlington: Ashgate, 2006. Highfill, Philip et  al., A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, Vol. 10. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.

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Kim, Elizabeth. “Maria Edgeworth’s The Grateful Negro: A Site for Rewriting Rebellion,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 16 no. 1 (2003): 103–26. Manly, Susan. “Introduction.” In Selected Tales for Children and Young People, vii–xxxix. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013. Marshall, Herbert and Mildred Stock. Ira Aldridge: The Negro Tragedian. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1993. Narain, Mona. “A Prescription of Letters: Maria Edgeworth’s ‘Letters for Literary Ladies’ and the Ideologies of the Public Sphere,” Journal of Narrative Technique vol. 28 no.3 (Fall 1998): 266–286. Nathans, Heather. Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787–1861: Lifting the Veil of Black. Cambridge University Press, 2009. Nussbaum, Felicity. “’Mungo Here, Mungo There’: Charles Dibdin and Racial Performance.” In Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture, edited by Oskar Cox, David Kennerley, and Ian Newman, 23–42. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Oldfield, J.R. ‘The Ties of Soft Humanity’: Slavery and Race in British Drama 1760–1800, Huntington Quarterly 56, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 1–14. Oldfield, J.R. Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery. London: Routledge, 1998. O Gallchoir, Cliona. Maria Edgeworth: Women, Enlightenment and Nation. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005. Perera, Suvendrini. Reaches of Empire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Robison, John Proofs of a Conspiracy, 4th ed. London: 1798. Rodríguez, Carmen María Fernández. “Enlightened Deception: An Analysis of Slavery in Maria Edgeworth’s Whim for Whim (1798).” Studiilrandesi: A Journal of Irish Studies 7 (2017): 243–60. Rodríguez, Carmen María Fernández. “Slight Productions: An Introduction to Maria Edgeworth’s Comic Dramas (1817),” EstudiosIrlandeses, 7 (2012): 33–43. Runia, Robin. “Edgeworth’s Letters for Literary Ladies: Publication Peers and Analytical Antagonists.” In Women’s Literary Networks and Romanticism: A Tribe of Authoresses, edited by Andrew Winckles and Angela Rehbein, 226–244. Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2017. Smith, Sharon. “Juba’s ‘Black Face’/Lady Delacour’s ‘Mask’: Plotting Domesticity in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 54 no. 1 (Spring 2013): 71–90.

CHAPTER 3

“The Appearance of Virtue”—Reading Abolition in Belinda

In 1800, another of abolition’s most persuasive voices, William Cowper, was silenced. His antislavery poems of 1788; “The Negro’s Complaint,” “Pity for Poor Africans,” “The Morning Dream,” and “Sweet Meat Has Sour Sauce or, the Slave Trader in the Dumps” had galvanized abolitionist sentiment around the abject suffering of the African body. However, at Cowper’s death, abolition of the trade was still seven years away. In Belinda, published the next year (1801), Edgeworth critiques the sentimentality central to Cowper’s abolitionist efforts. Edgeworth’s Belinda is a novel of female development typical of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It begins when Belinda is put into the custody of the fashionable Lady Delacour in order to be introduced to the world and the marriage market. Belinda learns from Delacour’s failures even while she is introduced to and considers two suitors. Edgeworth’s novel conforms in many ways to the marriage plot that dominated the form throughout the long eighteenth century. Belinda weighs her suitors’ merits and recognizes her own before considering a proposal of marriage. Nevertheless, many critics have also recognized in the novel Edgeworth’s own critique of the sentimentality central to so many marriage plots. Accordingly, much discussion has focused on Edgeworth’s corresponding efforts to redefine the genre in her “Advertisement” to Belinda. Here, she refers to her text as a “Moral Tale—the author not wishing to acknowledge a Novel” since “so much folly, error, and vice are disseminated in books classed under this © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Runia, Maria Edgeworth and Abolition, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12078-7_3

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denomination.”1 This chapter, however, nuances the critical discussion of Edgeworth’s deliberate critique of the manners and morals of fashionable courtship by considering its relationship to sentimental abolitionist discourse. As established earlier, scholars of the eighteenth century have identified how both pro- and antislavery activists relied on sentimental scenes of enslaved suffering to persuade their audiences. The failure of early abolitionist efforts and the solidifying of racist ideologies during the late eighteenth century have correspondingly been blamed on the tendency of these sentimental scenes to objectify Black people. In Belinda, Edgeworth anticipates these critiques to present discussions of slavery as a litmus test of characters’ virtue, simultaneously highlighting the anti-intellectual nature of sentiment and, in its most elite and cultivated of forms, taste disconnected from corresponding rational action or reform. Belinda chooses between her suitors by recognizing their ability to act in accordance with what they supposedly think and feel about slavery. While most scholars have agreed that Belinda is a novel intensely interested in evaluating the impact of Britain’s colonial activities, there has been little scholarship directly engaging the work’s representation of slavery and less consensus among those scholars about the politics of slavery represented in Belinda.2 James Morris has argued that Belinda is significant in avoiding repetition of the familiar allegory of slavery used to describe the plight of women—perhaps most famously featured in Mary 1  Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 3. References are to this edition. Jennie Batchelor has concluded, “By rejecting the term ‘novel,’ Edgeworth sought to express her distaste for the propensity of fiction, and particularly of sentimental fiction, to produce romantically deluded and intellectually weakened readers.” Jennie Batchelor, Dress, Distress and Desire: Clothing and the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 155. Susan Egenolf further develops this interpretation by looking to Belinda’s “range of narrative modes foreign to the traditional novel,” and in particular to its “glosses.” Susan Egenolf, The Art of Political Fiction in Hamilton, Edgeworth and Owenson (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009),73, 74. 2  See, for example, Andrew McCann, Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism, and the Public Sphere (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998). Katherine Kirkpatrick, “The Limits of Liberal Feminism in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.” Jane Austen and Mary Shelley and Their Sisters, ed. Laura Dabundo (New York: University Press of America, 2000), 73–82. Beccie Puneet Randhawa, “Penitent Creoles, Failed Hostesses, and the Impossibility of Home in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.” Transnational England: Home and Abroad, 1780–1860, eds. Monika Class and Terry F.  Robinson (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 185–186.

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Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman—and through the character of Juba, provides “a place for freed and escaped slaves in metropolitan culture;” nevertheless, his argument fails to consider how Mr. Hartley’s West Indian plantations and his daughter’s, Virginia St. Pierre, union with slave-rebellion quashing Captain Sunderland imply an ongoing need for the enslaved to be emancipated or to escape.3 Sharon Smith argues that the novel’s revisions represent “African slaves as superstitious, irrational, rebellious, potentially violent, and incapable of managing their freedom,”4 and while her observations about the similarities between Lady Delacour’s and Juba’s domestication are compelling, their differences are significant in this context. Juba’s eager embrace of marriage with Lucy contrasts starkly with Lady Delacour’s history, problematizing the claim that “In Belinda, Juba functions not as a distinct character, but as the racialized reflection of Lady Delacour’s hybridity and the embodiment of the disruptive impulses that drive her considerable, though never total, resistance to the domesticating influence exerted by the novel’s heroine.”5 Andrew McCann observes the novel’s revisions and Juba’s marital assimilation to emphasize the cultural erasures of bourgeois capital as only a supposedly liberatory alternative to colonial slavery.6 Unfortunately, both McCann’s and Smith’s focus on Edgeworth’s 1810 revision occludes the significance of Edgeworth’s first edition. Conny Cassity’s recent essay, “Caught by the Throat: Anti-slavery Assemblages in Paul et Virginie and Belinda” reverses this trend to read Edgeworth’s work as an antislavery and anti-racist work with a nuanced understanding of Black culture.7 Cassity’s conclusion that Belinda proves “Edgeworth’s defiant opposition to the horrific legacy of slavery and racial intolerance,” while somewhat tenuous in its extended metaphorical reading of Juba’s 3  James M.  Morris, “Transferential Rhetoric and Beyond: The West Indian Present in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda and Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray,” in Intersections of Gender, Class, and Race in the Long Nineteenth-Century and Beyond, eds. Barbara Leonardi (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 165–89. 4  Sharon Smith, “Juba’s ‘Black Face’/Lady Delacour’s ‘Mask’: Plotting Domesticity in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.” The Eighteenth-Century Theory and Interpretation, 54, no. 1 (Spring 2013), 73. 5  Smith, “Juba’s ‘Black Face’/Lady Delacour’s ‘Mask,’” 73. 6  Andrew McCann, “Conjugal Love and the Enlightenment Subject: The Colonial Context of Non-Identity in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 30, no. 1 (Autumn 1996), 56–77. 7  Connie Cassity, “Caught by the Throat: Anti-slavery Assemblages in Paul et Virginie and Belinda,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 31 no. 1 (Fall 2018), 99–115.

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Angola pea necklace, is compelling in its attention to the role JacquesHenri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1788) plays in the novel. Following Cassity’s example, this chapter attends closely to Edgeworth’s intertexts and early editions, but it builds a case for how Edgeworth’s repeated use of multiple intertexts in contrast with her revisions shed light on slavery’s centrality to the novel’s resolution. Specifically, this chapter argues that in the 1801 and 1802 editions of Edgeworth’s novel, Belinda’s suitors reveal their suitability for marriage through discussions of slavery. The early contest between Belinda’s two suitors, Mr. Augustus Vincent and Mr. Clarence Hervey’s reading of Thomas Day’s and John Bicknell’s poem, “The Dying Negro” is crucial to sorting the novel’s relationship to sentiment and slavery.8 While Marjorie Lightfoot has usefully categorized the ways in which Belinda invokes literature to satirize the follies of British society, her focus on individual characters’ relationships’ to various genres, “a moral tale, novel, sentimental romance, Gothic thriller, picaresque tale, mock heroic poem, Shakespearean drama, comedy of manners in the form of a novel or play or some other genre,”9 neglects the genre of abolitionist literature. However, as we will see, discussion of a sentimental abolitionist poem becomes a test of character and marriageability. The contest begins when Lady Delacour turns her interlocutors’ attention to consideration of Day’s work. We are told by the narrator that after discussing the African slave trade more generally, “she finished precisely where she had intended, and where Mr. Vincent could have wished, by praising a poem called ‘The Dying Negro,’ which he had, the preceding evening, brought to read to Belinda” (347). Delacour’s manipulation here is notable in the fact that she has by this point in the novel repeatedly demonstrated her preference for Belinda’s choice of Hervey over Vincent. Delacour’s intention to discuss “The Dying Negro,” then is a manifestation of her belief that, despite Vincent’s enthusiasm for the subject and praise of the abolitionist poem, Belinda would disapprove of his views on the subject. Vincent’s disadvantage here is highlighted when we are told by the narrator that Delacour’s praise of the poem “was particularly agreeable, because he was not perfectly sure of his own critical judgment and his knowledge of English 8  Vincent’s full name is Augustus Vincent, aligning him with the various tyrannical Augustus’s of Edgeworth’s Moral Tales (1804). 9  Marjorie Lightfoot, “‘Morals for Those That Like Them’: The Satire of Edgeworth’s Belinda, 1801,” Éire-Ireland, 29, no. 4 (Winter 1994), 124–25.

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literature was not as extensive as Clarence Hervey’s; a circumstance, which lady Delacour had discovered one morning” (347). Not only is Vincent insecure about how the poem might highlight Hervey’s superiority, but Vincent’s uncertainty about his “own critical judgment” of the poem flaunts his hypocrisy as a slave owner. The narrator shows us how, unfortunately for Vincent, Delacour deliberately takes advantage of his insecurities: “Flattered by her [Delacour’s] present confirmation of his taste, Mr. Vincent readily complied with a request to read the poem to Belinda” (348). Delacour anticipates that the irony of a Jamaican planter praising an abolitionist poem will not be lost on Belinda. Susan Greenfield argues that Vincent “identifies himself with African men when he reads Belinda The Dying Negro,” an assertion that leads Greenfield, in conjunction with Vincent’s attempted suicide by gun—like the subject of Day’s poem—to conclude that Vincent’s identification with a Black man threatens miscegenation and renders him an inappropriate husband.10 More immediately threatening to Vincent’s successful suit in this context, however, is Hervey’s superior taste. Edgeworth’s narrator tells us that while Belinda and Delacour “were all deeply engaged by the charms of poetry” offered by Vincent’s reading of “The Dying Negro,” a sudden entrance by Hervey quickly reveals the nature of the  skepticism Delacour hoped for Belinda’s response to it. (348). In an ironic reification of the poem’s African speaker cursing white slavers to loveless, jealous lives, “The book dropped from Vincent’s hand, the instant that he heard his [Hervey’s] name” (349). Vincent fears Hervey and with good reason. Upon Hervey’s introduction within the novel, Lady Delacour clarifies the nature of his superiority: “Clarence Hervey’s principle—perhaps you don’t think that he has any principles; but there you are wrong; I do assure you, he has sound principles—of taste” (19). Hervey explicitly prides himself on this quality, combatting Lady Delacour’s growing jealousy of his interest in Belinda by saying: “[A]ll the world must be sensible that Clarence Hervey is a man of too much taste to compare a country novice in wit and accomplishments to Lady Delacour” (79). Hervey also proves his superior taste in wine to that of Sir Phillip Baddely, and, approving his conclusions regarding Lady Percival’s superiority, the narrator tells us, “indeed there was no species of knowledge for which he had not taste and talents” (99). Further, about Hervey’s conversation with the Spanish minister invited to 10  Susan Greenfield, “‘Abroad and at Home’: Sexual Ambiguity, Miscegenation, and Colonial Boundaries in Edgeworth’s Belinda,” PMLA 112, no. 2 (March 1997), 220.

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a “select party” (112) at Lady Delacour’s we are told: “From Twiss to Vida, from Irwin to Sir William Jones, from Spain to India, he passed with admirable celerity, and seized all that could adorn his course from Indian Antiquities of Asiatic Researches” (113). Thus, “The ladies admired his taste as a poet” (113), and Belinda too, at least initially, admires this superiority; regarding Hervey’s close relationship with Dr. X, we are told: “‘On this instance I certainly do admire Mr. Hervey’s taste,’ said Belinda, ‘for the best of all possible reasons, because it entirely agrees with my own’” (117). Thus, when Delacour expertly maneuvers the discussion back to the poem by observing how it is admirable for the “manly, energetic spirit of virtue, which it breathes,” she is trying to help her favorite secure the upper hand in Belinda’s favor by demonstrating his superior taste in literature (349). In light of this, the details of Day’s poem are necessary to understand the nature of Hervey’s superior taste and the novel’s critique of sentimental abolitionism. “The Dying Negro” was first published in 1773  in response to a newspaper article chronicling the suicide of an African man on English soil who, despite having married a white, English, serving woman, was threatened with a return to the West Indies in chains. The poem questions the enforceability of Lord Mansfield’s 1772 decision in the Somerset case that barred enslavement on English soil, and the popularity of the poem was answered with two expanded editions in 1774 and 1775. Throughout the poem, the African speaker invokes various audiences to describe his experiences as a slave. He opens by vowing the suicide that would remove him from the power of his English captors, “Whose impious avarice and pride / The holy Cross to my sad brows deny’d/Forbade me Nature’s common right to claim / Or share with thee a Christian’s sacred name.”11 Day’s speaker combines Christian claims to the equality of souls with political claims to the equal rights of all human beings. The speaker goes on to celebrate his own bravery and heroism hunting tigers and lions on his native shores until “human brutes” (8) “more cruel far than they” (8) rendered him a “thing without a name” (9). The poem’s speaker recounts being cheated by Europeans and their alcohol, duped into boarding a ship, and awaking in chains, a story strikingly similar to that told by Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, but rather that emphasizing the hero’s courage and bravery in defying his white captors,

 Thomas Day, The Dying Negro (London, 1775), 6. References are to this edition.

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Day’s speaker shifts focus to address his white lover, “a mistress and a friend,” With heaving sighs thy lovely bosom rose; The trickling drops of liquid crystal stole Down thy fair cheeks, and mark’d thy pitying soul: Dear drops! Upon my bleeding heart, like balm They fell, and soon my tortur’d mind grew calm; Then my lov’d country, parents, friends forgot; Heav’n I absolved, nor murmured at my lot; Thy sacred smiles could ev’ry pang remove, And liberty became less dear than love. (14)

The speaker momentarily suspends his own objectification to insist upon that of his lover and upon the ability of feeling to salve a troubled mind and erase geopolitical injustice. Ultimately, however, we are told how the “softer frames” and “feebler souls” of “pallid tyrants” “unus’d to pity or to feel” return him to chains and despair. The speaker curses white slavers to suffer “unrequited passion” and the “jealousy” of a “favored rival” (19). He also simultaneously demands the wrecking of English slave ships on distant shores and asks God to “lead me to that spot, that sacred shore,/ Where souls are free, and men oppress no more!” (24). Poetic justice requires sentimental retribution. Brycchan Carey has argued that Day’s “poem did much to mobilized early anti-slavery sentiment and showed that poetry would be a crucial resource” for abolitionists.12 He goes on to explain how the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (SEAAST), upon the popularity of Day’s work commissioned a number of additional poems “making much use of a fashionable sentimental rhetoric.”13 Accordingly, when Hervey concurs with his ally Delacour and credits the virtues of the poem to the character of its author Thomas Day, he exemplifies the aestheticizing of abolitionism that Simon Gikandi sees represented by Wedgewood’s “Am I not a Man and a Brother” medallion. Gikandi writes, “Wedgewood understood how sensibility itself could

12  Brycchan Carey, “The Poetics of Radical Abolitionism: Ann Yearsley’s ‘Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade,’” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 34, no. 1 (Spring 2015), 93. 13  Carey, “The Poetics,” 93.

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emerge from the intersection of art, commerce, and social protest.”14 When Hervey declaims that Day according to “his [Hervey’s] definition of a good orator,” “must be a good man” (349), Day’s artistic form of social protest becomes yet another opportunity for Hervey to exemplify his superior taste. In contrast, “Mr. Vincent coldly replied, ‘This definition would exclude too many men of superior talents, to be easily admitted’” (349). Edgeworth’s novel is doing more here than pitting its suitors against one another in a literary duel. Vincent’s observation about the disconnect between taste and moral worth questions the sincerity of Day’s abolitionist sentiments and the sincerity of Hervey’s appreciation of them. Significantly, Belinda agrees with Vincent’s critique when she concludes, “Perhaps the appearance of virtue … might on many occasions, succeed as well as reality” (351). Belinda allows that the appearance of virtue might be good enough to fool others into assuming real virtue, but not always and, presumably, not in this case. At this point in the novel, Belinda’s observation about the potential for a man to be good as opposed to merely appearing good might seem to refer merely to her suspicions that Hervey keeps a mistress, a surmise relayed to Belinda just before “The Dying Negro” conversation by Delacour’s maid. This is exactly how Delacour interprets Belinda’s observation, so Delacour attempts to reinforce her friend’s position by “seizing Mr. Vincent’s book,” reading from it a paragraph about Thomas Day’s moral and literary views, and requesting Hervey read a portion of Day’s poem “To the Authoress of ‘Verses to be inscribed on Delia’s Tomb.’” Significantly, the paragraph Delacour reads about Day explicitly links his “character” to his “sympathy,” and established his virtue according to Day’s “strong detestation of female seduction” (351). Delacour links this virtue in Day to Hervey when she next points out the lines Hervey must read, those in which the speaker of another poem demands his male readers swear that: “ne’er by thee deceived, the tender maid/ Shall mourn her easy confidence betray’d,/Nor weep in secret the triumphant heart; / With bitter anguish rankling in her heart” (351). Nevertheless, the novel forestalls interpretive certainty here regarding the value of such professions of sensibility and their relationship to virtue. We read that: “Mr. Hervey read these lines with so much unaffected, unembarrassed energy, that lady Delacour could not help casting a triumphant look at Belinda, 14  Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 22.

