Prudence and Prejudice in Maria Edgeworth’s “Murad the Unlucky” (1804)

Lawrenson, Sonja

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6_7

Sonja Lawrenson⁵

Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series ((CIPCSS))

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Abstract

Set in Turkey, Maria Edgeworth’s Oriental fable “Murad the Unlucky” (1804) derives its atmosphere and ambience directly from the Arabian Nights. Yet, although the tale has enjoyed a small but sustained readership over the centuries, critics have often dismissed it as a late example of an earlier moralistic group of Oriental fictions.

This chapter contends that the overt didacticism of “Murad the Unlucky” belies its engagement with an impressive array of historical, anthropological, and philosophical sources. Overall, in its subtle yet salient scrutiny of the socio-economic realities of the modern East, “Murad the Unlucky” aligns itself more readily to Irish Orientalist modes of representation than those of the British Romantic tradition in which it is generally considered.

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Notes

1.
Namely, Robert L. Mack, ed., Oriental Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Alan Richardson, ed., Three Oriental Tales (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002); Raymond N. Mackenzie, ed., Persian Letters: With Related Texts (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2014). See also, Maria Edgeworth, Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales (London: Cassell, 1981).
2.
Mackenzie, ed., Persian Letters: With Related Texts, 292.
3.
Robert Irwin, ed., The Arabian Nights: A Companion (London: Tauris Parke, 2003), 320.
4.
Martha Pike Conant, The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908), 11.
5.
Joseph Lennon, Irish Orientalism (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 152.
6.
Edward Said , Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978), 42.
7.
Joep Theodor Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), 66.
8.
Lennon, Irish Orientalism, xxv–xxvi.
9.
Ibid., 141–42.
10.
See Sharon Murphy, Maria Edgeworth and Romance (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004) and Julia M. Wright, Ireland, India and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
11.
Lennon, Irish Orientalism, 141.
12.
See Clíona Ó Gallchoir, Maria Edgeworth: Women, Enlightenment and Nation (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005) and Esther Wohlgemut, Romantic Cosmopolitanism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
13.
Lennon, Irish Orientalism, xxii.
14.
Ibid., xxiii.
15.
Ibid.
16.
Ros Ballaster , “Narrative Transmigrations: The Oriental Tale and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture, eds. Paula Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 79.
17.
Maria Edgeworth, “Murad The Unlucky” in Oriental Tales, ed. Mack, 215.
18.
Ballaster, “Narrative Transmigrations,” 77–78.
19.
Robert L. Mack, ed., Arabian Nights Entertainment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 73.
20.
Mack, ed., Arabian Nights, 746.
21.
Ros Ballaster , Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662–1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 372.
22.
Richard Lovell Edgeworth to Maria Edgeworth 8 Nov 1779. The Papers of Maria Edgeworth, ms10166/7 f15, National Library of Ireland.
23.
Ibid.
24.
Kristyn Nicole Coppinger, “The Arabian Nights in British Romantic Children’s Literature” (PhD Thesis, Florida State University, 2006), 28.
25.
Jing-Huey Hwang, “Orientalism in Pedagogy: Maria Edgeworth’s ‘Murad the Unlucky,’” Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities no. 28 (Jan 2010): 100.
26.
Ballaster, Fabulous Orients, 374.
27.
Mack, ed., Arabian Nights, 747.
28.
Ibid.
29.
Ibid., 758.
30.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations: Books I-III, ed. Andrew Skinner (London: Penguin, 1999), 110.
31.
Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011) 203.
32.
Ibid., 5.
33.
Ibid., 3.
34.
Lennon, Irish Orientalism, 142.
35.
Ibid., 117.
36.