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which said, or seemed to say—‘You see, I was right in my opinion of Clarence’” (351). However, the excessiveness of Hervey’s “unaffected, unembarrassed” manner, especially for one with a celebrated reputation as a lady’s man, reeks of a suspiciously practised dissimulation. Also, the narrator is conspicuously silent on whether Delacour’s look says to Belinda what Delacour intends. Similarly, the line, “Belinda’s countenance openly expressed satisfaction; it seemed to say, ‘I am glad, that Mr. Hervey is worthy of our esteem, though he can no longer have any claim to my love,’” proves the circularity of Delacour’s belief that intention speaks because it is intended to do so (351). The opacity of “seemed” suggests Belinda’s satisfaction just as likely arises from her feeling justified in seeing through Hervey’s caricature of worthiness. She can recognize the mere appearance of virtue instead of its reality in the poem’s suspicious rendering of both the seducer and the seduced as victims equally worthy of sympathy. The disconnect between the appearance of virtue and real virtue modeled in this scene and its implications become clearer when we consider that Edgeworth takes the biographical paragraph read by Delacour and the lines read by Hervey from James Keir’s An Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Day, Esq. (1791). Edgeworth knew Keir through his membership in the Lunar Society, of which her father and Thomas Day were also members, and Edgeworth visited Keir in 1799 at Birmingham, after which they became lifelong friends.15 Testifying to their shared perspectives, Keir’s Dialogues on Chemistry Between a Father and his Daughter (1805) and Edgeworth’s Harry and Lucy (1801) and Harry and Lucy Concluded (1825) reflect their mutual interest in the careful instruction of science for children. In An Account, Keir provides biographical detail to explain the impetus of each of Day’s publications and unifies them according to Day’s very different kind of interest in children’s education. Specifically, Keir makes clear the failures of Day’s “sympathetic character,” explaining the same “detestation of female seduction” that led Day to write “Delia’s Tomb” also led him to adopt two orphans and raise them according to what Keir denounces as the “seductive eloquence of Rousseau.”16 As Wendy Moore has detailed, Day’s original plan to educate 15  Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 141. 16  James Keir, An Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Day, Esq. (London: 1791), 25. References are to this edition.

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these young women and choose one of them for his wife failed.17 He refused the first and apprenticed her, Lucretia, with a milliner; she ­eventually married a linen draper. He refused the other, Sabrina, and eventually consented to her marriage with his writing partner, Bicknell. In his Account, Keir acknowledges the failure of either of these girls to become the ideal wife Day intended, concluding “nothing surely can be more absurd than the principle of this plan of education, or more impracticable in execution” (25). Notably, not only does Edgeworth’s quotation of Keir reflect her general knowledge of contemporary gossip about the failure of Day’s sympathetic character to do good, it also suggests a deeper disdain for his infliction of trauma on women. Moore reiterates the idea that Belinda’s Virginia St. Pierre plot is an act of “literary revenge” on Day, one that Edgeworth herself explained in her father’s memoirs.18 Moore also notes that in the same year as Belinda, Edgeworth also published “Forrester,” in the first volume of Moral Tales (1801). In this text, the eponymous young hero refuses basic manners and sports the dirty boots and messy hair for which Day was infamously unapologetic.19 Edgeworth also knew that Day was well aware of the utter failure of her father’s applying Rousseau’s theories of education in the case of her own brother Dick, who had become estranged from the family. Repeating Keir’s observations on the high-flown philosophical fantasies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that informed a “natural” education and that refused to “explain our duties and relations, but also the acquisition of the most important habits, particularly that of controlling our selfish impulses for the sake of general order and happiness,” is Edgeworth’s repudiation of Day (26). According to Keir, Day was impulsive and selfish in ways injurious to others. Edgeworth repeats this judgment and extends it to Hervey through his identification with Day. Edgeworth’s invocation of Keir regarding Day’s Rousseauism is valuable in unpacking the interpretive impasses debated and depicted in Belinda’s discussion of “The Dying Negro” because, as Keir admits, 17  Wendy Moore. How to Create the Perfect Wife: Britain’s Most Ineligible Bachelor and His Enlightened Question to Train the Ideal Mate (New York: Basic Books, 2013). She also reads the title Belinda as a “rebuff to Day’s advice to would-be female writers” in “Advice to the Ladies” (1731), which claimed women’s brains were too feeble for wit. 18  Moore, How to Create the Perfect Wife, 254. Edgeworth confronted Sabrina about her painful history when preparing to write her father’s memoir, writing to her and meeting her in 1809. 19  Moore, How to Create the Perfect Wife, 253.

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despite Rousseau’s “absurdities,” Day names Rousseau, in the poem’s second edition, as the only human being worthy the dedication of his first published literary work. In this dedication, Day insists that Rousseau’s “matchless eloquence is less admirable than the fortitude with which he has developed the principles, and defended the rights of human nature; whose virtue is as unequalled as his genius; and whose life is a nobler pattern of imitation than his writings” (iv). Following this celebration of eloquence over action, Day appends his poem, in “protection of the injured Africans,” as proof of his “glowing passion of philanthropy, and the indignation of humanity at the practice of subjecting one unfortunate part of our species to the dominion, avarice, and cruelty of another” (39). However, as evidenced by Day’s publication of Fragment of an Original Letter on the Slavery of the Negroes in 1784, the poem’s lofty expression of feeling for enslaved suffering had failed to end their subjection. Thus, in Fragment, which he had originally written in 1776, Day finds himself offering a rational prose repudiation of slavery to one of his friends, the American slave-owner Henry Laurens; Day builds this argument upon an assumption not of feeling, as he had earlier, but of universal human rights. He insists that “there are such things as Right and Justice, to which the whole human species have an indefeasible claim.”20 Day goes one to emphasize that only “a professed enemy to mankind” could deny “there are certain claims, which for want of a better name, we call rights, to which the human species has an indisputable title” (1). He writes: “If men would be consistent, they must admit all the consequences of their own principles” (1). Day tells his American correspondent that “you have to admit that your negroes have rights, or you have to give up your own rights”(1). He concludes that the natural and universal rights claimed in the Declaration of Independence must be applied universally in order for the claim to have any validity. While Day’s publication of Fragment functions as a partial acknowledgment of the inefficacy of his poem to prompt the political will necessary to end British slavery, Belinda’s focus on the poem within a larger context of debate about slavery provides useful direction for how we should read Belinda’s “seeming satisfaction” in the face of Hervey’s “proof” that an appearance of virtue must necessarily translate into real virtue or that we must believe that when something sounds good it comes from a good 20  Thomas Day, Fragment of an Original Letter on the Slavery of the Negroes, Written in the year 1776 (London, 1784), 1. References are to this edition.

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person. Part of this context includes the fact that Delacour arranges the discussion of the poems above following an incident involving Vincent’s dog, and it is this incident that provides the first evidence of Belinda’s skepticism regarding the efficacy of sentimentality in reflecting human virtue and the natural and universal rights it was often used to claim. The infamous episode occurs immediately after Delacour’s grudging acknowledgment to Belinda that Belinda’s own preference should remain primary in accepting any marriage proposal, despite Delacour’s partiality for Hervey. In this moment, Delacour has agreed to be fair and allow Vincent a decent chance at winning Belinda’s hand. However, when Delacour finds out that Vincent is on good terms with her nemesis, Mrs. Luttridge, Delacour takes out her frustration on Vincent’s dog, balking when her daughter Helena plays with the apparently traitorous pet, Juba. Vincent tries to salve her pique by assuring Delacour “that he is the very quietest and best creature in the world,” but, based on the fact that Vincent is served by his only recently manumitted Black manservant—also named Juba—Belinda offers a sarcastic critique of the planter’s sentiment (345). We read: ‘No doubt,’ said Belinda, smiling, ‘since he belongs to you; for you know, as Mr. Percival tells you, every thing animate or inanimate, that is under your protection, you think must be the best of its kind in the universe.’ ‘But really, Juba is the best creature in the world,’ repeated Mr. Vincent, with great eagerness, ‘Juba is, without exception the best creature in the universe.’ ‘Juba, the dog, or Juba, the man?’ said Belinda, ‘you know they cannot be both the best creatures in the universe.’ ‘Well! Juba, the man, is the best man—and Juba, the dog, is the best dog, in the universe,’ said Mr. Vincent, laughing, with his usual candour, at his own foible, when it was pointed out to him. (346)

As Cassity has pointed out, many critics have read the scene as evidence of Vincent’s racism.21 This fact seems indisputable, but what critics have overlooked in this scene is the fact that Belinda’s joke deliberately exposes 21  Cassity, “Caught by the Throat,” 114. She mentions Greenfield and Smith as examples. She also mentions Julie Nash’s focus on the “dog-like,” blind devotion of Edgeworth’s white-servant characters. Julie Nash, “Standing in Distress Between Tragedy and Comedy’: Servants in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” in New Essays on Maria Edgeworth, ed. Julie Nash (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 165.

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it. Vincent tries to deflect Belinda’s criticism by quickly emphasizing the trustworthiness of his dog. Here, however, we see Belinda carefully question the compatibility of sincere fondness and real respect for those without liberty. Her skepticism challenges sentiment’s ability to reflect virtue. Here, Edgeworth clearly also invokes the language of Day’s “Fragment” to parody the incompatibility of rational arguments declaring universal human rights with those offering only sentimentality. Day’s letter uses “universe” and “species,” where Vincent uses “universe” and “creature.” Playing off the use of “creature,” referring affectionately to another human being, against the use referring to animals in distinction from humans, Belinda’s question slyly satirizes Vincent’s reduction of the human to a sentimental object for whom he does not seem truly to feel an emotional connection and moral responsibility.22 His “eagerness” to justify his position and his “laughing” discomfort reinforce the reality of his unjust enslavement of other human beings. This is the origin of the poetic debate analyzed above. Lady Delacour, always the opportunist, capitalizes upon this sore spot: “her ladyship now turned the conversation from Juba, the dog, to Juba, the man. She talked of Harriet Freke’s phosphoric Obeah-woman, of whom, she said, she had heard an account from Miss Portman. She spoke of Juba’s marriage, and of his master’s generosity to him. From thence she went on to the African slave trade … and she finished precisely where she had intended … by 22  Also suggestive of the nature of Edgeworth’s critique of sentimental abolitionism is her repetition of the Vincent name from Anna Maria MacKenzie’s Slavery, or The Times (1792). While there is not proof that Edgeworth read MacKenzie’s novel, Edgeworth’s extensive knowledge of works exploring transatlantic slavery encourages speculation. MacKenzie’s text follows the education of an African prince—Adolphus—on his journeys from Africa to the West Indies, England, and France, and his witnessing of the multiple forms of enslavement (including navy impressment, forced marriage, and chattel slavery). Published in the same year as Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, MacKenzie’s choice of Adolphus for the name of her hero could have been inspired by Equiano’s discussion of his own naming as GustavusVassa after the king of Sweden (1523–1560); Gustavus Adolphus being king of Sweden (1594–1632). MacKenzie’s pitting of her aristocratic mixed-race hero against odious racist bigots explores assumptions about the relationship between race and enslavement. In MacKenzie’s novel, Mr. Vincent is also a plantation owner, in particular one who refuses to inflict corporal punishment upon his slaves, instead allowing them to work according to their inclination. By the end of the novel, however, MacKenzie’s Vincent is revealed to be General St. Leger, leader of Revolutionary forces in America. The novel ends with a lengthy disquisition on the nature of political rebellion and the duties and responsibilities of those in power. Similarly, Edgeworth’s exile of Vincent insists on the incompatibility of revolutionary principles with the mere amelioration of slavery.

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praising a poem called ‘The Dying Negro’” (347). Delacour uses the fact that Belinda has just told her about Harriet Freke’s nefarious pranking of Juba and of Juba’s marriage to the serving-girl Lucy to revive Belinda’s critique of Vincent.23 The narrator’s use of Belinda’s exact phrasing in combination with Delacour’s self-interested machinations, “Juba, the dog, or, Juba, the man” revitalizes Belinda’s critique of sentimental discourse in the context of slavery. In mentioning Freke’s manipulation of Juba’s religious beliefs, Delacour primes Belinda’s interest in the victims of slavery, and in moving from the subject of Juba’s marriage to Day’s poem, Delacour calls into question the “generosity” of Vincent as Juba’s “master.” Like the speaker of Day’s poem, all that is needed to overturn Juba’s good fortune in settling down with a white woman on English soil is his capture and transportation to the West Indies. Edgeworth intensifies her critique of the sentimentality of abolitionist discourse through intertextual allusion to John Moore’s antislavery novel Zeluco (1789).24 Specifically, Lady Delacour compares Belinda’s hesitance to commit to either Vincent or Hervey to Moore’s character, Mr. Transfer (339). While Mr. Transfer learns over the course of Zeluco to value family in addition to wealth, this minor subplot within the novel’s major focus on Zeluco’s transformation from slave-torturing planter to unfaithful husband and child murderer is significant. Through this intertextual comparison, the novel emphasizes how both suitors maintain uncomfortable ties to and views of slavery. Delacour’s analogy invites additional comparison between the character of Zeluco to Vincent as planter and to Hervey as an impassioned fanatic whose Rousseauian experiment to form Virginia St. Pierre into a perfect wife requires the intercession of the good Dr. X. While 23  Nicole Wright focuses on how Harriet Freke exploits Juba’s spiritual beliefs. She contends that the novel demonstrates that empirical enquiry and application of reason empower characters of all races by helping disabuse them of irrational beliefs. With respect to Juba, Belinda disabuses him of superstition through the phosphorous experiment. Nicole Wright, “Opening the Phosphoric ‘Envelope’: Scientific Appraisal, Domestic Spectacle, and (Un)‘Reasonable Creatures’ in Edgeworth’s Belinda,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 24, no. 3 (Spring 2012), 509–536. While I agree that Edgeworth is particularly interested in inculcating reason over superstition in both Juba and Lady Delacour, I’m not convinced of their equal treatment. Belinda uses children to explain the use of phosphorous, in essence infantilizing Juba. Justine Murison’s recent article on the subject of Obeah repeats this reading of the novel’s replacement of superstition with science but contrasts it with contemporary treatment of West Indian disease. Justine Murison, “Obeah and its Others: Buffered Selves in the Era of Tropical Medicine,” Atlantic Studies 12, no. 2 (2015), 144–59. 24  Many scholars have recognized John Moore himself as the model for Edgeworth’s Dr. X.

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Vincent’s sympathy for Juba accounts for Juba’s emancipation, Vincent’s wealth continues to flow from his plantations and the enslaved upon whom they depend, and while Hervey’s conclusion that the poetic beauty of Day’s “The Dying Negro” proclaims his superior taste, his hypocrisy in deciding to rename Rachel Virginia, like a planter would a newly enslaved African, flows through his fantasies of a kept woman. Jeanine Britton has also observed the significance of the Virginia St. Pierre plot, arguing that its highlighting of “the potential that confrontations with literary or false character have for enriching psychological interiority, moral integrity, and independent resolve” is the “crux of the novel.”25 Nevertheless, her focus on Virginia’s reading of Paul et Virginie (1788) and her portrait as clues to Virginia’s true character overlook Hervey’s role and responsibility in its formation. Clarence Hervey transforms Rachel into the literary character of Virginia St. Pierre. Through her renaming, he invokes the island key to France’s global trade, and he commissions the exotic portrait through which Virginia is introduced in the novel. Almost human, she is, “A most beautiful creature!” Virginia is described as a “foreign beauty” and judged by her “air, her dress, and the scenery about her—cocoa trees, plantains” (190). Despite her lack of love for Hervey and her distaste for her impending marriage to him, her biggest fear is that Hervey will “think [her] the most ungrateful of human beings” (465). As such, “perfidious, ungrateful Virginia” invokes a distorted version of the grateful slave trope (466). She is his captive; nevertheless, Clarence is angry and frustrated that her “gratitude” should “sacrifice his happiness,” or, in other words, trap him in a marriage with her when he would rather be married to Belinda. When his anger provokes her violent tears, Virginia reveals that gratitude is not actually what she feels for Hervey at all: “‘Do not look at me with so much terror, Virginia,’ She burst into tears” (467). Virginia’s terror proves that she feels quite otherwise than grateful to her master. By painting his tyranny with the brush of plantocratic fantasy, Edgeworth’s novel indicts the sentimental discourses of slavery for their objectifying tendencies. The end of the novel reinforces the fact that sentimentality in discussions of slavery only poorly masks the greedy self-interest driving British slave trading and slave holding and reveals a lack of character and principled virtue. Vincent exits the narrative in disgrace after losing his entire 25  Jeanne Britton, “Theorizing Character in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” NineteenthCentury Literature 67, no. 4 (Spring 2013), 440.

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fortune to the gaming tables, a tragic fate inevitable since: “The taste for gambling he had acquired whilst he was a child; but as it was confined to trifles, it had been passed over, as a thing of no consequence, a boyish folly, that would never grow up with him: his father used to see him, day after day, playing with eagerness, at games of chance, with his negroes, or with the sons of neighbouring planters; yet he was never alarmed; he was too intent upon making a fortune for his family” (422–423). His father’s focus on extracting as much wealth from those he enslaved precluded him from attending to his responsibility as a father to inculcate virtue. Later, while under the guardianship of Mr. Percival, Vincent is introduced to the “ruinous effects of high play in real life,” and “his emotion was stronger than his conviction; his feelings were always more powerful than his reason” (423). While Vincent’s sympathetic character led to Juba’s emancipation, it also led to his own attempted suicide and removal to Germany, the only proper place for any young Werther’s excessive sensibility.26 The novel also indicts the excessive sensibility of Virginia’s planter father: “Mr. Hartley, a gentleman who had made a considerable fortune in the West Indies” (423). Mr. Hartley, in another allusion to the evils of Zeluco, had abandoned his daughter in order to form “a new connexion with the rich widow of a planter in Jamaica,” and only after the deaths of this widow-made-wife and their son does Hartley reconsider “the desertion of his daughter.” Note the construction. Hartley still refuses to take responsibility for his previous obsession with wealth (408). We read: “Mr. Hartley, left alone in the midst of his wealth, felt how insufficient it was to happiness;” his motivation for reform in this case is still entirely selfish (408). His new appearance of virtue only proves his continued failure to privilege his responsibility to others over his greed. Nevertheless, Hartley entrusts Captain Sunderland with his daughter’s hand and the property which she will inherit after his death because Sunderland is responsible for saving Hartley’s life “some years ago at Jamaica,” likely at the expense of Black life during “a rebellion of the negroes on [Hartley’s] plantation” (408). Conveniently, Sunderland’s most recent sailing orders from the navy return him to the West Indies “where he had hopes of making a fortune” and he could oversee his new property (475). Despite or perhaps because of the fact that Hartley’s West Indian spoils seem to have led directly to the “derangement” and “disorder” (476) of his “intellects” 26  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Werther’s unrequited love for the engaged Charlotte leads him to shoot himself in the head.

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(477), he dooms Virginia St. Pierre to suffer from his continued moral failures, from the mere professions of a sympathetic character who fails to end the immoralities of plantation slavery. Complicating this reading is the fact that Edgeworth revised Belinda twice. First in 1802, she clarified Belinda’s behavior toward Hervey and amplified his declared passion for Belinda. As is now well-known, the revisions for Anna Letitia Barbauld’s anthology British Novelists (1810) were more extensive. In this edition, Edgeworth eliminates the interracial relationship testifying to Juba’s humanity and right to equal citizenship and de-emphasizes Belinda’s relationship with Vincent. She writes: “In the second volume, ‘Jackson’ is substitute for the husband of Lucy instead of ‘Juba,’ many people having been scandalized at the idea of a black man marrying a white woman; my father says that gentlemen have horrors upon the subject, and would draw conclusions very unfavorable to a female writers who appeared to recommend such unions; as I do not understand the subject, I trust to his better judgment, and end with—for Juba read Jackson.”27 The fact that Edgeworth failed to make these changes consistently throughout the novel has led Iwanisziw and Kirkpatrick to the compelling conclusion that these remarks reflect her ambivalence toward the revisions and suggest Edgeworth’s justification should be read facetiously; she was half-heartedly placating her father and critics.28 Nevertheless, Kirkpatrick’s observations about the nature and extent of revisions surrounding Vincent for the 1810 edition are extremely important for understanding the role of sentiment in abolitionist discourse before and after the 1807 end of British involvement in the trade. In the later edition, Edgeworth changes the discussion about love and suitors between Belinda and Lady Delacour to involve Belinda and Lady Percival. In the 1801 edition, Delacour prompts Belinda to defend Vincent; Delacour champions passion and Belinda reason. This conversation, which 27  Suvendrini Perera, Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 16–17. Alison Harvey agrees that Edgeworth’s disavowal in this letter is disingenuous. “West Indian ‘Obeah’ and English ‘Obee’: Race, Femininity, and Questions of Colonial Consolidation in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” in New Essays on Maria Edgeworth, ed. Julie Nash (Burlington: Ashgate, 2000), 3. 28   Susan Iwanisziw, “Intermarriage in Late-Eighteenth-Century British Literature: Currents in Assimilation and Exclusion.” Eighteenth-Century Life. 31 no. 2 (Spring 2007), 76. Kathryn Kirkpatrick, ‘Gentlemen Have Horrors Upon This Subject’: West Indian Suitors in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 5 no. 4 (July 1993), 342.

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includes the reference to Zeluco’s Mr. Transfer detailed above, ends with the following lines from Delacour: “One does grow accustomed to disagreeable things, certainly; and it is well one does,’ said lady Delacour, a little embarrassed. ‘But at this rate, my dear, I do not doubt, but you might become accustomed to Caliban.’ ‘My belief in the reconciling power of custom does not go quite so far,’ said Belinda, laughing. ‘It does not extend to Caliban, or even to la belle et la bête. Tho you have seen a French audience applaud with raptures, and an English audience tolerate, Zemire and Azor.’”(340)

In this early edition, Belinda’s critical joke links acceptance of the slave Caliban to an excessive French sensibility contrasted with the English habit of intellectual evaluation. She archly refuses any association between herself and an acceptance of slavery. In the 1810 edition, however, Belinda is the one to introduce the idea of growing “accustomed to Caliban,” and other “disagreeable things” (xxxi). Lady Percival is the one to laugh. Kirkpatrick argues that by having Belinda introduce the association of the West Indian planter with Prospero’s slave, she “is censored as an advocate for rational love” and “loses her position as agent” (xxxii). It also transfers to Belinda the ability to grow accustomed to slavery, an ability the earlier edition dismisses. Further, when the reference of Zemire et Azor (1771) and the contrast between French raptures and English toleration toward it is given to Lady Percival, she—not Belinda—is given the authority to laugh at belief in the ability of emotion to bring about reform. That becomes significant when considering this comic opera is a mash-up of The Tempest and Beauty and the Beast. In Zemire et Azor, a shipwrecked merchant—Sander—plucks a rose for his daughter—Zemire—from the garden of the beast-like Azor. Azor explains that as punishment, he must convince one of his daughters to take his place. Zemire agrees and learns to care for him; he, the Caliban-like beast, is transformed through sentimental intervention. In the earlier edition, Belinda refuses slavery and contrasts rational with sentimental discourses of abolition. In 1810, Belinda fears slavery and Percival validates English toleration of sentimental abolitionist discourse. This change is especially significant in terms of the novel’s end. While we are clearly encouraged by Lady Delacour to believe that Belinda will marry Hervey, by the end of the novel she has not. Britton has emphasized this fact, explaining that while “Virginia’s marriage to Sunderland is

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indicated by their theatrical poses; Belinda’s is only suggested by Lady Delacour telling Clarence that he has ‘a right to Belinda’s hand, and may kiss it too’ and admonishing Belinda, ‘Nay, miss Portman, it is the rule of the stage.’ As she does at the novel’s beginning, Belinda stands outside Edgeworth’s fictional range, her character still awaiting the ‘development’ and ‘change of feeling’ that the novel seems to promise but does not deliver.”29 I would argue that this fact emphasizes, on the last page of the novel, the necessity of Hervey’s ongoing character development as much as it does Belinda’s. Delacour also advises him “to accompany captain Sunderland” on his cruise (477). What Hervey learns from his West Indian travels and his slave-revolt-quashing companion will be essential in light of Belinda’s previous skepticism toward him and her ability to become accustomed to him as a lover. The early edition suggests that should Hervey’s sentimental abolitionist professions continue to run up against his tyrannical fantasies Belinda could or should have the wherewithal to reject him. The later edition suggests otherwise, indicating, perhaps, that three years after the abolition of the British slave trade, abolition no longer functioned as a cultural flashpoint dominating conversations and defining character. Instead, in 1810, the newly sensible Belinda begins the long history of mythmaking around the moral progress of British abolition by celebrating her inevitable union with a sentimental connoisseur of slavery and British imperial supremacy, a process Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery unmasked less than 30 years ago.30 Maria Edgeworth opens Belinda by insisting that in it she had avoided the instruction in “error” promulgated by so many authors of the genre. Accordingly, her heroine, unlike her suitors, proves “true to [her] principles to the last gasp” (477). In 1801, those principles include relying on her own judgment in the evaluation of character, especially that of any potential suitor according to his views of slavery. The novel offers Belinda’s discerning example as a serious critique of the space between affect and action.

Bibliography Batchelor, Jennie. Dress, Distress and Desire: Clothing and the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

 Britton, “Theorizing Character,” 447.  Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

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Britton, Jeanne “Theorizing Character in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 67, no. 4 (Spring 2013): 433–56. Butler, Marilyn Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. Carey, Brycchan. “The Poetics of Radical Abolitionism: Ann Yearsley’s ‘Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade,’” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 34, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 89–105. Cassity, Connie. “Caught by the Throat: Anti-slavery Assemblages in Paul et Virginie and Belinda,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 31 no. 1 (Fall 2018): 99–115. Day, Thomas. The Dying Negro. London, 1775. Day, Thomas Fragment of an Original Letter on the Slavery of the Negroes, Written in the year 1776. London: 1784. Edgeworth, Maria. Belinda. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Egenolf, Susan. The Art of Political Fiction in Hamilton, Edgeworth and Owenson. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. Gikandi, Simon. Slavery and the Culture of Taste. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Greenfield, Susan. “’Abroad and at Home’: Sexual Ambiguity, Miscegenation, and Colonial Boundaries in Edgeworth’s Belinda,” PMLA 112, no. 2 (March 1997): 214–28. Harvey, Alison. “’West Indian Obeah and English ‘Obee’: Race, Femininity, and Questions of Colonial Consolidation in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.” In New Essays on Maria Edgeworth, edited by Julie Nash, 1–20. Burlington: Ashgate, 2000. Iwanisziw, Susan. “Intermarriage in Late-Eighteenth-Century British Literature: Currents in Assimilation and Exclusion.” Eighteenth-Century Life. 31 no. 2 (Spring 2007): 56–82. Keir, James. An Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Day, Esq. London: 1791. Kirkpatrick, Kathryn. “‘Gentlemen Have Horrors Upon This Subject’: West Indian Suitors in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 5 no. 4 (July 1993): 331–48. Kirkpatrick, Katherine “The Limits of Liberal Feminism in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.” In Jane Austen and Mary Shelley and Their Sisters, edited by Laura Dabundo, 73–82. New York: University Press of America, 2000. Lightfoot, Marjorie. “’Morals for Those That Like Them’: The Satire of Edgeworth’s Belinda, 1801,” Éire-Ireland, 29, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 124–25. McCann, Andrew. “Conjugal Love and the Enlightenment Subject: The Colonial Context of Non-Identity in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 30, no. 1 (Autumn 1996): 56–77. McCann, Andrew. Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism, and the Public Sphere. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998.

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Moore, Wendy How to Create the Perfect Wife: Britain’s Most Ineligible Bachelor and His Enlightened Question to Train the Ideal Mate. New  York: Basic Books, 2013. Morris, James M. “Transferential Rhetoric and Beyond: The West Indian Present in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda and Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray.” In Intersections of Gender, Class, and Race in the Long Nineteenth-Century and Beyond, edited by Barbara Leonardi, 165–89. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Murison, Justine “Obeah and its Others: Buffered Selves in the Era of Tropical Medicine,” Atlantic Studies 12, no. 2 (2015): 144–59. Nash, Julie. “Standing in Distress Between Tragedy and Comedy’: Servants in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.” In New Essays on Maria Edgeworth, edited by Julie Nash (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), Perera, Suvendrini. Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. Randhawa, Beccie Puneet. “Penitent Creoles, Failed Hostesses, and the Impossibility of Home in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.” In Transnational England: Home and Abroad, 1780–1860, edited by Monika Class and Terry F. Robinson, 185–207. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Smith, Sharon. “Juba’s ‘Black Face’/Lady Delacour’s ‘Mask’: Plotting Domesticity in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.” The Eighteenth-Century Theory and Interpretation, 54, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 71–90. Williams, Eric Capitalism and Slavery. University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Wright, Nicole. “Opening the Phosphoric ‘Envelope’: Scientific Appraisal, Domestic Spectacle, and (Un)’Reasonable Creatures’ in Edgeworth’s Belinda,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 24, no. 3 (Spring 2012): 509–536.

CHAPTER 4

“The Good Aunt”—An Education in Abolition

Written the same year as Belinda, “The Good Aunt” illustrates how the attitudes and behaviors necessary to slavery could be blamed upon failures of childhood education. Specifically, the tale describes childhood error according to the language of the plantocracy, and it represents rejecting this language and its associated beliefs as a test of character. “The Good Aunt” was published in the second of the three volumes comprising Moral Tales for Young People (1801). In this series, Edgeworth offers works illustrating the educational ideas she and her father outlined in Practical Education (1798). As Richard Lovell describes in the Preface to the first volume of Moral Tales: In a former work the author has endeavoured to add something to the increasing stock of innocent amusement and early instruction, which the laudable exertions of some excellent modern writers provide for the rising generation; and, in the present, an attempt is made to provide for young people, of a more advanced age, a few Tales, that shall neither dissipate the attention, nor inflame the imagination.1

Edgeworth uses “The Good Aunt” to instruct “young people, of a more advanced age” by drawing attention to the injustices of slavery.

1

 Maria Edgeworth, Moral Tales, vol. I (London: 1801), v-vi. References are to this edition.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Runia, Maria Edgeworth and Abolition, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12078-7_4

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Readers, however, have continued to disagree about the nature of its instruction. Richard Lovell describes “The Good Aunt’s” lesson according to his own traumatic experiences at school in Warwick. He writes: In “The Good Aunt,” the advantages which a judicious early education confers upon those who are intended for public seminaries are pointed out. It is a common error to suppose that, let a boy be what he may, when sent to Eton, Westminster, Harrow, or any great school, he will be moulded into proper form by the fortuitous pressure of numbers; that emulation will necessarily excite, example lead, and opposition polish him. But these are vain hopes: the solid advantages which may be attained in these large nurseries of youth must be, in a great measure, secured by previous domestic instruction. (x)

This echoes the description in his Memoirs in which he explains that his time at school taught him about those whose “love of power and tyranny” seemed “innate.”2 Apparently, whatever hopes he or his parents had possessed for his public education were sorely disappointed. Accordingly, for Richard Lovell, his daughter’s tale emphasizes the importance of “previous domestic instruction,” and the plot clearly corresponds to this emphasis. The eponymous character, Mrs. Howard, has taken upon herself the education of her nephew and ward, Charles. While her fortunes allow it, she educates him herself at home and hires a private tutor for the instruction of those subjects beyond her own expertise, specifically Greek and Latin. But once her fortune is lost, she is forced to move Charles to Harrow School where the virtues of his previous education enable him to excel academically and socially. He avoids the bully Augustus and befriends the bullied Oliver. Charles also uses his mechanical genius to solve problems in poor housing. Hence, Mitzi Myers has emphasized the tale’s depiction of women as “rational educators,” reading it as a celebration of potential female empowerment and social reform.3 Despite the obvious didactic message outlined by these plot points, Edgeworth’s story also teaches a lesson about the specific “love of power and tyranny” inherent to slavery, albeit one that has not enjoyed critical consensus. Moira Ferguson has described “The Good Aunt” as a response 2  Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Maria Edgeworth. Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Esq. Vol. 1 (London: 1820), 50. 3  Mitzi Myers, “Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames and Moral Mothers,” Children’s Literature 14 (1986), 35.

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to fears of slave revolt in Santo Domingo, while Sharon Murphy reads it as a justification for benevolent colonization.4 In contrast, Susan Manly, in her “Introduction” to the tale in her Selected Tales for Children and Young People, observes that Oliver “is described in terms that suggestively position him as analogous to an enslaved child; as the tale unfolds Charles plays an important part in his emancipation into his full potential.”5 Manly also acknowledges that Oliver and the ex-Jamaican slave Cuba are key to restoring Mrs. Howard’s fortune, what Manly calls “a fairy-tale reward that is indirectly the result of the aunt’s refusal to inherit a slave plantation in Jamaica, and her emancipation of some of the slaves on the estate.”6 Thus, in her article, “Intertextuality, Slavery and Abolition in Maria Edgeworth’s ‘The Good Aunt’ and ‘The Grateful Negro,” Manly specifies that “The Good Aunt” “cannot be termed an abolitionist tale.”7 Paying close attention to Edgeworth’s sources for the tale, specifically, Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden (1791) and Bryan Edwards’s The History, Civil and Commercial of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1793), Manly argues that Edgeworth’s tale is merely skeptical of the anti-abolitionism Edwards. Nevertheless, evidence of Edgeworth’s interest in abolition and equal justice for all can be found by reexamining “The Good Aunt’s” intertextuality in the context of the rest of the tales in the collection, which, sadly, have been largely neglected by scholars.

Abolition in Children’s Literature Before “The Good Aunt,” Edgeworth had already demonstrated her interest in presenting children with abolitionist arguments. In Practical Education, she recommended Letitia Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose for Children (1781), which she called, “by far the best books of the kind that have ever appeared,”8 as well as the multi-volume Lessons for Children 4  Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834. New  York: Routledge 1992), 234. Sharon Murphy, Maria Edgeworth and Romance (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), 122. 5  Susan Manly, “Introduction,” Selected Tales for Children and Young People (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), xxix. 6  Manly, “Introduction,” xxxii. 7  Susan Manly, “Intertextuality, Slavery and Abolition in Maria Edgeworth’s ‘The Good Aunt’ and ‘The Grateful Negro,” Essays in Romanticism 20 (2013), 25. 8  Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Practical Education, Vol. I (London, 1798), 317.

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(1779, 1787, and 1788). Barbauld published these works after 11 years teaching at the boy’s school, Palgrave Academy, and she designed it for children ages three to five, expecting it first to be read to and later by children. In Hymn VIII, the poet speaks to an enslaved woman weeping over her sick child: though no one seeth thee, God seeth thee; though no one pitieth thee, God pitieth thee; raise thy voice, forlorn and abandoned one; call upon him from amidst thy bonds, for assuredly he will hear thee.9

Peggy Dunn Bailey reads this tragic scene as Barbauld’s encouragement to her young pupils to actively and immediately reject slavery and its horrors, 10 an encouragement to which Barbauld returned, like Edgeworth, in her writing for adults, Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade (1791). About Epistle, Mary Waters has argued that in the closing couplet of the first stanza’s cryptic reference to the “infamy” slavery “stamps” on “future time,” Barbauld is specifically referring to how the “corruption arising from slave ownership is passed on from parent to child in the next generation.”11 Waters explains how Barbauld’s poem reflects the influence of David Hartley’s Observations on Man (1749) and its doctrine of the association of ideas. Specifically, Barbauld’s detailing of a planter’s tyrannies and his wife’s rages reflects how a chain of associations can distort a child’s natural goodness and perpetuate cruelty. Aileen Douglas has argued that Barbauld’s influence on Edgeworth deepened throughout the 1790s and in the decade after their meeting in 1799, an observation that resonates with “The Good Aunt’s” pairing of educational reform with discourses of slavery and abolition,12 Edgeworth follows Barbauld’s example in asking her young readers to identify with the victims of slavery’s tyranny and reject those whose behavior perpetuates it.  Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Hymns in Prose for Children (London, 1781), 61–2.  Peggy Dunn Bailey, “Barbauld’s ‘Hymns in Prose for Children’: Christian Romanticism and Instruction as Worship,” Christianity and Literature 59, no. 4 (Summer 2010), 604. 11  Mary Waters, “Sympathy, Nerve Physiology, and National Degeneration in Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Epistle to William Wilberforce,” Affect and Abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1770–1830, ed. Stephen Ahern (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 102. 12  Aileen Douglas, “Maria Edgeworth and Anna Letitia Barbauld: Print, Canons, and Female Literary Authority,” European Romantic Review 31, no. 6 (2020), 699–713. 9

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Edgeworth also saw a valuable model of abolitionist fiction for children in Thomas Day’s novel Sandford and Merton (1783–1789). As a long-­ time friend of her father and the family, Day’s impact on Edgeworth was significant. He had opened his home to her after she left school in 1781, and as Stephen Bending and Stephen Bygrave detail, their careers in the world of print eventually overlapped. Bending and Bygrave explain how Day’s The History of Sandford and Merton (1783–1789) had originated as a short story to be included in a work planned by Richard Lovell’s second wife, Honora, but that was ultimately taken up by Edgeworth and published as Early Lessons in 1801.13 In Sandford and Merton, Day repeatedly returns to the issue of slavery, using in-set tales and the exemplary interpretations of those tales by the wise clergyman tutor Mr. Barlow to impugn the wealthy. The novel follows the reformation of young Tommy Merton, son of a Jamaican planter, by Harry Sandford, son of a yeoman farmer. Early on in the novel, Mr. Barlow tells the story of “Androcles and the Lion” in which the eponymous slave was so ill-treated that he concluded: “It is better to die, than to continue to live in such hardships and misery as I am obliged to suffer” (81). After hearing this tale, Tommy regrets his past behavior to the slaves on his father’s Jamaican plantation, acknowledging that he “used to beat them, and kick them, and throw things at them, whenever I was angry, and they never dared strike me again, because they were slaves” (81). Mr. Barlow then carefully walks Tommy through his initial emotional response to Androcles’s suffering to help him conclude that no man has the right to sell or to buy another man, and Tommy asserts that he will “never use our black William ill; nor pinch him, nor kick him, as I used to do” (82). In another episode, an unnamed poor Black man begs for charity only to rescue Tommy from a wild bull. When Tommy inquires and hears about the life experiences that encouraged such intrepidity, he “blushed a little at the remembrance of the prejudices he had formerly entertained, concerning blacks and his own superiority” (389). Edgeworth herself, in her father’s Memoirs, acknowledged Day’s influence upon her, writing: “The lofty nature of his mind, his romantic character, his metaphysical enquiries, and eloquent discussions, took her into another world.”14 In “The Good Aunt,” she transforms Day’s 13  Stephen Bending and Stephen Bygrave, “Introduction,” The History of Sandford and Merton, Thomas Day (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2009), 11. References are to this edition. 14  Quoted in Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth, p. 75.

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eloquent discussions of plantocratic tyranny into an imagined reform of characters who would defend slavery and those who would depend on sentimentality for its mere amelioration.

Slavery in Moral Tales In the “Good Aunt, “Edgeworth creates a villain in the spoiled son of Mr. Alderman Holloway, Augustus, whose bullying associates him with the tyrannies of the plantocracy. Significantly, Edgeworth reuses the name Augustus, first name of the planter Vincent in Belinda, for “The Good Aunt’s” child-villain, a move she repeats in critiques of the love of power and tyranny in to other tales within the three-volume set. In “Mademoiselle Panache,” a story begun in The Parent’s Assistant (1796) Edgeworth contemplates the relationship between revolution and rights. This tale of a bad French governess compares the cruelty and coquetry the Lady Augusta learns from the eponymous character to the intelligence and unaffected behavior a Mrs. Temple has taught her daughter, Helen. The tale presents Augusta’s inability to read character as a trait that she, like characters in Belinda, has learned from her acquaintance with wealthy social circles. The tale first presents us with multiple comic instances of this inability in action. For example, Madame Panache ridiculously mistakes another gentleman guest at S—Hall, Mr. Montague, for a mere apothecary. However, she also mistakes George’s servant “black Tom” for “a monster” (151). Two other characters make a game of her misjudgment, betting that her “unconquerable antipathy, as she calls it, to a negro” will lead her to scream upon sight of Tom (152). One ironically indicts her racism by saying “that he should enjoy her affectation, or her terrour, whichever it was, of all things” (155). When she refuses to join the company for a river cruise “wid dat vilain [sic] black” everyone, including Tom, laughs at her folly (181). While ultimately, the tale presents the misguided Augusta’s Scottish elopement with Dashwood and its portent of marital strife as seriously tragic, it also presents Madame Panache’s failure to read Black Tom’s character as irrational and morally reprehensible. In another of the collections meditations on the love of power and tyranny associated with characters named Augustus, Edgeworth explores questions of law and jurisprudence. In “The Prussian Vase,” Augustus Laniska, a servant of Frederick the Great, is accused of insulting the king, and his friend Albert uses reasoning to prove Laniska’s innocence through examination of witnesses for a trial by jury. Like in “The Good Aunt,”

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Augustus’s imprudence is described through talk of liberty and slavery, and the character in the story necessary to proving Augustus’s innocence is Sophia Mansfeld. As a prisoner-of-war removed from Dresden to Frederick’s new ceramics manufactures in Berlin, her name and situation invoke Lord Mansfield’s 1772 decision of the Somerset case. About her we are told that, like a “resentful African slave,” “either she could not or would not execute these [ceramics] with her former elegance” (198). Edgewood deepens this abolitionist resonance when, upon witnessing Sophia’s melancholy figure, an English traveler, arrived to demonstrate Wedgwood’s recent innovations, announces: “‘Tis the way with all slaves. Our English manufacturers—(I wish you could see them) work in quite another manner—for they are free—” (201). Through these lines, Edgeworth repeats skepticism of planters’ racist views of enslaved people’s work ethic to argue on behalf of the dignity possible for laborers paid a fair wage. When, following this episode, Augustus Laniska investigates Sophia’s situation only to be told that her compulsion to marry a Prussian and abandon her lover back home, while tragic in the eyes of the factory overseer, must be recognized as the directive of a wise king, Laniska explodes: ‘Slave!’ exclaimed Laniska, bursting into a sudden transport of indignation.— ‘Slave! You are fit to live only under a tyrant.—The king knows best!—The king must be obeyed!—What, when his commands are contrary to reason, to justice, to humanity!’ (203)

Accordingly, Laniska and Albert petition the king for Sophia’s release. Reason demands justice and abhors slavery. “The Good Aunt” repeats “The Prussian Vase’s” presentation of an Augustus in need of reform who must recognize the injustices of slavery. In other tales in the collection without Augustus characters, Edgeworth returns to critiquing the character of those who would misappropriate sentimental abolitionist discourse to justify their own love of power and tyranny. In “Forrester,” the eponymous hero misuses the language of slavery to justify running away from his guardian. After becoming an object of ridicule for his inability and refusal to dance, he swears: Thank Heaven, I have yet the power to fly—I have yet sufficient force to break my chains—I am not yet reduced to the mental degeneracy of the base monarch, who hugged his fetters because they were of gold. (67)

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This, Forrester’s proclamation, taking place as it does after innumerable examples of downright rude behavior, rings hollow. Heir to a fortune of thousands, he wears no chains. The rest of the tale illustrates how his privileged status as a gentleman secures him the benefit of the doubt when he is mistakenly taken up for inciting a riot that breaks the windows of a confectionary shop. Fortunately for him, his friends’ respectability secures a fair hearing and release, an injustice he thoroughly acknowledges. “Angelina,” which Richard Lovell describes in his Preface as “a female Forrester,” also focuses on the misappropriation of abolitionist rhetoric. 15 In following the adventures of its eponymous heroine after she runs away from her guardian, the fashionable Lady Diana Chillingworth, the tale offers what Butler describes as “commentary on the writing school of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays.”16 However, Mitzi Myers’s argument that the Angelina is important as an example of Edgeworth’s prioritization of experimentation over the genre’s assumed didacticism and that Edgeworth’s heroine should be celebrated for her “idealistic criticisms of her culture” is more useful in understanding the link between the tale’s form and its social commentary on slavery.17 Similarly, Rachel Carnell and Alison Tracy Hale have argued that “Angelina” should not be read as a simple satirical treatment of the “theories and individualism of the French Revolution,” but as a nuanced investigation of their limits.18 Correspondingly, this can elucidate the tale’s representation of misappropriated abolitionist discourse. In the tale, “Araminta,” author of the novel, “The Woman of Genius” is a self-interested schemer and drunk who

 Edgeworth, Moral Tales, x.  Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 161. Butler also notes that Angelina could have been modeled upon Mary Hay’s Emma Courtney (n. 164). However, where Butler suggests the heroine “was partially forestalled by Bridgetina in Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (n. 164), additional in-text references to Araminta’s biography and financial need to support herself by novel writing suggest Charlotte Smith and her Young Philosopher (1798) could have also been a model. 17  Mitzi Myers, “Quixotes, Orphans, and Subjectivity: Maria Edgeworth’s Georgian Heroism and the (En)Gendering of Young Adult Fiction.” The Lion and the Unicorn 13, no. 1 (June 1989), 27. Katherine Gustafson argues that Edgeworth’s writing for children should contextualize readings of her adult fiction, Belinda. Katherine Gustafson, “Assimilation and Indeterminacy: Moral Tales for Young People, Belinda, and Edgeworth’s Destabilizing Fictions of Maturity,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 29 no. 4 (Summer 2017), 635–661. 18  Rachel Carnell and Alison Tracy Hale, “Romantic Transports: Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism inn Transatlantic Context.” Early American Literature 46, no. 3 (2011), 526. 15 16

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encourages Angelina to run away to a cottage in Wales. Araminta encourages her young reader’s folly, writing: what are legal technical formalities, what are human institutions to the view of shackle-scoring Reason?—Oppressed, degraded, enslaved—must our unfortunate sex forever submit to sacrifice their rights, their pleasures, their will, at the altar of public opinion? (155)

Fortunately, Angelina’s subsequent experiences of rustic privation on the road from Wales to Bristol prove to her that she had not been “oppressed, degraded, enslaved.” She also recognizes that she had personally and thoroughly enjoyed the profits of empire: “refined sugar, green tea, and Mocha coffee” (173). These lessons, added to the significance of Angelina’s savior’s name, Lady Somerset—with its invocation of the Somerset case—, the fact that the action of the story is set in Bristol—England’s largest slave-trading port, and Lady Somerset’s employment of a Black servant encourages Edgeworth’s young readers to interrogate their own beliefs and behaviors surrounding rights and justice for Black and enslaved peoples, especially in light of personal benefits they experience due to colonialism and slavery. Finally, Edgeworth situates “The Good Aunt” alongside another tale that explicitly calls upon her young readers to search out reasoned arguments against slavery. “The Good French Governess” provides a pointed counterexample to the collection’s Augustus-adjacent injustice and abolition misappropriators. Its titular character reforms the children of the dissipated London lady, Mrs. Harcourt, through extensive reading assignments. Governess de Rosier, fleeing a death sentence in revolutionary France, assigns the children Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). In this work, the children would encounter Smith’s condemnation of slavery: There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not, in this respect, possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind, than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to, and

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whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished.19

As Daniel Klein has recently argued, in this passage Smith indicts the immorality of British slave traders,20 and Klein traces how the eloquence of Smith’s condemnation was celebrated, having been quoted in full, twice, in an anonymous antislavery pamphlet, An Essay in Vindication of the Continental Colonies of America, From a Censure of Mr. Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1764).21 Through each of these tales, Edgeworth critiques slavery or invokes condemnations of it.

Slavery in “the Good Aunt” While the preceding discussion proves the majority of the pieces in Moral Tales at least partially interested in critiquing character through examination of individual behaviors justifying racism, slavery, and the misappropriation of abolitionist discourse, “The Good Aunt” makes these themes explicit through the character of Oliver and his relationship with the bully Augustus. Edgeworth’s text shows how tyranny is cultivated by poor parenting and translates directly into the racism manifesting mistaken views of white supremacy, but, unlike in Belinda, children are not doomed to repeat the mistakes of their parents. Initially, we are repeatedly told of Augustus’s preference for aping the tyrannies of the young Lord Rawson. He’d rather play, gamble, or nap than complete his studies, and his parents have to bribe him to complete his homework. Edgeworth explicitly describes this behavior using the language slavery and abolition by connecting Augustus’s excuses for his behavior to the incident crucial to the tale’s denouement, formerly enslaved Cuba’s accident. The narrator tells us that Augustus’s “Idleness, ennui, noise, mischief, riot, and a nameless train of mistaken notions of pleasure are often classed, in a young man’s mind, under the general head of liberty” (121). These mistaken notions lead him to go coach racing with Rawson, during which he injures the innocent bystander, Cuba, and for which he refuses to take responsibility. He mistakes his wealthy privilege as the liberty for which Cuba endured a  Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: 1759), 206–7.  Daniel Klein, “Adam Smith’s 1759 Rebuke of the Slave Trade,” GMU Working Paper in Economics 19, no. 6 (2019), 1–10. 21  Klein, “Adam Smith’s,” 7. 19 20

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transatlantic crossing. In an adoption of the Jamaican Tommy Sandford’s racist prejudice, the English Augustus Holloway insists: “I shan’t for a mulattowoman, I promise you … What, is she hurt—the mulatto woman?—I say, coachy, make haste … I want to be off” (127). Her skin color justifies his selfish and reprehensible decision-making. Through the character of Oliver, Edgeworth further challenges her readers to confront their personal prejudices about slavery and race. When Oliver is informed of Cuba’s accident, we read: “‘A mulatto!—I like her better,’ cried Oliver, ‘for my nurse was a mulatto’” (133). Oliver shows Edgeworth’s readers that acquaintance with or proximity to Black people need not translate into racial prejudice but also that feeling for Black people does not translate into abolition. Edgeworth represents the planter’s son, Oliver’s behavior as a lesser, if still reprehensible crime against justice that, in part, reflects upon his identity: a Creole, lively, intelligent, openhearted, and affectionate in the extreme, but rather passionate in his temper, and adverse to application. His literary education had been strangely neglected before he came to school, so that his ignorance of the common rudiments of spelling, reading, grammar, and arithmetic, made him the laughing-stock of the school. … He suffered no complaint or tear to escape him in public; but his book was sometimes blistered with the tears that fell when nobody saw them: what was worse than all the rest, he found insurmountable difficulties at every step in his grammar. (114)

The opening of Edgeworth’s description seems to play upon stereotypes of Creoles as irrational and overly emotional. As Bryan Edwards in his History of the West Indies (1792) explained: Indolence, I will admit, is too predominant among them …. Both sexes, when the springs of the mind are once set in motion, are remarkable for a warm imagination and a high flow of spirits. There seems indeed universally to reign among them a promptitude for pleasure. To the same cause is commonly imputed the propensity observable in most of the West Indians to indulge extravagant ideas of their riches.22

22  Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial of the British Colonies in the West Indies Vol. 2 (London: 1792), 15.

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Oliver is “affectionate in the extreme,” possessing another kind of “extravagant ideas.” However, Edgeworth’s plot goes on to make very clear that this tendency has less to do with his torrid zone origins and purported associated degeneracy and, like Augustus’s, all to do with his neglected education. Nevertheless, Edgeworth also indicts the racist stereotypes motivating Oliver’s classmates behavior. When his previously poor Latin instruction renders him a target for his classmates’ teasing, we are also told: The poor boy felt inexpressible shame and anguish; his cheek burned with blushes, when every day in the public class he was ridiculed and disgraced; but his dark complexion, perhaps, prevented those blushes from being noticed by his companions, otherwise they certainly would have suppressed, or would have endeavoured to repress, some of their insulting peals of laughter. (114)

The narrator’s “perhaps” here is significant in the emphasis it puts on Oliver’s dark complexion. As the son of a planter, Oliver’s skin tone could have resulted from his exposure to the bright tropical sun, a fact that his classmates, like Edwards, assume is evidence of his supposed inferiority. It could also suggest mixed-race parentage. The “perhaps” here insinuates that in Edgeworth’s tale, this very question may have engaged his classmates’ imaginations and motivated their ridicule. In this context, the “perhaps” even more specifically may allude to the erroneous belief that Black people cannot blush and that Black people do not deserve equal intellectual and moral consideration. In acknowledging this uncertainty, Edgeworth’s narrator illustrates the multiple ways racism shapes belief and behavior with traumatic results. Unfortunately, Edgeworth’s story also reflects the historical reality for mixed-race West Indian children of the late eighteenth century. Increasing racial prejudice demanded white British West Indians send mixed-race children to England for schooling. Daniel Livesay has chronicled the gradual disenfranchisement of mixed-­ race West Indian individuals, noting how in 1711 the Jamaican Assembly barred mixed-race individuals from holding public office, in 1733 they lost the right to vote, in 1743 they lost the right to testify against whites, and in 1761, illegitimate mixed-race individuals’ inheritance was capped at

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£2000 (there was no cap for illegitimate or legitimate Black children).23 As a result, Wolmer’s—Jamaica’s first successful school—banned mixed-race children from attending until 1815.24 Mixed-race children suffered from the white supremacy structuring sexual relations between planter fathers and Black women. However, in taking additional pains to describe Oliver’s being bullied according to the language of slavery, Edgeworth comments on the arbitrariness of tyranny. When Augustus makes Oliver his “fag,” Edgeworth provides a note explicitly defining a “fag” as a younger student who serves an older one within British boys’ boarding schools, but beyond the note, she goes on to indict those who engage in this practice as “persons” “in the compass of the civilized world” as “barbarously ignorant”(114). Reversing colonial denomination of civilized and savage, Edgeworth also repeatedly describes Augustus’s behavior as “tyrannical” (114). Accordingly, the narrator describes Oliver’s whippings by Augustus as ritual; he “was usually flogged three times a week. Day after day brought no relief, either to his bodily or mental sufferings” (114).Through this imagery, Edgeworth invokes William Blake’s infamous and disturbing engravings illustrating John Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796). Edgeworth additionally explicitly situates Oliver within the context of slavery and abolition when Charles attempts to rescue Oliver from Augustus’s power. She writes: ‘Fag or no fag,’ cried Howard, ‘you shall not make a slave of him.’ ‘I will, I shall, I will,’ cried Holloway, worked up to the height of tyrannical fury; ‘I will make a slave of him, if I choose it—a negro-slave, if I please!’ At the sound of negro-slave, the little Creole burst into tears’. (33)

Despite the wealth and apparent rank qualifying him to attend boarding school in England, far away from his plantation home in Jamaica, Oliver is tortured by his association with enslaved Blackness. Perhaps his ostensibly dark complexion has provoked such taunts before. Perhaps he is outraged at Augustus’s repudiation of his rank. Regardless, Oliver accepts the 23  Daniel Livesay, “Imagining Difference: Abolition and Mixed Race in the British Atlantic,” in Free at Last?: Reflections on Freedom and the Abolition of the British Transatlantic Slave Trade, eds. Cecily Jones and Amar Wahab (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 43. 24  Livesay, “Imagining Difference,” 43.

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appellation, saying: “let him call me dunce, or slave, or negro, or what he will” in exchange for Charles’s promise to end the violence with Augustus (36). However, Edgeworth’s tale for older children also provides an account of how slavery can be abolished and tyrannous villains can be reformed. Oliver pleads for a new “master,” ‘… if you’ll let me, I’ll be your fag. Do, will you? pray let me! I’ll run of your errands before you can say one, two, three, and away; only whistle for me,’ said he, whistling, ‘and I’ll hear you, wherever I am. If you only hold up your finger, when you want me, I’m sure I shall see it … May I be your fag?’ (120)

Oliver offers to accept a subservient position within the colonial hierarchy, but Edgeworth does not allow Oliver’s pathetic pleas to find ears. Her exemplary hero refuses mere amelioration of a master–slave relationship. Charles refuses Oliver’s gratitude for Charles’s intervention with Augustus. When Charles insists, instead, “Be my friend!” he insists on equality (120), and eventually Edgeworth teaches her young readers that equality becomes possible with the right education. Oliver learns to reject the racist stereotypes that have crippled his self-worth, and Augustus learns to take responsibility for his inhumanity. Edgeworth delivers this message even more clearly near the end when Charles applauds Oliver for his acuity in recognizing the former-slave Cuba’s thimble as the cap to Mrs. Howard’s stolen toothpick case. Oliver insists: ‘No, no, no! … all I did was accident; all that you did was not accident. You first made me love you by teaching me that I was not a blockhead, and by freeing me from—‘A tyrant, you were going to say,’ cried [Augustus] Holloway, colouring deeply; ‘and if you had, you’d have said the truth.’ (173)

Oliver is freed to properly value himself while Augustus is brought to recognize his own embodiment of the tyrannical character flaws defining the West Indian planter. Edgeworth uses additional characters to model her critique of the tyranny of slavery and reject the kind of bigotry Augustus practices. Augustus’s coachman is the first. He attends to Cuba’s physical injuries after the accident and offers her a place inside the carriage until medical assistance can be secured. When she turns out to require medical attention

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before she can be removed, he insists on returning later to carry her to her place of residence. Edgeworth writes; “The postillion, more humane than Holloway, exclaimed, ‘No master, though she’s no Christian, as we are, poor copper-coloured soul! I was once a stranger myself in Lon’on, without a sixpence to bless myself; so I know what it is, master’” (128). Edgeworth teaches her readers to befriend strangers, regardless of race or religion. We learn that Mrs. Howard’s gardener has also sympathized with Cuba’s lot when he questions whether Charles’s rank, age, and race might provide too much ground for misrecognition: ‘But master,’ said the gardener, ‘I should warn ye beforehand, that mayhap you mayn’t pity her so much, for she’s rather past her best days; and bad must have been her best, for she’s swarthy, and not like one of this country; she comes from over the seas, and they call her a—a—not quite negro.’ (133)

Of course these are misplaced fears. Charles recognizes instantly how he might help her improve her situation. Thus, in all of these characters we are provided examples of those who clearly see that Cuba deserves the rights and duties upon which England has long prided itself. Edgeworth further strengthens these lessons through intertextual allusion. In particular, the tale’s early depiction of Charles’s preference for learning about exotic wildlife instead of Latin functions as an introductory allegory for the work of abolition. When Mr. Russell, Charles’s tutor, caters to the interest of his charge by turning the conversation to Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s story on hummingbirds from Letters from an American Farmer (1782), Edgeworth references a chapter that begins: “Why would you prescribe this task? you know that what we take up ourselves seems always lighter than what is imposed on us by others.”25 This allusion represents Edgeworth’s belief that children should be exposed to material that fits their interests and should be engaged in experimental method according to their level of development, but it also refers to her refusal of alienated labor. When she next has Mr. Russell offer comments about Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia (1794–6), and, specifically, Darwin’s discussion of the Jamaican spider, “who makes himself a house underground, with a door and hinges, which door the spider and all the members of his family take care to shut after them, whenever they go in and 25  Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 166.

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out,”26 she invites her reader to consider their own interest in taking up the task of seeing the exotic as human, of seeing the familiar in the foreignness of the West Indies. Edgeworth’s allusion to Crèvecoeur’s humming birds is also interesting in its proximity of mere pages to his description of the torture and mutilation of enslaved individuals that he witnessed in Charlestown, South Carolina. She invites her audience to imagine a future without the horrors of the  slavery about which he explains, “my mind is, and always has been, oppressed since I became witness to it.”27 Edgeworth introduces her young readers to a wide-ranging habit of reading that renders the political personal and is critical of colonial violence. Edgeworth further underscores this with the subject of the deserving Charles’s award-winning essay, two lines from Erasmus Darwin’s poem “The Botanic Garden”: “Hear it, ye Senates, hear this truth sublime,/ He who allows oppression shares the crime” (141). These lines from Darwin’s condemnation of Parliament’s failure to abolish the slave trade provide the evidence that Susan Manly has suggested undermines George Boulukos’s reading of Edgeworth as a pro-slavery writer.28 Nevertheless, the significance of Charles’s essay increases in the context of Edgeworth’s larger commitment to educational reform in reading for children about abolitionist discourse. While Holloway, “according to the usual practice of little minds, undervalued a talent, which he did not possess,” “ridiculed the scheme of writing an English periodical paper, and had loudly declared, that he did not think it worth his while to write English,” Charles spent three weeks carefully writing and revising his essay (140). Upon his win we are told: How much the pleasure of success is increased by the sympathy of our friends! The triumph of a school-boy over his competitors is sometimes despicable; but Howard’s joy was not of this selfish and puerile sort. All the good passions had stimulated him to exertion, and he was rewarded by his own generous feelings. (141)

26  Maria Edgeworth, “The Good Aunt.” Selected Tales for Young People, ed. Susan Manly (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 104. 27  Crèvecoeur, Letters, 163. 28  Manly, “Intertextuality,” 19–36. George Boulukos, “Maria Edgeworth’s ‘Grateful Negro’ and the Sentimental Argument for Slavery,” Eighteenth-Century Life 23, no. 1 (February 1999), 12–29.

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All his “good passions,” values, and prudence combined and pressed him to act, setting an example for all who read his essay. Ultimately, Charles’s essay follows the very example Mrs. Howard provides at the beginning of the tale when she decides to sell her Jamaican estates, emancipates those enslaved on her property, and bequeaths them provision grounds as partial recompense for their stolen labor. While Augustus’s father mocks her decision as sentimental, in returning the provision grounds to the hands that had worked them, Edgeworth offers Mrs. Howard’s behavior as the model necessary for Charles’s intellectual and moral development. In so doing, Edgeworth illustrates her belief that money and morality are inextricably entangled, that excessive and unearned wealth is incompatible with right and good behavior. Edgeworth previously introduced this argument in a rhetorical question she offered her readers in Practical Education. In the chapter, “On Prudence and Economy,” she argues that regarding children, “we should early accustom them to choose for themselves” and “if they choose wisely, they should enjoy the natural reward of their prudence” (249). She offers this advice on the building of convictions as a remedy for those children whose beliefs and conduct are merely obedient to their elders or the opinions of others. She would rather children think for themselves than uphold the status quo, and she goes on to outline how such thinking will almost always involve attention to money or property. Practice attending to domestic and family expenses becomes crucial to maintaining domestic felicity and intimacy. In contrast, she writes: It is curious to observe, that the propensity to extravagance exists in those who enjoy the greatest affluence, and in those who have felt the greatest distress. Those who have little to lose, are reckless about that little; and any uncertainty as to the tenure of property, or as to the rewards of industry, immediately operates, not only to depress activity, but to destroy prudence. (265)

Those who suffer from a rigged system cannot develop their own sense of a just reward and will accordingly jeopardize their little happiness and that of those around them. Significantly, Edgeworth goes on to mention Bryan Edwards’s claim that Black enslaved peoples were incapable of developing prudence. He claims as evidence their supposed preference for wild, indigenous produce and purchased delicacies as opposed to foodstuffs requiring arduous cultivation. In contrast to Bryan’s claim, Edgeworth asks,

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“We are told, that the provision ground, the creation of the negro’s industry, and the hope of his life, is sold by public auction to pay his master’s debts. Is it wonderful that the term prudence should be unknown in the negro vocabulary?” (266). “The Good Aunt” provides an answer to this question, illustrating that legalized white theft prevented Black people from realizing the profits of their work and care. Edgeworth’s aunt stops this cycle and leads the younger generation to abolition. “The Good Aunt” is clearly a critique of the racist belief used by whites to justify slavery. While the ostensibly  mixed-race Oliver benefits from conferred legal legitimacy, his mixed-race nurse is not so fortunate, an acknowledgment of the limitations of the  supposedly good and great. Mrs. Howard, who, like Oliver, grew up on a Jamaican plantation, in contrast, takes it upon herself to emancipate the mixed-race best friend with which she grew up. In emancipating Cuba, Mrs. Howard cements the fact that—in a text written for young people—while we cannot choose our parents or their parenting methods, we can recognize the debts we owe others as evidence of our shared humanity. Racism might try to excuse slavery, but it can never justify it. Racism is learned, and it can be unlearned. Slavery can be abolished if children are taught to intellectually grasp the nature of its tyrannies.

Bibliography Bailey, Peggy Dunn. “Barbauld’s ‘Hymns in Prose for Children’: Christian Romanticism and Instruction as Worship,” Christianity and Literature 59, no. 4 (Summer 2010): 603–17. Barbauld, Anna Laetitia. Hymns in Prose for Children. London, 1781. Bending, Stephen and Stephen Bygrave, “Introduction,” The History of Sandford and Merton, Thomas Day. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2009. Boulukos, George. “Maria Edgeworth’s ‘Grateful Negro’ and the Sentimental Argument for Slavery,” Eighteenth-Century Life 23, no. 1 (February 1999): 12–29. Butler, Marilyn Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. Carnell, Rachel and Alison Tracy Hale, “Romantic Transports: Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism inn Transatlantic Context.” Early American Literature 46, no 3 (2011): 517–39. Crèvecoeur, Hector St. John de. Letters from an American Farmer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

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Douglas, Aileen. “Maria Edgeworth and Anna Letitia Barbauld: Print, Canons, and Female Literary Authority,” European Romantic Review 31, no. 6 (2020): 699–713. Edgeworth, Maria. “The Good Aunt.” Selected Tales for Young People. Edited by Susan Manly. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Edgeworth, Maria Moral Tales, Vol. I. London: 1801. Edgeworth, Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Practical Education, Vol. I. London, 1798. Edgeworth, Richard Lovell and Maria Edgeworth. Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Esq. Vol. I. London: 1820. Edwards, Bryan. The History, Civil and Commercial of the British Colonies in the West Indies Vol. II London: 1792. Gustafson, Katherine. “Assimilation and Indeterminacy: Moral Tales for Young People, Belinda, and Edgeworth’s Destabilizing Fictions of Maturity.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 29 no. 4 (Summer 2017): 635–661. Klein, Daniel. “Adam Smith’s 1759 Rebuke of the Slave Trade,” GMU Working Paper in Economics 19, no. 6 (2019): 1–10. Livesay, Daniel. “Imagining Difference: Abolition and Mixed Race in the British Atlantic.” In Free at Last?: Reflections on Freedom and the Abolition of the British Transatlantic Slave Trade, edited by Cecily Jones and Amar Wahab, 39–57. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. Manly, Susan. “Intertextuality, Slavery and Abolition in Maria Edgeworth’s ‘The Good Aunt’ and ‘The Grateful Negro,” Essays in Romanticism 20 (2013a): 19–36. Manly, Susan. “Introduction,” Selected Tales for Children and Young People. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013b. Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834. New York: Routledge 1992. Murphy, Sharon. Maria Edgeworth and Romance. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004. Myers, Mitzi. “Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames and Moral Mothers.” Children’s Literature 14 (1986): 31–59. Myers, Mitzi. “Quixotes, Orphans, and Subjectivity: Maria Edgeworth’s Georgian Heroism and the (En)Gendering of Young Adult Fiction.” The Lion and the Unicorn 13, no. 1 (June 1989): 21–40. Smith, Adam. Theory of Moral Sentiments. London: 1759. Waters, Mary. “Sympathy, Nerve Physiology, and National Degeneration in Anna Letitia Barbauld’sEpistle to William Wilberforce.” In Affect and Abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1770–1830, edited by Stephen Ahern, 89–105.Burlington: Ashgate, 2013.

CHAPTER 5

Parodic Intervention in “The Grateful Negro”

Maria Edgeworth’s “The Grateful Negro” was published in 1804, the year after Toussaint Louverture, military leader and former slave of Saint-­ Domingue, died on April 7  in a French prison after Napoleon sent his brother-in-law General Charles Leclerc to restore French European rule to its West Indian territories. Despite Louverture’s capture and imprisonment, the Armée Indigène defeated the French, and on January 1, 1804, the island declared its independence under the Arawak name of Haiti. Accordingly, Edgeworth’s tale considering the historical realities of West Indian slave revolt has now become a fixture in studies of transatlantic and Afro-Caribbean literature. Thus far, there has been little consensus on the tale’s particular relationship to debates about the abolition or amelioration of slavery. George Boulukos relies on one of Edgeworth’s acknowledged source texts, Bryan Edwards’s History of the West Indies (1792) to argue the tale is ameliorationist, relying on sentiment to argue merely for better treatment of the enslaved, and Alison Harvey concludes that Edgeworth’s depiction of armed slave revolt reflects Edgeworth’s fear, antithetical to

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Runia, Maria Edgeworth and Abolition, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12078-7_5

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abolition, of a black unrest.1 Meanwhile, Frances Botkin has argued that Edgeworth is “firmly in the progressive, abolitionist camp.”2 Botkin’s focus on the tale’s discussion of the contrast between wage and slave labor is valuable when taking into consideration what Suvendrini Perera and Moira Ferguson see as the tale’s internal unresolved contradictions.3 Here, I argue that full consideration of Edgeworth’s intended audience, the tale’s parodic intertexts, and its publication as the second tale in the third and final volume of Popular Tales suggest Edgeworth’s interest in encouraging a laboring-class audience to draw their own informed and careful conclusions about slavery and abolition. Further, Edgeworth’s deployment of wage-labor abolitionist arguments within her tale’s ameliorated plantation slavery setting allows her to share with her working-class readers the irony of her tale’s title and suggest the impossibility of enslaved gratitude. In his preface to Popular Tales, Richard Lovell makes clear Edgeworth’s interest in extending her interrogation of the relationship between abolitionist discourse and for a new working-class audience. He writes: Burke supposes that there are eighty thousand readers in Great Britain, nearly one hundredth part of its inhabitants! Out of these we may calculate that ten thousand are nobility, clergy, or gentlemen of the learned professions. Of seventy thousand readers which remain, there are many who might be amused and instructed by books, which were not professedly adapted to the classes that have been enumerated. With this view the following volumes have been composed. The title of “Popular Tales” has been chosen not as a 1  George Boulukos, “Maria Edgeworth’s ‘Grateful Negro,’ and the Sentimental Argument for Slavery,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction23, no.1 (2003), 12–29. Elizabeth Kim sees similar conservative leanings in her reading of the tale as an allegory of the Anglo-Irish planter class. Elizabeth Kim, “Maria Edgeworth’s The Grateful Negro: A Site for Rewriting Rebellion,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 16 no. 1 (2003), 103–26. Alison Harvey, “West Indian Obeah and English ‘Obee’: Race, Femininism, and Questions of Colonial Consolidation in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” New Essays on Maria Edgeworth, ed. by Julia Nash (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), 19. Nini Rodgers, similarly, offers extensive biographical details linking Edgeworth to Bryan Edward’s colonial and ameliorationist position. Nini Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery, and Anti-Slavery (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 2  Frances Botkin, “Questioning the ‘Necessary Order of Things’: Maria Edgeworth’s ‘The Grateful Negro,’ Plantation Slavery, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” in Discourses of Slavery and Abolition, ed. by Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004),194. 3  Suvendrini Perera, Reaches of Empire, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 33–4. Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others, pp. 231–4.

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presumptuous and premature claim to popularity, but from the wish that they be current beyond circles which are sometimes exclusively considered as polite. The art of printing has opened to all classes of people various new channels of entertainment and information.4

Edgeworth clearly aimed to capitalize on the desire of these 70,000 common readers for amusement and instruction. She believed amusement and instruction could inform readers beyond elite circles in evaluating abolitionist discourse and behavior. It is important to note that while Popular Tales was designed not for an elite audience, it was also not aimed at the poor. While Ashley Cohen reads Edgeworth’s unpublished essay “On the Education of the Poor” as a reflection of Edgeworth’s interest, like that of Hannah More, to “displace radical writings with more wholesome reading material” that taught obedience and submission to hierarchy, her acknowledgment that Popular Tales, at 15 s, was not cheap undermines her claims about the collection being an “elementary book on education.”5 This fact also undermines Cohen’s conclusion that the tale’s irony is located in its simultaneous profession “to be written for a demographic that could not afford to purchase it” and presentation of “readers from the upper orders with lessons in labor management.” Instead, Edgeworth’s correspondence reveals her confidence in the ability of a new industrious and upwardly mobile reading public to read and interpret for themselves. In an April letter to her Aunt Ruxton, Edgeworth complains generally about the print quality of the collection, but also writes: But what will provoke you much more, Mr. Holcroft, whom Johnson employed as corrector of the press has taken the liberty to cut the stories into chapters and has stuck at the head of each such base trite mottoes as give an air of vulgarity to the whole. Such as ‘The end of the wicked.”—“The triumphs of envy bring their own disgrace’ and many worserer and worserer, and baddeerer and badderer. My comfort is that nobody will read them after the first look, and my father will say in the preface “that if the head of

4  Richard Lovell Edgeworth, “Preface,” in Popular Tales by Maria Edgeworth Vol. I (London, 1804). ii–iv. 5  Ashley Cohen, “Wage Slavery, Oriental Despotism, and Global Labor Management in Maria Edgeworth’s Popular Tales,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 55, no. 2–3 (Summer/Fall 2014), 199.

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c­ hapters have any merit it must be attributed to the publisher as they were inserted by him.6

Edgeworth’s equating of Holcroft’s chapter titles with linguistic error refuses Holcroft’s assumption about the apparent ignorance of her intended audience and renders him, as mere editor, the real dunce. Further, her preface closes with a footnote containing the above apology as additional evidence that she had no interest in reducing her work to simple or childish moral lessons. Instead, she had every faith that her reader would indeed find entertainment or enlightenment, especially if that meant recognizing subtle irony. Ten of the 11 tales are preceded by such trite clichés. “The Grateful Negro” is not. This singularity merits a reading attendant upon its situation within the three-volume series.

Popular Tales: Slavery and Irony Overall, Popular Tales features a variety of characters and settings in which plot encourages consideration of national identity and duty, and beyond “The Grateful Negro,” two more of the tales focus explicitly on the differences between proper English industrialization and the injustice of colonial slavery. Ashley Cohen’s focus on the failure of Edgeworth’s text to mimetically represent slavery is useful in understanding Edgeworth’s various invocations of slavery throughout the tales, and it paves the way for a new attention to Edgeworth’s interest in genre. Edgeworth’s use of character and plot as opposed to a third-person narrator does more than reflect “Edgeworth’s sense of the pervasiveness of unfreedom that animates her depiction of slavery as endemic to the British nation and empire in Popular Tales.”7 It reflects Edgeworth’s interest in readers drawing their own conclusions about slavery and abolition according to their own experiences and values. Thus, in the first tale of volume one, “Lame Jervis,” a five-­ year-­old boy injured in a Cornwall tin mine is sent by the mine owner to be educated in science and mechanics. The boy, Jervis, proves his ingenuity and skill by devising a model of an improved mine, and he is eventually employed in India to reform the Sultan’s diamond mines. The Sultan and the slaves that work in his mine provide an opportunity for the first-person 6  Maria Edgeworth to Mrs. Ruxton, April 1804, MS 406, The Edgeworth Papers, National Library of Ireland. 7  Cohen, “Wage Slavery,” 196.

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narrator to recognize and celebrate his own values and identity. Upon arrival in India, Jervis describes how the Sultan, “yet treated me with a species of insolence; which, having some of the feelings of a free-born Briton about me, I found it difficult to endure with patience.”8 Jervis is uncomfortable directing the Sultan’s slaves and appalled at their treatment, but he resigns himself, concluding: “I might for a short season lessen the sufferings of these slaves; but still they were slaves” (I.177). But even this minor intervention provoked the Sultan’s ire. The Sultan asks Jervis, “[A]fter all, what concern are they of yours? They are used to the life they lead. They are not Europeans” (I.119). Only the fact that Jervis is able to bring one of the enslaved individuals back with him to England salves his conscience for acceding to the Sultan’s tyranny, “I told him we had no slaves there; and that, as soon as any slave touched the English shore, by our laws, he obtained his freedom” (I.131). In “Lame Jervis” Edgeworth repeats the belief that slavery is incompatible with English rights and identity, and she argues for extending those rights to Black and Brown human beings in British colonial territory. Similarly, in the eighth tale of the collection, “The Manufactures,” cousins Charles and William Darnford inherit their uncle’s cotton mill. William, educated by his uncle, likes work and equates exercise of economic responsibilities with happiness. Charles, whose father is now bankrupt, was brought up in extravagance and disagrees with his uncle and cousin. Charles and William inherit the mill upon their uncle’s death, and while William works hard to improve the mill, Charles disdains any role in the manufacture. He marries an heiress and purchases an estate, but he’s constantly ridiculed for his class-climbing pretensions and things go poorly for him until he decides to reform his behavior according to William’s advice. Significantly, William’s manufacturing success depends upon the good treatment of his workers, especially the children: ‘You see,’ said he, ‘that we cannot be reproached with sacrificing the health and happiness of our fellow creatures to our own selfishness and mercenary views. My good uncle took all the means in his power to make every person, concerned in this manufactory, as happy as possible; and I hope we follow his example. I am sure the riches of both the Indies could not satisfy me, if

8  Maria Edgeworth, Popular Tales, 3 vols. (London: 1804), I.92. All references are to this edition.

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my conscience reproached me with having gained wealth by unjustifiable means’. (II.290)

Edgeworth encourages her readers to consider how heavy the wages of slavery would weigh on their consciences and to what extent the profits of slavery should fuel their desires. Another tale in the collection uses irony to critique an insatiable desire for wealth and social position. “Murad, the Unlucky,” the eighth tale, is the only one in the collection other than “The Grateful Negro” set outside the British isles. It begins as a frame narrative in which the Grand Seignor explores Constantinople at night incognito. He subsequently debates with his Vizier the role of fortune. The Vizier insists prudence is more important than luck and relates the story of “Murad, the Unlucky and Saladin, the Lucky” (II.250) This story contrasts the fortunes of the titular brothers. While Saladin finds success in business, a nightmare promising Murad misfortune dogs his every move and justifies his repeated poor decision-making. In contrast, his brother survives fire in the city, avoids plague, and wins a beautiful wife, a fate of which he tells Murad in his story, “Saladin, the Prudent” (II.250). In the end, Murad dies of opium addiction. The contrast between Saladin’s actions and Murad’s is instructive, however, through the title of Saladin’s inset narrative, Edgeworth encourages her readers to consider that Murad’s tragic end was not a matter of luck but a lack of prudence. His greed drives him to cheat his customers. His foolishness leads to his being robbed. His naivete fuels his drug addiction, and his ignorance brings plague to the city. Thus, his tale’s title is ironic. The tale’s action implies the alternative, “Murad, the Imprudent.”

The Negro Slaves In “The Grateful Negro,” Edgeworth again asks her readers to consider the bad behavior practiced and injustices experienced in British colonial territory, and, with the irony in the title of Murad’s East Indian tale, she signals the potential value of an ironic reading of her West Indian tale. Specifically, she asks her readers to analyze the relationship between profession and action regarding the injustices of slavery. Without a “base trite motto” to help readers understand the nature of “The Grateful Negro’s” engagement with slavery or recognition of the satiric technique she employed elsewhere in the collection, most scholars have failed to fully

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recognize the ironic edge of Edgeworth’s tale. The exception is Susan Manly, who has read the “parodic echoes” of Edwards’s The History of the West Indies in “The Grateful Negro” as evidence of Edgeworth’s skepticism of pro-­slavery rhetoric. Nevertheless, no one has yet acknowledged “The Grateful Negro’s” simultaneous parody of her other acknowledged source text, August von Kotzebue’s The Negro Slaves.9 Edgeworth tells us early in the tale that her representation of the violence of slave rebellion is particularly informed by “The Negro Slaves—A fine drama, by Kotzebue,” and when she goes on in a footnote to explain that she found in it the “horrible instances of cruelty” that she saw confirmed in Edwards’s text, she signals, on her first page and once again, her interest in evaluating the role of sentiment in abolitionist and ameliorationist rhetoric (III.175). Kotzebue’s drama was translated into English as The Negro Slaves, a Dramatic-Historical Piece in 1796.10 This edition’s preface contains an anecdote about a ruined ex-planter whose fortunes are restored by a former slave. The fact that this anecdote provides the scaffolding for the plot of the “The Good Aunt” (which she began in 1797 and published in 1801) suggests that Edgeworth may have read this 1796 translation during its initial popularity, a popularity to which The Lady’s Magazine attested, writing: Few writers have ever attained to his excellence in delineating whimsical and impassioned characters: and in schemes drawn from private and domestic life, our poet eminently excels his contemporary rivals, both in the unaffected delicacy of the sentiments he conveys, and the freedom and precision with which he introduces them.11

Kotzebue’s popularity corresponded to the sentimental tastes of the decade previous to Edgeworth’s tale. Nevertheless, when the Magazine also acknowledges that while The Negro Slaves was one of Kotzebue’s most well-regarded works, it was not likely that it would “be ever brought on the English stage,” it clarifies the debt the play owed to its depiction of 9  Susan Manly, “Intertextuality, Slavery and Abolition in Maria Edgeworth’s ‘The Good Aunt’ and ‘The Grateful Negro,” Essays in Romanticism 20 (2013), 20. 10  While this translation was anonymous, Thomas Holcroft, Benjamin Beresford, and Anne Plumptre are known translators of Kotzebue’s other work. August von Kotzebue, The Negro Slaves, trans. Anonymous, London1796. All references are to this edition. 11   “Biographical Sketch of Kotzebue,” in The Lady’s Magazine Vol. 29 (London, 1798), 538.

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horrors so disturbing they could not be performed.12 Such horrors rendered The Negro Slaves a perfect example of abolitionist discourse relying upon sentiment to move political will, a fact to which its dedication to William Wilberforce and the translator’s description of himself as “an attentive observer of [Wilberforce’s] active zeal for the abolishment of slavery” further testify (iii). The sentimental argument of the play, the “moving horrors” that so piqued Edgeworth’s interest, pits two brothers, John, the Jamaican planter, against William, who has just returned to the island from his education in England. William is disgusted by the fact that John has become infatuated with one of his slaves, Ada, and intends to force her attentions. Eventually, however, Ada is reunited with her husband, Zameo, and with his father, who has sold himself into slavery in an effort to redeem his son’s freedom. William buys Zameo and his father from John and emancipates them, but John refuses to recognize the marriage between Ada and her husband and threatens to have Zameo killed. Ada resolves upon death and begs Zameo to end her life. When he refuses, she tries to take it herself. Murder and suicide mean death is the only end to the sufferings of slavery until the manuscript offers a second ending. The second ending features William arriving just in time to convince John to sell him Ada for half his fortune, claiming despite the cost, “Brother, I am richer than you” (142). Both of these outcomes anticipate the sentimental response of an idealized reader, and accordingly, the play ensures such a response by offering repeated and explicit details about the extreme suffering of enslaved peoples. For example, Truro, one of the older field-hands, laments that his  “Biographical Sketch of Kotzebue,” 538. Heather Nathans makes clear the stakes of its “virtually unproducible” nature, writing: “It recounts horrific descriptions of the Middle Passage, depicts slaves (including some wearing muzzles and collars) brutally treated by overseers and owners, and shows a slave rebelling against the white men who attack his father and lay claim to his wife.” Heather Nathans, “Slave Rebellions on the National Stage,” in Cambridge Companion to African American Theater, ed. by Harvey Young, 34–58 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 38. In addition, while The Negro Slaves was clearly produced as part of a larger trend in drama of the 1790s to employ melodrama in service of abolition, the fact that it was never performed and thus never accompanied by the “innovative theatrical machinery, elaborate set designs, and lighting, as well as the performance traditions of the pantomime” and music, means that Kotzebue’s abolitionist arguments should be analyzed not in terms of their relationship to spectacle but instead to sentimental rhetoric of print novels and tales from that same moment. Dana Van Kooy and Jeffrey Cox, “Melodramatic Slaves,” Modern Drama 55, no. 4 (Winter 2012), 459. 12

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fellow workers are “scorched with the burning sun, and waked with stripes of the whip, bedew the hard ground with sweat and blood” (8). Truro chronicles other plantation tragedies: including a slave incapacitated by flogging who is bitten by a rabid dog and then suffers the raving madness of hydrophobia, and of an older brother who refuses to lash his younger brother and cuts off his own hand to avoid doing so. In addition, we also hear directly from the overseer that he has “ordered old Ben’s back to be flayed, and salt and Spanish pepper to be strewed on it” for neglecting the sugar kettles, while John regrets that he did not “order him to be skinned, to make him feel the more” (19). Horrifyingly, owner and overseer compromise in planning Ben’s slow death from malnutrition. The overseer also describes some of the psychological torture he inflicts upon the slaves through threats of “fattening them in order to eat them” and making shoes of “negro-leather” (21). We learn that eventually such mental anguish leads one of the enslaved women on the plantation to infanticide when she explains: “Who but a mother could take pity on her own child?” (52). Later, Truro further details the horrors of the chains of the slave market, and William witnesses the various forms of slave collars and torture devices. Near the play’s end, we also learn that the horrors of the middle-passage caused Ada to miscarry Zameo’s child. The Negro Slaves adds to these horrors descriptions of the sexual violence practiced on the plantation. Lilli describes her master’s intended rape of Ada as an “endeavor with the same violence that the juice is pressed from the sugar-cane” (8). And John triumphantly details his past success with such endeavors: “Force? … I once made a wild girl so tame— … I had her whole body pricked with needles; then cotton dipped in oil was twisted round her fingers, and lighted.—Three days after she loved me most tenderly” (13). What is crucial to understanding Edgeworth’s interest in this play’s representation of the horrors of slavery is its admission of the inefficacy of the abolitionist sentiment it was designed to provoke. In the end, the white planters’ debates over slavery come to nothing. John insists on the necessity of violence, “a single crack of the whip operates more powerfully than all the eloquence of a Burke,” but William has nothing to say in return other than his “heart loudly contradicts” (11). When initially William attempts to intervene and asks for his brother to sell him Ada, John refuses and further mocks his brother’s ineffectual intellectualism. Refused the purchase of Ada, “He sits down, and draws a book out of his pocket” (17, emphasis original). In the face of John’s mockery at the uselessness of reading in this situation, William is merely “Exasperated” (18,

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emphasis original). After hearing even more details about the plantation’s violence, he “Shuts up his book in a passion. His face reddens with indignation” (20, emphasis original). Later we see him, “Repressing his anger” (20, emphasis original). At another point, in response to his brother, William: “Gives him a satirical contemptuous look, and is silent” (22, emphasis original). Afterwards, we see him merely “Gnashing his teeth” (44, emphasis original. And eventually, he is overcome: “He wipes his eyes… hides his face and runs out” (46, emphasis original). William’s sentimentality is plainly useless. While William does attempt to add more than ineffectual emotion and dirty looks to refute each of the justifications for slavery that John offers, championing “liberty!,” all he does is harden his brother’s racist resolve to enjoy his wealth (30). In response, John says: This is all idle declamation, imported from the universities.—At this rate we shall grow no coffee-trees, nor ripen any sugar-canes. You are in possession of a fine fortune, which our father acquired by means of the negro-slaves, and it makes you happy, is not that true? (32)

All William’s talk of God-given human rights goes out the window when he agrees to his own “mastery” (30, 60). William concedes: “Alas! he is right!” (32). And ultimately, his tears lead the slaves to request his intervention and become their “master” (60). The best it seems that William can do is claim the future intervention of Wilberforce, “Have hope, poor men! It will be better with you. There lives a man in England who loves you, who is day and night meditating your relief, and who, warmed with the glorious fire of philanthropy, defends your rights with fervid eloquence” (61). He promises: “The slave-trade shall cease. No more of your brethren shall be imported here… And your burden will be lighter too” (61). Nevertheless, William’s invocation of Wilberforce does not imagine emancipation. Worse, when John insists that Ada succumb to his lust, William urges her to comply: “Make use of the influence of your charms to mend my brother, to make him more gentle, more humane. Ease the burden of your poor companions, and your sacrifice has its reward” (122). In the end, the trade continues and the violence slavery provokes, however ameliorated its practice, is inevitable. The parallels between Edgeworth’s tale and Kotzebue’s play are conspicuous, and the differences suggestive of her tale’s parodic skepticism of sentimental abolitionist and ameliorationist arguments. Writing her tale

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eight years after the publication of Kotzebue’s melodrama and 12 years after Wilberforce’s initial and failed efforts in Parliament, Edgeworth is fully cognizant of the fact that slavery is still a going concern and that sentimental abolitionist discourse had been coopted by planters in order to excuse the enslavement of individuals whose humanity would cost them too much to recognize. “The Grateful Negro” parodies Kotzebue’s play to consider the logical consequences of even ameliorated enslavement. Her tale also pits two men and their views of slavery against one another, but where Kotzebue details the flaying of black skin, Edgeworth briefly glosses the 50 lashes for sugar-kettle negligence ordered by Durant, Jefferies’s overseer (III.188). Also, where Kotzebue repeats graphic scenes of infanticide and rape, the enslaved women of the Jefferies plantation are merely “severely chastised” for a gown’s ruin (III.190).13 Edgeworth’s depiction insists on the injustice of even an ameliorated slavery.

A Hero’s Labor Instead of violence provocative of horrified sentiment, Edgeworth’s tale pits the logic of her planters against themselves in order to argue for abolition. While Jefferies sees “the negroes as an inferior species” (III.175) deserving of enslavement, Edwards asks: Granting it to be physically impossible that the world should exist without rum, sugar, and indigo, why could they not be produced by freemen as well as by slaves? If we hired negroes for labourers, instead of purchasing them for slaves, do you think they would not work as well as they do now? Does any negro, under the fear of the overseer, work harder than a Birmingham journeyman, or a Newcastle collier, who toil for themselves and their families? (III.231)

Edwards imagines that paying emancipated Black people for their labor would effectively incentivize according to the model of England’s burgeoning industrial sector. To Edward’s logic, Jefferies offers a confused reply insisting planters “have as good a claim to their rights as the poorest 13  Susan Manly has observed the similarities of Mrs. Jefferies to Anna Barbauld’s descriptions of planter-wives in “Epistle to William Wilberforce” and their cruelties as described by A Short Sketch of the Evidence for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which Edgeworth likely read during her 1792 visit to Clifton. Susan Manley, “Introduction,” Selected Tales for Children and Young People, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 205, n 99.

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black slave on any of our plantations” (III.231), and in so saying, perverts the common understanding of universal human rights, to argue individuals have, instead of a right to be free from tyranny, a horrific right to tyrannize. While Edwards acknowledges Jeffery’s point that might makes right, he also laments it: “The law, in our case, seems to make the right; and the very reverse ought to be done: the right should make the law” (III.231). Here, Edgeworth asks her working-class readers to compare their own situations as proud providers with the inhuman subjugation perpetrated upon enslaved men and women. Robert Allen’s analysis of wages in the late eighteenth and early eighteenth century is useful in understanding these situations. Unlike the subsistence wages of laborers around the globe from India to Italy, England’s high wages meant its workers enjoyed white bread, meat, and alcohol regularly.14 Edgeworth prompts her hardworking readers to consider their rights and privileges as English citizens. Accordingly, when Edwards goes on to celebrate the liberty of English law so often attributed to the Mansfield decision, Edgeworth parodies his invocation of British patriotic claims to freedom by emphasizing the luxury consumption defining English law and global commerce: You know that you cannot smuggle slaves into England. The instant a slave touches English ground he becomes free. Glorious privilege! Why should it not be extended to her dominions? If the future import of slaves into these islands were forbidden by law, the trade must cease. No man can either sell or possess slaves, without its being known: they cannot be smuggled like lace, or brandy. (III.231–2)

Edwards entertains the possibility of the trade’s legal abolition and the emancipation of slaves, but in attempting to extend his ideal of liberty to the enslaved and distinguish them from chattel, his acknowledgment of the greed and taste for luxury driving smugglers to break the law betrays his own self-interest in the wealth currently preventing abolition legislation. Ultimately, when Edwards concludes:

14  Robert Allen, “The High Wage Economy and the Industrial Revolution: A Restatement,” The Economic History Review 68 no. 1 (February 2015), 1–22. Allen also notes that these high wages led to mechanization in order for employers to alleviate labor costs. This mechanization led to high unemployment and poverty rates in the second half of the nineteenth century.

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he wished that there was no such thing as slavery in the world … he was convinced, by the arguments of those who have the best means of obtaining information, that the sudden emancipation of the negroes would rather increase than diminish their miseries. His benevolence, therefore, confined itself within the bounds of reason. He adopted those plans, for the amelioration of the state of the slaves, which appeared to him the most likely to succeed without producing any violent agitation, or revolution…. (III.176)

Edgeworth’s common, ordinary readers are confronted with their revolutionary moment, of the corruption and injustice prompting agitation and revolution across the Atlantic, across the English Channel, and across the Irish Sea. Edgeworth reminds her readers of the unreliability, the uncertainty, and the tenuousness of a system entirely dependent upon an archaic system of paternalistic duty ensuring the landlords set fair rents and MPs fair taxes. She reminds them of the dangers of adhering to a belief that charity will always manifest sufficient to answer the calamities of illness or accident and that benevolence will always guide the hands of those elites distributing justice. Her working-class readers would have intimately understood that their betters did not always adopt those plans for the amelioration of their own state nor were those plans always grounded in benevolence and reason. For these readers then, the tale’s title offers an ironic warning. An ironic reading of “The Grateful Negro” is further justified in considering Edgeworth’s parodic rewriting of another source text, Oroonoko (1688). In Aphra Behn’s version, the eponymous hero, renamed Caesar by English slavers, harangues his countryman Aboan for his cowardice in resisting enslavement, and Behn’s Caesar is tortured to death at the end of the text. Edgeworth offers an uncannily familiar yet significantly different brave Black hero who stands to protect his friends and family against injustice. In “The Grateful Negro,” Edgeworth’s Hector harangues Caesar, damning his decision to inform Edwards of the planned rebellion: ‘Betray us if you will!’ Cried he. ‘Betray our secrets to him whom you call your benefactor; to him whom a few hours have made your friend! To him sacrifice the friend of your youth, the companion of your better days, of your better self! Yes, Caesar, deliver me over to the tormentor: I can endure no more than they can inflict. I shall expire without a sigh, without a groan. Why do you linger here, Caesar? Why do you hesitate? Hasten this moment to your master; claim your reward for delivering into his power hundreds of your countrymen! Why do you hesitate? Away! The coward’s friendship can

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be of use to none. Who can value his gratitude? Who can fear his revenge?’(III.183)

Hector’s use of “us” and “ours” puts the working-class reader of Edgeworth’s text into the position of the enslaved individual. His emphatic exclamations resonate with the heroism of Behn’s Oroonoko, but unlike Behn’s character, Edgeworth’s Caesar suddenly and incredibly repudiates his previous relationships.15 He abandons loyalty and his own “better self” to the interest of a “tormentor.” The elevated register of these characters’ speeches and Hector’s moving eloquence is also significant. Edgeworth refuses to represent an inaccurate and infantilizing West Indian dialect, and Hector speaks with all the elegance, persuasive power, and combative prowess of any legendary hero. The material significance of Hector’s argument is also reiterated in the moment Edwards gives Caesar a knife to prune his tamarind tree. When Edwards notices that Caesar is unarmed, we read: “‘Here is mine for you,’ said Mr. Edwards. ‘It is very sharp,’ added he, smiling; ‘but I am not one of those masters who are afraid to trust their negroes with sharp knives’” (III.187). Here, Edwards’s smile proves his naiveté. While he is confident his ameliorationist policies protect him from violent rebellion, his confidence is foolish: “These words were spoken with perfect simplicity: Mr. Edwards had no suspicion, at this time, of what was passing in the negro’s mind” (III.188). Utterly ignorant of his danger, Edwards arms a man who had until only yesterday plotted his murder. Interestingly, the narrator suggests through “at this time” that Edwards does, if only later, come to understand this fact and the inadequacy of his ameliorationist policies. More important, though, is the space Edgeworth’s narrator gives to Caesar’s internal struggle. While the next paragraph begins with the by now foreseeable claim that for Caesar: “The principle of gratitude conquered every other sensation,” the rest of the paragraph details just how dangerous Edwards’s simplicity was (III.188). We are told: The mind of Caesar was not insensible to the charms of freedom: he knew the negro conspirators had so taken their measures, that there was the

15  Manly has also observed that Edgeworth’s character may have been named for Behn’s eponymous hero in Oroonoko (1688) or Thomas Southerne’s adaptation (1696). Manly, Selected, 203, n. 89.

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­ reatest possibility of success. His heart beat high at the idea of recovering g his liberty. (III.188)

While Caesar takes the knife from Edwards, he endures a silent internal struggle against the bonds of his captivity. He exults at the sight of liberty on a near horizon. This lengthy digression into Caesar’s thought processes, hitherto unprecedented in a tale composed largely of dialogue, finally ends with the reiteration of the power Hector’s previous harangue held over Caesar, “The loss of Hector’s esteem and affection was deeply felt by Caesar. Since the night that the decisive conversation relative to Mr. Edwards passed, Hector and he had never exchanged a syllable” (III.188). Still reeling from the rejection of his own most deeply felt connections, Caesar continues to doubt the value of his new allegiances. While the tale then follows Caesar’s decision to warn Edwards against the planned rebellion, illustrating a miraculous but quite incredible enslaved gratitude, it also details a less than happy ending. Edwards’s endeavors fail to quell the rebellion. Caesar is stabbed, and 50,000 pounds worth of capital is lost: “The taking of the chief conspirators prisoners did not prevent the negroes, upon Jefferies’s plantation, from insurrection”(III.194). Durant, whose suspicions of Hector’s involvement in revolt earlier led him to institute “that brutality which he considered as the only means of governing black men,” is lynched (III.194). His ignorance and violent brutality are justly punished: “The overseer was the principal object of their vengeance: he died in tortures, inflicted by the hands of those who had suffered most by his cruelties” (III.194). Justice is also served to Mr. Jefferies: He was never afterward able to recover his losses, or to shake off his constant fear of a fresh insurrection among his slaves. At length, he and his lady returned to England; where they were obliged to live in obscurity and indigence. They had no consolation, in their misfortunes, but that of railing at the treachery of the whole race of slaves. (III.194)

Ultimately then, Edwards’s supposedly well-intentioned unwillingness to pursue immediate emancipation and, instead, practice ameliorationist policies utterly fail to contain violence and destruction.

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Popular Tales: Justice Edwards’s failure is also significant within the context of Popular Tales as a whole. Throughout all the tales, criminals enjoy swift justice. In “The Limerick Gloves,” Brian O’Neill’s innocence is proven and Justice Marshall arrests the real thief. In “Out of Debt, Out of Danger,” Bowstreet officers arrest the forger, Leonard Ludgate and his horrid wife dies of a stroke. In “The Lottery,” drunk Aunt Dolly dies in a carriage accident. In “Rosanna,” the rapacious land-agent Hopkins loses at law. In “The Manufacturers,” the gambling wife separates from her husband and commits suicide. In “The Contrast,” the Bettesworth boys are sentenced to transportation for their smuggling. In “The Grateful Negro,” Hector is pardoned, and with this, Edgeworth again critiques the relationship of slavery to justice. One final detail emphasizing Edgeworth’s interest in assessing their own beliefs about slavery and abolition relates to “The Grateful Negro’s” penultimate situation in the collection before the tale, “To-morrow.” “To-morrow” follows Basil, son of an eminent London bookseller, whose flawed education inflates his sense of worth and encourages a habit of procrastination. Procrastination prevents him from success in college and from publishing an account of his China travels. Procrastination alienates him from his father and uncle and leads him to lose his inheritance. Procrastination loses him the new employment he sought in Philadelphia and, for two years, makes him the dupe of a Mr. Hudson who leads him on in a scheme to sell land to Irish and Scottish immigrants in Louisiana. After Hudson marries an actress and departs for his Jamaican plantations, Basil’s son dies of small pox and his house burns down. The tale ends unfinished with an editor note that the tale was composed from a fragment found in an escritoire in “obscure lodging in swallow-street” (III.394). In the last tale of her collection, Edgeworth proves that procrastination allows villains to prosper only in the short term and only delays the inevitable failure of lives built on fantasies of unearned and undeserved wealth. Edgeworth insists her readers consider whether “The Grateful Negro’s” Edwards might truly have prevented a violent uprising, and she also asks, “For how long?” Edgeworth’s tale repeatedly urges her working-class readers to think through her work in the context of that produced by her contemporaries and of the other tales in her collection. It invokes the sentimental rhetoric used by English abolitionists to reveal its disgusting appropriation by the pro-slavery camp. It also, correspondingly, depicts the right of enslaved people to revolt. Its parodic inversion of Kotzebue and Oroonoko invite an ironic reading of its title that is corroborated by the moral of “Murad, the

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Unlucky.” Its unprecedented meting out of justice, and its penultimate placement in the third and final volume that concludes with a warning to those who delay justice that they will only suffer the more for doing so damns the failure of the abolitionist movement to end the trade and emancipate the enslaved.

Bibliography Allen, Robert. “The High Wage Economy and the Industrial Revolution: A Restatement,” The Economic History Review 68 no. 1 (February 2015): 1–22. “Biographical Sketch of Kotzebue.” In The Lady’s Magazine Vol. 29. London, 1798. Botkin, Frances. “Questioning the ‘Necessary Order of Things’: Maria Edgeworth’s ‘The Grateful Negro,’ Plantation Slavery, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade.” In Discourses of Slavery and Abolition, edited by Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih, 194–208. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Boulukos, George. “Maria Edgeworth’s ‘Grateful Negro’ and the Sentimental Argument for Slavery.” Eighteenth-Century Life 23 no. 1 (1999): 12–29. Cohen, Ashley “Wage Slavery, Oriental Despotism, and Global Labor Management in Maria Edgeworth’s Popular Tales,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 55, no. 2–3 (Summer/Fall 2014): 193–215. Edgeworth, Maria. The Edgeworth Papers, National Library of Ireland. Edgeworth, Maria. Popular Tales, 3 Vols. London, 1804a. Edgeworth, Richard Lovell. “Preface.” In Popular Tales by Maria Edgeworth Vol. I. London, 1804b. Harvey, Alison. “West Indian Obeah and English ‘Obee’: Race, Femininism, and Questions of Colonial Consolidation in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.” In New Essays on Maria Edgeworth, edited by Julia Nash, 1–29. Burlington: Ashgate, 2006. Kim, Elizabeth. “Maria Edgeworth’s The Grateful Negro: A Site for Rewriting Rebellion,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 16 no. 1 (2003): 103–26. Kotzebue, August von. The Negro Slaves. Translated by Anonymous. London 1796. Manly, Susan. “Intertextuality, Slavery and Abolition in Maria Edgeworth’s ‘The Good Aunt’ and ‘The Grateful Negro,” Essays in Romanticism 20 (2013): 19–36. Manley, Susan. “Introduction,” Selected Tales for Children and Young People. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Nathans, Heather. “Slave Rebellions on the National Stage.” In Cambridge Companion to African American Theater, edited by Harvey Young, 34–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Perera, Suvendrini. Reaches of Empire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Rodgers, Nini. Ireland, Slavery, and Anti-Slavery. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Van Kooy, Dana and Jeffrey Cox, “Melodramatic Slaves,” Modern Drama 55 no. 4 (Winter 2012): 459–75.

CHAPTER 6

Erasing Slavery in “The Two Guardians” and Harry and Lucy Concluded

By the time Edgeworth published “The Two Guardians” in 1817, British involvement in the slave trade had been abolished for a decade. Nevertheless, Black and Brown people remained legally enslaved in Britain’s colonies, and the Slavery Abolition Act making the purchase or ownership of slaves illegal in almost all of Britain’s colonies wouldn’t be passed until 1833. Enslaved individuals over the age of six wouldn’t see freedom until the end of two sets of “apprenticeships” in 1838 and 1840. Regardless of the abolition of the trade, “The Two Guardians” and, later, Harry and Lucy Concluded (1825) testify to Edgeworth’s continued interest in an end to slavery. The passage of abolition, however seemed to require new arguments; her former critiques of sentimental abolitionist failures and its misappropriation  had been rendered moot. Instead of her previous satirical arsenal, Edgeworth turned to genre convention in order to structure simplified plots imagining a harmonious post-slavery Britain.

Comic Dramas Comic Dramas has been almost entirely neglected by scholars, with the exception of Carmen Maria Fernández-Rodriguez. In her essay “Slight Productions: An Introduction to Maria Edgeworth’s Comic Dramas (1817),“Fernandez-Rodriguez observes that the three plays it includes

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imagine an integrated Britain.1 Indeed, these three pieces “Love and Law,” “The Two Guardians,” and “The Rose, Thistle, and Shamrock” are set in Ireland, England, and Ireland, respectively, and they feature a wide-­ ranging cast of British and British colonial characters. The collection repeatedly imagines colonial peace and reconciliation. For example, “Love and Law,” the first of the three plays in Comic Dramas, resolves a feud between the Protestant M’Bride and the Catholic Rooney families through the marriage of their children. This play attempts to critique cultural stereotypes and prejudices held by both the English and Irish. Bloomsbury, the London lady’s maid to Mrs. Carver, wife of the local justice of the peace, for example, denounces the “vicious pronunciations in regard to their Irish brogues,” even while her own pronunciation suffers from class-­ based errors of tense and pronunciation such as “tooked” and “larn.”2 Accordingly, the family feud over land, Ballynascraw bog, is situated along predictable ethnic lines, most clearly outlined by the family matriarch, Catty Rooney: What are they? Cromwellians at the best.—MacBrides!—Macks—Scotch!— not Irish native-at-all-at-all—People of yesterday, graziers, and mushroons— which tho’ they’ve made the money, can’t buy the blood.—My anshestors sat on a throne, when the M’Brides had only their hunkers to sit upon …. (46)

Edgeworth, through Catty, reminds her audience of the violent history of the Scottish settling of the Ulster Plantation at the beginning of the seventeenth century and of English Parliamentarian violence against Catholics during the English civil war. She also references the contemporary conflict between graziers hungry for the land necessary to support livestock exportation and small farmers needing land to cultivate foodstuffs. The feud is eventually resolved through the intervention of the Anglo-Irish Mr. Carver: “a good magistrate, except a little pompous, mighty good” (136). Ever in the background, however, is the site of such reconciliation: “Long may your honor’s honor reign over us in glory at Bob’s Fort” (136). The history of colonial violence against the Irish is never fully forgotten, but it is salved through happy marriage of Protestant and Catholic. 1  Carmen Maria Fernandez Rodriguez, “Slight Productions: An Introduction to Maria Edgeworth’s Comic Dramas (1817),” EstudiosIrlandeses no. 7 (2012), 33–43. 2  Maria Edgeworth, Comic Dramas (London: 1817), 34. All references refer to this addition.

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Similarly, “The Rose, Thistle, and Shamrock,” the last play in Comic Dramas, is also set in Ireland, specifically the village of Bannow. Sir William Hamden has arrived at Bannow Castle to mentor his niece who has just inherited the estate. The central conflict of the play concerns the building of a new inn and the choice of individuals responsible for its management. Gilbert, English manservant to Sir William, announces his dream of owning an inn in retirement and betrays a strong romantic interest in the daughter of the former innkeeper, Clara. Meanwhile, the Gallaghers— drunk father and fashion-obsessed daughter—engage in multiple forms of deception and attempted seduction to trade their ramshackle inn for the planned replacement. Fortunately, all is cleared up through the intervention of Owen, educated son of the former innkeeper, who is ultimately rewarded with a place as bugler in the regiment of the Scottish Captain Andrew Hope. Edgeworth’s insistence on the potential for ethnic and cultural cooperation is blatantly reflected in the name of the new inn: “The Rose, Thistle, and Shamrock.” The fantasy of reconciliation in “The Two Guardians” revolves around a young West Indian heir, St. Albans, who has brought to England, his newly emancipated servant Quaco. Since St. Albans’s father’s will identified for his son two potential guardians, Lord Courtington—a fashionable man of town—and Mr. Onslow—a retired country gentleman—Mrs. St. Albans must choose between the two. Meanwhile, Lady Courtington courts the guardianship and St. Albans as a suitor for her daughter Juliana, and her son, Mr. Beauchamp, tries to sell St. Albans a bad horse. Eventually, Mr. Onslow’s groom exposes the unscrupulousness of Mr. Beauchamp’s horse-trading, but St. Albans thinks himself in love with Juliana. At the same time, Lady Courtington’s god-daughter, the widowed Mrs. Beauchamp, is unable to obtain payment for the harp lessons she’s been giving Juliana. When Quaco gives money to the destitute Mrs. Beauchamp, Juliana’s irresponsibility is exposed, and St. Albans chooses Onslow for his guardian. Rodriguez has focused on “The Two Guardians” to argue that Edgeworth may have understood drama as a “subaltern site” through which to upset English cultural dominance.3 Nevertheless, Fernandez-­ Rodriguez also acknowledges how such disruption was less than successful, specifically because the dramatic form represented a “technical 3

 Rodriguez. “Slight Productions,” 36.

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handicap” for Edgeworth by not allowing the complexities of narration with which she had previously excelled in character development and motivation.4 This technical handicap has encouraged a number of conflicting readings regarding Quaco’s moral exemplarity. Sharon Murphy too reads Quaco’s moral superiority as a model of his assimilation to the moral superiority of “the British way of life.”5 Anne Mellor similarly focuses on the infantilization of Quaco and his “dependence upon his superior white master.”6 Meanwhile Alison Harvey’s attention to the ‘“song of freedom” which Quaco sings upon being made “free’” in England, has led her to insist on the impossibility of any simple reading of Quaco’s relationship to a master/slave binary.7 Ultimately, these readings may be reconciled through further analysis of the ways Edgeworth’s character development in the play renders him a moral exemplar but not the moral arbiter of the play. While in Whim for Whim Edgeworth contrasts Quaco’s intellectual acumen and real suffering against that claimed by hypocritical elites, “The Two Guardians” contrasts Quaco’s moral clarity with obvious villains and no possibility of reform.

History of the Maroons Interestingly, “The Two Guardians” seems to have emerged out of Edgeworth’s ongoing interest in enriching and complicating her own understanding of slavery and racism. One year after publishing, “The Grateful Negro,” she wrote to her cousin Sophy of the play’s inception: I have some idea of writing (in the intervals of my soberer severer studies) a comedy for my father’s birthday; but I will do it without eyes in my own room and will not produce it till it is finished. I [conceived] the first hint of a plan in the strangest place that ever any body could invent; for it was in Dallas’s history of the Maroons; & you may read the book to find it and ten to one you miss it. At all events, pray read the book, for it is extremely enter Rodriguez, “Slight Productions,” 38.  Sharon Murphy, Maria Edgeworthand Romance, (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), 124. 6  Anne Mellor, “Am I Not a Woman, and a Sister?: Slavery Romanticism, and Gender,” in Race, Romanticism, and Gender, eds. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 322. 7  Alison Harvey, “West Indian Obeah and English ‘Obee’: Race, Femininity, and Questions of Colonial Consolidation in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” in New Essays on Maria Edgeworth, ed. Julie Nash, (Burlington: Ashgate 2006), 15. 4 5

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taining and interesting, it presents a new world with new manners to the imagination & the whole bears the stamp of truth—It is not well written in general but there are particular parts admirable from truth of description & force of feeling. The mere manufacture of fine writing may be wanting but there’s a rich quantity of the … commodity of goodness.8

It is significant but not surprising that Edgeworth found the description of Jamaica and its Maroons in Robert Charles Dallas’s History of the Maroons (1803) fascinating since its author situates the work explicitly as a reaction to and correction of the accounts related by Bryan Edwards and upon which Edgeworth had previously relied for some of her knowledge of the West Indies. It is even more significant that Edgeworth insisted on crediting the details of his description as “admirable from truth of description & force of feeling” as well as its “rich quantity of the commodity of goodness.” Previously, she had referred her readers in “The Grateful Negro” to Bryan Edwards’s representation of Tacky’s Rebellion or Tacky’s War of 1760, particularly his rendering of Obeah, even providing a note with an extended quotation. Now, however, Dallas provided Edgeworth with new information about the Maroons, a group initially formed by enslaved individuals who had escaped from the Spanish colonial government while it ruled the island and who were formally recognized by British treaty and land grant in exchange for aid in capturing and returning newly escaped enslaved individuals. While Edwards’s History of the West Indies depicted the Maroons as violent and monstrous, Dallas offered her an alternative history, explaining: Far be it from me to speak lightly of the works of Mr. Edwards; I shall only observe here, that I have been able to derive little or no assistance from the cursory narrative published by him in the year 1796 … my information did not concur with his.9

Writing after the events of the French Revolution, Dallas was particularly careful to contextualize his more historically accurate depictions of the Maroons’ violence. He writes:

8  Maria Edgeworth to Sophy Ruxton, 26 Feb. 1805, MS 10166/7–451, The Edgeworth Papers, National Library of Ireland. 9  Robert Dallas, The History of the Maroons, Vol. I, (London,1803), iv.

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If I have not caught the zeal of Edwards, in painting these people as tygers; if I own that I have read more savage casts, and that I have known some distinguished by complexions less dingy, more barbarous; and if I allow them the portion of dessert which appears to me their due; I trust I shall not therefore be misunderstood, and proclaimed the apologist of their rebellion.10

Dallas’s description of white planters as the real savage animals, the real barbarians culpable for fomenting revolutionary violence resonates with Edgeworth’s critique in “The Grateful Negro.” He goes even further in deliberately humanizing the real victims of the conflict. At one point, Dallas explicitly rejects Edwards’s claims that “Even women in child-bed and infants at the breast, were alike indiscriminately slaughtered by this savage enemy.”11 Instead, he offers the following counternarrative about a Maroon named Johnson who: was proceeding to [a plantation] near which, and in his way, stood a small house belonging to a white woman, whose name was Letitia Mahoney, who had several small children. The woman on seeing him was terrified, and at her first emotion thought of flying from him, but he called to her not to be afraid, and coming up to her, told her he was not fighting with women and infants, and that no harm should be done to her or her children … He then advised her to keep out of the way of their shot, and directed her with her children to a safe place.12

While I cannot prove without a doubt that this incident provided “the first hint” of “The Two Guardians” that Edgeworth challenged her cousin not to miss in Dallas’s two-volume work, Edgeworth’s resolution of the play’s central conflict relies on a very similar depiction of white fear and Black humanity. Perhaps it was the woman’s Irish name that arrested Edgeworth’s attention and focused it on this brief anecdote. Significantly, Edgeworth’s  stage directions read: “She covers her eyes with her hand, and does not see Quaco, who advances on tiptoe—a glass of water in his hand. Quaco sighs—she turns her head, sees him, and starts.”13 Like  Dallas, The History, Vol. I, xii.  Dallas, The History, Vol. II, 184. 12  Dallas, The History, Vol. II, 186–187. 13  Maria Edgeworth, Comic Dramas (London, 1817), 186. All references are to this edition. 10 11

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Dallas’s Letitia Mahoney, Mrs. Beauchamp is terrified and thinks of flying from him. However, Quaco’s measured response, like Dallas’s Johnson, upsets any easy claims about the relationship between civility and race. Accordingly, Edgeworth’s text once again features discussions of slavery that contrast Quaco’s character with those of the other players, and his introduction to the action comes with an invocation of the Somerset Case defining liberty as a definitively English quality: Quaco. London very fine, Massa!—Quaco like England very much, Massa. –Very good country, England.—No whip for de slave,--nor no slave no where. St. Alb. True.—No slaves in England. From the moment that you touched English ground, Quaco, you ceased to be a slave. Quaco. Me! Quaco? St. Alb. You, Quaco—you are as free this moment as I am. Quaco. (Clapping his hands and capering.) Free! Free! Quaco?—But no, Massa—(Changing his tone, and kneeling to his master)—me will be Massa’s slave always. St. Alb. My servant, henceforward—not my slave. Now if you stay with me, it is from choice.—You may go when and where you please—you may choose another master. Quaco. Quaco never have no other massa.—Good massa—love him— kind to Quaco, from time leetlepiccinini boy.—Oh, let Quaco stay widmassa. (160–1)

However, this vivid repetition of the grateful slave trope reminds readers that, despite Britain’s criminalizing of the slave trade in 1807, in 1817 slavery is still being practiced in its West Indian colonies and that whips and chains prevent the enslaved from being recognized as the men and brothers for which the kneeling slave in the Wedgewood-medallion implores. This may be why she offers a number of arguments mitigating Quaco’s ostensible racial and cultural otherness. She first represents Quaco’s conversion, his abandoning of the spiritual practices Edwards had imbued with such irrational fear. Quaco sings: “Indian Obee’s wicket art,/ Sicken slow poor negro’s heart;/English Obeemakes the slave/Twice be young, and twice be brave” (162). This flattens his difference, rendering him a more comfortable neighbor to his white, Christian, fellow Britains. The next two stanzas then  repeat Edgeworth’s economic arguments in “The Grateful Negro” about the superiority of wage as opposed to enslaved labor and the possibility of enslaved gratitude:

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Quick the magic, strong the pow’r— See man changing in an hour! For the day that makes him free, Double worth that man shall be. Massa, grateful Quaco do. Twice the work of slave for you; Fight for Massa twice as long; Love for Massa twice as strong. (163).

Thus, Quaco’s waged value provides a stark contrast to the villainy of the other servants in the play. For example, the text’s first lines feature the footman, Popkin, reading newspaper advertisements for employment opportunities and scoffing at expectations that a servant’s “character bear strictest scrutiny—honesty and sobriety” and offer “no objection” to changing duties (142). When Blagrave, the groom enters, the two discuss their plans to bilk their employers, the Courtingtons, out of as much money as possible while doing the least work. The fact that St. Albans may become the ward of Lord Courtington raises their hopes for even more lucrative scheming. Popkin spends as much time out of reach from his employers as possible even while he slurps ices and stuffs his mouth with biscuits. Blagrave secures a payoff from Mr. Beauchamp for selling St. Albans the defective horse. At one point, much later on in the play, Mr. Onslow, St. Albans’s other prospective guardian offers a lengthy speech on the topic of such “impertinent” servants. Edgeworth offers Quaco as a useful and alternative. Additionally, “The Two Guardians” pits the racist depravity of white servants against that of Quaco. For example, Popkin fails to grasp the nature of Quaco’s positivity He muses: “Now was he a white man, I’d set him down for a knave; but being he’s a black, I can’t doubt but he’s a fool.— I hear he has got some money tho’, and I’ll be civil to the little black gem’man” (189). Popkin’s assumption that Quaco’s complexion renders him a fool is inaccurate and foolish. Eventually he concludes: “Never saw a fellow so brightened and sharpened in an hour in my life, as this little black boy.—I suppose it’s the money has done it.—More fool his master to give it to him!—and greater fool I, if I don’t get some of it from. Him, in some shape or another. ‘Twoud be odd enough, if I John Popkin the white weren’t a match any way for Quaco the black” (190). Popkin’s assertion of white supremacy only reinforces the moral depravity proved by his fetishizing of money. Later, when Quaco fails to fall for Blagrave’s

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schemes, Blagrave’s lament, “[T]here’s no managing them blacks, nor breeding ‘em to have the sense or memory of a Christian, without flogging of it into them, they say; on account they’ve not the feeling we have,” proves patently false (210–11). Blagrave’s “we” ironizes his claim to Christian values. However, the play’s ending undercuts the significance of Quaco’s moral exemplarity, for it is his “massa” St. Albans’s “generosity” to the formerly enslaved young man that uncovers all of the Courtington’s schemes. At the beginning of the play, St. Albans pays Quaco with a “little scarlet purse—it has my name marked on it—your mother marked it for me,” containing “All the money you have earned, Quaco, —the price of that provision ground, at which you used to work so hard, in every hour you had to yourself.—I told you, that if you trusted to me, and if you would come to England with me, you should not lose the value of your former labor” (161). When St. Albans spots this purse in the possession of Mrs. Beauchamp, all is resolved. The Courtingtons’ true characters are revealed. On the one hand, this incident does prove Quaco’s humanity to all. He did, after all, sneak his purse into the basket of the penniless widow, Mrs. Beauchamp, and about this Quaco prides himself: “no throw away money—no throw—give away, massa, like your own self.—Give, massa; give well—make happy, massa. (188). Quaco’s wages ignite his own sense of self-worth, and his ability to emulate the charitable virtues of the upper class inspire his new English identity. On the other hand, St. Albans remains the character responsible for the play’s ultimate resolution, even while the purse’s color and the fact that Quaco’s mother had embroidered his “master’s” name on it conjure images of the blood, sweat, and tears defining enslaved labor on the St. Albans plantation where Quaco’s mother is likely still slaving away.

Generic Limits Despite Edgeworth’s initial excitement about writing a play inspired by The History of the Maroons, her decision to publish such an attempt did give her pause. August 25, 1816, she wrote to her aunt Ruxton: I should not upon any account like to have any of these little dramas brought out on any public stage before they are published—If I should find that the generous public like them & if critics who will let me know without scruple the sum of public opinion encourage me to write for the stage I would then

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turn my mind to writing comedy fit for the stage—These little dramas are merely what Bacon would call experiments tentative—I should be very sorry that they were talked of before they are published especially with the partiality of friendship for that would do me & them great mischief by raising expectations which would then be disappointed.14

Repeatedly calling her work “little,” she seems to acknowledge that the plays do not satisfy. They are less comedies than experiments. They are more tentative than fitting. This has much to do with the fact that the predictable plots of these simple plays lack the narrative complexity and rich intertextuality of her other prose fiction and her even earlier Whim for Whim. Edgeworth’s father actually apologizes for this in his preface to the volume noting that while his daughter was: aware of the wide difference that there is between the exhibition of character in a Tale and in a Comedy. In the one, there is room for that detail of small circumstances, and for that gradual development of sentiments and incidents, which make us acquainted with the persons whose adventures are related, and which insensibly interest us in the fable. On the contrary, in the Comedy the characters must be shewn by strong and sudden lights, the sentiments must be condensed; and nothing that requires slow reflection can be admitted. (vi)

He concludes the preface by saying, “Her failure in such an humble attempt cannot be attended with much disgrace, as it is made with real humility” (vii). Further, Edgeworth’s early pleas to keep expectations low were prescient. In a letter of May 27th, 1817, she received a letter from John Whishaw, in which his praise was decidedly mixed: I have read them with very great pleasure and think they display the same peculiar and characteristic merits which distinguish your former publications. At the same time I must acknowledge that, if called upon to assign them a rank among your works, I should be disposed rather to class them with your excellent “Popular Tales,” than to place them by the side of Ennui, Maneuvering, The Absentee, & c., which I do no expect to see

14  Maria Edgeworth to Mrs. Ruxton, 25 Aug. 1816, MS 10166/7–1195, The Edgeworth Papers, National Library of Ireland.

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equaled.—The pieces now published are obviously written without a view to representation and with respect to two of them, the great number of Irish characters, which it is so unusual to see well represented in the country, makes it impossible that they could appear with any advantage on the English stage. I cannot therefore but regret that they did not appear under what I should consider as their more natural shape of “Tales” which retaining the most striking parts of the present dialogues would have given us the advantage of many of those details and observations so essential to the true delineation of national character … which about excluded by the form of the dramatic composition.15

Whishaw’s contrast of Comic Dramas with Ennui and The Absentee, works for which Edgeworth was celebrated for her complex representation of Irish life, and his focus on the “impossible” number of Irish characters in the work, suggest the impossibility of accurately defining and representing the specific and complex cultural differences of Britain’s various inhabitants according to contemporary trends in stage comedy. Instead of reflecting the “awareness of the contradictions, conflicts, and idiosyncrasies that exist within any national discourse,” their very “obviousness” undercut their potential value.16 Significantly, Whishaw’s letter offers little with respect to “The Two Guardians,” the only one of the three works not set in Ireland and the only one to include a formerly enslaved character. He writes: “You are possibly aware that the ‘Guardians’ is the least popular of the three dramas, in England… but I accede opinion that the vices of fashionable are somewhat overcharged, and that the whole piece is less original than either of its companions.”17 This distancing through the use of the passive voice, in a letter to his friend of over five years, is suggestive not only because of Whishaw’s “tremendous reputation for critical sagacity.” 18 John Whishaw was also secretary to the African Institution, formed in 1807 to fulfill the failed plans of the Sierra Leone Company to realize a refuge for freed slaves, and he was the biographer of Mungo Park, Scottish explorer of West Africa, upon whose papers Whishaw based Journal of a Mission to the Interior of Africa (1815). It is likely that Whishaw’s 15  John Whishaw to Maria Edgeworth, May 27, 1817, MS 10166/7–1280, The Edgeworth Papers, National Library of Ireland. 16   Kerstin Fest, “Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent (1800).” Handbook of British Romanticism. Vol. 6, Ed. Ralf Haekel. (Boston: De Gruyter 2017), 377. 17  Whishaw to Edgeworth. 18  Butler, Maria p. 228, n. 405.

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first-hand experience with Africans and members of the diasporic community, including Paul Cuffee—the American mixed-race businessman and abolitionist, lay at the root of his silent disapproval. Unlike Whishaw, the Critical Review of 1817, however, pulled no punches, writing: “The scene of the ‘Two Guardians,’ the second drama in this volume, is laid in London, and the characters are persons of a higher and more polished rank, but have still fewer remarkable and contrasted features to make them fit agents in a play.”19 In addition to remarking upon Edgeworth’s unoriginal modeling of St. Albans’s upon Richard Cumberland’s Belcour in the The West Indian (1771), we are told: In the first scene in which we see him, he is imposingly represented telling a black boy he had brought from the West Indies, that he has made him free, giving him at the same time a purse full of gold. Quaco, the young negro, afterwards performs a very active and important part, displaying an excess of gratitude that is even obtrusive and sickening; we are tired, too, of his West-­ Indian English with an eternal repetition of ‘good Massa,’ ‘kind Massa,’ & c.20

By 1817, any invocation of characters even approaching the grateful slave trope, however complicated, was “sickening.” Jean Marsden has detailed how Cumberland’s play relied upon the performance of benevolence to justify British colonial and imperial interests, but, more importantly, she has also argued that audience faith in or acceptance of the benevolent planter had “eroded by 1787 when Coleman’s Inkle and Yarico first appeared at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket.”21 Coleman had revised the ending of the tale found in Spectator No. 11 with an improbable happy marriage between Inkle and Yarico. Marsden concludes that by 1787, English audiences could not tolerate “watching one of their own selling human flesh.”22 By 1817, however, it appears that the tolerance of English audiences was further diminished. They could no longer tolerate watching one of their own who had owned human flesh, however benevolent.

19  “Review of Comic Dramas.” The Critical Review 55 (May 1817), 381. Northeastern University Women Writers Project. https://www.wwp.northeastern.edu/review/reviews/ edgeworth.comicdramas.criticalreview.1. 20  “Review of Comic Dramas.” 21  Jean Marsden, “Performing the West Indies: Comedy, Feeling, and British Identity,” Comparative Drama 42, no. 1 (Winter 2008), 80. 22  Marsden, “Performing,” 81.

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Abolition Erased Edgeworth’s failure with Comic Dramas did not prevent her continuing interest in discourses of colonialism and slavery. On May 5, 1822, Edgeworth wrote to John Bowring, thanking him for tickets to the African Institution: Though it will be impossible for me to be able to go to Newgate on that day, yet I don’t wish that Mrs. Fry should make any alteration in her arrangements on my account as I shall make some friend of mine very happy by giving them my tickets.23

These tickets, gifted during her 1821–1822 winter season in London, corresponded with her circulation amongst the best of the town’s intelligentsia. She was “received ‘in six different and totally independent sets, of scientific, literary, political, travelled, artist, and the fine fashionable of various shades.”24 The tickets themselves permitted entrance to the May 10 meeting of the Africa Institution (founded in 1807). At this meeting, a report was delivered to a meeting of over 1500 people, after which passed a motion imploring the British government to declare all participation in the slave trade international piracy. While Edgeworth did not attend, the Institution’s focus on piracy reflected a shift in British conceptions of their relation to the ongoing practice of slavery. As a nation, Britons no longer saw themselves as responsible for the anti-humanitarian scourge of slavery. Accordingly, Harry and Lucy Concluded (1825), a science textbook for children and Edgeworth’s last published representation of abolition and slavery, reflects her last attempt to engage with the injustices of slavery. In it, Edgeworth locates a distinctly partial and opaque critique of slavery in a purely intellectual and hypothetical register. While her eponymous protagonists, young Harry and his even younger sister Lucy, explore Bristol and the evidence of West Indian slavery still shaping the city, there is no Black voice to function as intellectual and moral exemplar nor any ironic deployment of abolitionist discourse. In this scene, the noisome hold of the slave ship Edgeworth herself toured in 1792 is replaced with the noisy work of expanding urban infrastructure. Instead of England’s dependency 23  Maria Edgeworth, “To John Bowring”, 5 May 1822. Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, The New York Public Library, BRNG 0001. 24  Butler, Maria, 415.

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upon the West Indies for sugar, Harry and Lucy are informed of the West Indies’ dependence upon the Bristol lime employed in its sugar manufacturing. Bristol’s superior refineries have ameliorated the dangers of sugar production. Interestingly, when the children are then asked to recall any previous information they have encountered on the subject, their knowledge of slavery presents a revised history. Lucy acknowledges that in Bryan Edwards’s History of the West Indies, she read about sugar cane and mills and explains “The canes are cut in autumn, and the sugar-making time is a season of gladness and festivity to man and beast, especially to the poor negroes, who work in the plantations.”25 This shocking allusion to Edward’s absurd claims for the “gladness and festivity” of boiling down sugarcane is hurriedly covered over. We read: “Lucy was near going off, far away from the sugar-making, to talk of the poor negroes, but her father called her back again” with a technical question about the next step in the process. Apparently confused by her father’s denial of so relevant a participant in the process as the enslaved, we are told, Lucy “looked to Harry for assistance when she came to the mill” (II.229). Significantly, Harry does not return to the involvement of the “poor negroes” but instead explains how large iron rollers squeeze the cane for juice, and that these are “turned by wind or water, or horses, or oxen, or perhaps, now, the people may have learned to work them with steam” (II.229). Edgeworth’s text replaces enslaved labor with technology. Harry and Lucy’s uncle goes on to describe the next step of boiling to enable crystallization, but his descriptions are disturbingly passive: “The bundles of cane are passed,” “It is caught” (II.229). The only agent is the boil itself that “causes” other vegetable matter to separate which, in the only reference to human involvement, is “removed by the skimmer” (II.229). In a Bristol emptied of slave ships but whose expansion betrays its recent history, Edgeworth’s characters sanitize colonial slavery. Slaves are generalized “people,” and yet also equated with “water” and “horses.” Edgeworth’s text goes on to further sever the notorious connection between Bristol, sugar manufacturing, and slavery when the next morning the children tour a new sugar refinery where further improvements on the process had been made. These improvements include the boiling of sugar in a vacuum created with the aid of a steam engine, and at the factory, Lucy is taken aback at the few employees necessary in the process: 25  Maria Edgeworth, Harry and Lucy Concluded: Being the Last Part of Early Lessons, 2 Vol. (London 1825), II.229. This work was not reproduced in the Pickering & Chatto collection.

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In truth, the men seemed of little importance. It appeared as if they were employed only as under-servants to the machines, and to do trifling things, which the mechanic and the chemist had not thought it worth their while to invent the means of effecting in any other way. (II.246)

In contrast to the “poor negro” Lucy imagined responsible for the production of sugar, Edgeworth’s work represents the products of colonial slavery as sanitized and scientific. The process is efficiently described: “[I]t required one hundred degrees less heat to boil sugar in vacuo than in the ordinary method, and that it was accomplished in less than one-fifth of the time formerly” (II.250). Instead of the enslaved boiling sugar, the children see the presumably free and upwardly mobile “black sailors” unloading sugar at the West Docks. These efforts present a sanitized vision of Britain’s colonial legacies. While Edgeworth had previously repeatedly depicted discussion of abolition and slavery as an opportunity for assessing character and behavior, after the abolition of Britain’s engagement in the slave trade, she found herself writing to a nation interested in distancing itself from this past and redefining itself as liberated by economic and technological innovation. Edgeworth’s repeated attempts to engage with the challenges and complexities of discourses surrounding slavery and race are evidence of the power she saw they had in shaping her world. In abandoning most of the satiric methods she had previously employed to challenge slavery’s proponents, she signals a skepticism in their ability to actually change the status quo. This skepticism was not and is not unique to her and still troubles literary critics, and of course, her decision to set aside the injustices of slavery after her flawed experiments with simple comedy and instruction despite having so gamely attacked them earlier through irony, parody, and caricature early in her career could be read as her capitulation to the political and economic forces preventing the social change she imagined. After 1817, her publishing career largely came to an end. Nevertheless the facts of this very trajectory insist that her attempts to critique the various wrongs of chattel slavery need to be read within the larger context of her lengthy career. After offering these arguments about Maria Edgeworth’s efforts to critique the characters of those who would practice or condone slavery and the failures of those whose sentimental arguments in favor of abolition and emancipation failed or were misappropriated, I must acknowledge that I don’t believe Edgeworth believed in the fundamental equality of all human beings  or in any sort of social equality. Her representations of morally bankrupt elites and the  class-climbing underclasses prove this

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unequivocally. Nevertheless, I do believe that Edgeworth was committed to justice under the law for all. I also think my arguments make clear that Edgeworth saw the institution of slavery as essentially unjust and as a multiplier of injustices. Accordingly, through characterization, plot, and satiric technique she condemned those who justified slavery and the racist attitudes it inevitably promoted. She also imagined a world in which the victims of slavery were able, despite horrific suffering, to manage morally exemplary lives. Ultimately, while I also believe it may be impossible to accurately imaginatively represent the lives and experiences of people utterly different from ourselves, I believe Edgeworth’s repeated attempts to do so reflect her belief in the value of such attempts and her corresponding belief in the value of attempts by readers to try and understand them. She modeled this practice again and again. My deep hope is that similar beliefs inform the reception of this book.

Bibliography Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1972. Dallas, Richard. The History of the Maroons, Vol. I. London,1803. Edgeworth, Maria. Comic Dramas. London: 1817. Edgeworth, Maria. The Edgeworth Papers, National Library of Ireland. Edgeworth, Maria. Harry and Lucy Concluded: Being the Last Part of Early Lessons, 2 Vol. London, 1825. Edgeworth, Maria. “To John Bowring,” 5 May 1822. Carl H.  Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, The New  York Public Library, BRNG 0001.Fest, Kerstin. “Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent(1800).” In Handbook of British Romanticism, edited by Ralf Haekel. Vol. 6. Boston: De Gruyter 2017. Harvey, Alison. “West Indian Obeah and English ‘Obee’: Race, Femininity, and Questions of Colonial Consolidation in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.” In New Essays on Maria Edgeworth, edited by Julie Nash, 1–29. Burlington: Ashgate 2006. Marsden, Jean “Performing the West Indies: Comedy, Feeling, and British Identity,” Comparative Drama 42, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 73–88. Mellor, Anne “’Am I Not a Woman, and a Sister?: Slavery Romanticism, and Gender.’” In Race, Romanticism, and Gender, edited by Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh, 311–29. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Murphy, Sharon. Maria Edgeworthand Romance. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004. “Review of Comic Dramas.” The Critical Review 55 (May 1817), 381. Northeastern University Women Writers Project. https://www.wwp.northeastern.edu/ review/reviews/edgeworth.comicdramas.criticalreview.1. Rodriguez, Carmen Maria Fernandez “Slight Productions: An Introduction to Maria Edgeworth’s Comic Dramas (1817),” EstudiosIrlandeses no. 7 (2012): 33–43.

Index1

A African Institution, 113, 115 Allegory, 44, 79 Allusion, 13, 14, 25, 56, 58, 79, 116 Amelioration, 5, 18, 19, 26, 70, 78, 85, 91, 94, 97–99 An Essay in Vindication of the Continental Colonies of America, From a Censure of Mr. Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, 74 Anglo-Irish, 25, 86n1, 104 Anti-slavery, 5, 10, 15, 30, 40, 43–45, 49, 56 B Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 59, 67, 68 Hymns in Prose for Children, 68n9 Bickerstaff, Isaac The Padlock, 15, 37, 38

Behn, Aphra Oroonoko, 18, 37, 48, 97, 98, 100 Blackface, 32, 37–39 Blake, William, 77 Bernardin, Jacques-Henri Paul et Virginie, 46 Bristol, 8, 10, 11, 19, 73, 115, 116 Burney, Frances, 10 C Caricature, 12, 14, 51, 117 Catholic, 104 Clarkson, Thomas, 7, 9 Class, 27, 31, 74, 86, 89, 96, 98, 100, 104, 111, 117 Colonialism, 5, 6, 12, 14, 25, 26, 44, 73, 88, 89, 104, 107, 114, 115, 117 Conservative, 29 Cowper, William, 43

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Runia, Maria Edgeworth and Abolition, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12078-7

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INDEX

Creole, 75, 77 Crevecoeur, Hector St. John de Letters from an American Farmer, 10, 17, 79 Cumberland, Richard, 19, 114 The West Indian, 19, 114 D Dallas, Robert History of the Maroons, 19, 106–111 Darwin, Erasmus, 10, 17, 67, 79, 80 Day, Thomas, 10, 12, 16, 28, 46–53, 48n11, 51n16, 52n17, 53n20, 55–57, 69, 69n13, 77 Dialect, 25, 27, 37, 38, 98 E Earle, William, 7 Edgeworth, Maria The Absentee, 12, 112, 113 Double Disguise, 27 Ennui, 12, 112, 113 An Essay on Irish Bulls, 12, 23 Letters for Literary Ladies, 10, 12, 28 Edwards, Bryan, 85, 91, 107–109, 116 Emancipation, 15, 17, 18, 36, 40, 57, 58, 67, 94, 96, 97, 99, 117 Empire, 73, 88 Enlightenment, 2, 3, 15, 88 Equiano, Olaudah, 7, 23 F Feminist, 3, 5, 12–14 Free Mason, 29 French Revolution, 23, 72, 107

G Gothic, 7, 46 Grateful slave trope, 36, 57, 109, 114 H Harlequin Mungo; or Peep into the Tower, 39 Human rights, 36, 53, 55, 94, 96 Hypocrisy, 4, 14, 18, 24, 25, 29, 31, 40, 47, 57 I Illuminatism, 23, 24, 28–33 Inchbald, Elizabeth, 10 Irish, 1–3, 12, 104, 108, 113 Irish Rebellion, 25 Irony, 14, 18, 31, 32, 47, 86–88, 90, 117 K Keir, James An Account of the Life and Writing of Thomas Day, Esq., 16, 51, 52 Kotzebue, August von The Negro Slaves, 10, 18 L The Lady’s Magazine, 91 Louverture, Toussaint, 85 Lovell, Richard, 17, 65, 66, 69, 72, 86 M Mansfield Decision, 48, 71, 96 Miscegenation, 47 Mixed-race, 55n22, 76, 77, 82, 112, 114

 INDEX 

Moore, John Zeluco, 56 Mulatto, 75 N Narrator, 2, 7, 46, 47, 51, 56, 74, 76, 77, 88, 98 Nationalism, 3 P Parody, 12, 14, 28, 55, 91, 117 Patriarchy, 3, 5 Postcolonial, 3 Progressive, 3, 26, 86 Protestant, 2, 104 R Racism, 17, 19, 34, 37, 54, 70, 74, 106 Radical, 5, 17, 27, 29, 87 Rebellion, 98 Robison, John, 14, 29, 30 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 28, 51, 52 S Satire, 12, 13, 24, 26–29, 31, 33, 40 Sentimentality, 4, 16, 35, 39–40, 43, 54–57, 70, 94 Slave rebellion, 45, 58, 91, 97, 99 Slavery Abolition Act, 103

121

Smith, Adam Theory of Moral Sentiments, 17, 73 Smith, Charlotte, 7 Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 49 Somerset Case, 34, 48, 71, 73, 109 Spectacle, 32 Spectator, 35 Stael, Germaine de, 11 Stedman, John Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, 77 Sugar, 19, 73, 93–95, 116, 117 Sympathy, 5, 11, 15, 37, 38, 50, 51, 57, 80 T Tacky’s Rebellion, 19, 107, 108 Taste, 10, 15, 16, 44, 47, 48, 57, 58, 91, 96 W Weishaupt, Johann, 29 Whishaw, John, 112–114, 113n15, 113n17 Wilberforce, William, 7, 18, 68, 92, 94 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 44–45, 72 Z Zemire et Azor, 60