Ibid., xxiv.
37.
For an overview of this unsuccessful campaign, see Iradj Amini, Napoleon and Persia: Franco-Persian Relations under the First Empire (Surrey: Curzon P, 1999) and Darrell Dykstra, “The French Occupation of Egypt” in The Cambridge History of Egypt, ed. M.W. Daly, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1113–38.
38.
John Antes , Observations on the Manners and Customs of Egyptians (London: Stockdale, 1800). Throughout “Murad the Unlucky,” Edgeworth refers to Antes as Antis.
39.
François Baron de Tott, Memoirs of Baron De Tott, 2 vols. (London: Robinson, 1785).
40.
de Tott, Memoirs, 1: 204–06, 1: 15–22.
41.
Antes, Observations, 40.
42.
Mack, ed., Oriental Tales, 272; de Tott, Memoirs, 1: 40–49.
43.
Mack, ed., xlv.
44.
Ibid., xlvi.
45.
Ballaster, Fabulous Orients, 373.
46.
Mack, ed., Oriental Tales, 276. As Mack points out, Edgeworth’s description of the French engineer’s “extraordinary” firework display for “the Grand Seignor’s birth-day” (244) recalls Baron de Tott’s account of the firework exhibition he staged for the very same event. See de Tott, Memoirs, 2: 85.
47.
Dykstra , “French Occupation of Egypt,” 119. Said cites this military campaign as “the first in a long series of European encounters with the Orient in which the Orientalist’s special expertise was put directly to functional colonial use,” Orientalism, 80.
48.
Dykstra, “French Occupation of Egypt,” 119.
49.
Richardson, ed., Three Oriental Tales, 247.
50.
The battle of the Nile took place in August 1798, producing a swift and decisive victory for Britain.
51.
Antes, Observations, 12; de Tott, Memoirs, 1:vii.
52.
Mack, ed., Oriental Tales, xliii.
53.
Richardson, ed., Three Oriental Tales, 247.
54.
Ibid., 332.
55.
Lennon, Irish Orientalism, xxiv.
56.
Ibid.,142.
57.
Ibid., 115.
58.
Ibid., xxvi.
59.
Smith, Wealth of Nations, I–III, 392.
60.
Ibid., 142.
61.
Paul D. Mueller, “Adam Smith’s Views on Consumption and Happiness,” Adam Smith Review 8 (2014): 277.
62.
Ibid.
63.
Ibid.
64.
Smith, Wealth of Nations: Books I–III, 442.
65.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations: Books IV-V, ed. Andrew Skinner (London: Penguin, 1999), 236.
66.
Ibid., 247.
67.
Ibid., 529.
68.
Ibid., 247.
69.
Fraser Easton, “Cosmopolitan Economy: Exchangeable Value and National Development in Adam Smith and Maria Edgeworth,” Studies in Romanticism 42 (2003): 111. For alternative readings of Smith’s colonial critique, see Sanjay Krishnan, Reading the Global: Troubling Perspectives on Britain’s Empire in Asia (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2007) and Emma Rothschild and Amartya Sen, “Adam Smith’s Economics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 319–65.
70.
Easton, “Cosmopolitan Economy”, 119, 115.
71.
Ibid., 119.
72.
Julia M. Wright , Ireland, India, and Nationalism, 53–80.
73.
Maria Edgeworth, Harrington, ed. Susan Manly (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2004), 218.
74.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Dodsley, 1790), 130.
75.
Ó Gallchoir, Maria Edgeworth, 34.
76.
Ibid., 35.
77.
Ibid., 24.
78.
See Maureen Harkin, “Adam Smith on Women,” in The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith, eds. Christopher J. Berry, Maria Pia Paganelli and Craig Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
79.
Shelley Saguaro, “Maria Edgeworth and the Politics of Commerce,” Moderna Sprak 92, no. 2 (1998): 147.
80.
Ibid.
81.
Ibid.
82.
Ibid., 158.
83.
Ibid., 147.
84.
Ibid., 157.
85.
Ibid., 158.
86.
Colleen Booker, “What’s Luck Got to Do With It?: Reading the East in Maria Edgeworth’s ‘Murad the Unlucky,’” The Looking Glass: An Online Children’s Literature Journal 10, no. 1 (2006): par. 1. http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/ojs/index.php/tlg/article/view/94/80.
87.
Ibid., par. 15.
88.
Sheila A. Spector, “The Other’s Other: The Function of the Jew in Maria Edgeworth’s Fiction,” European Romantic Review 10, no. 3 (1999): 320; quoted in Booker, “Reading the East,” par. 4.
89.
Edgeworth, Harrington, ed. Manly, 67.
90.
Saguaro, “Politics of Commerce,” 156.
91.
Ibid., 235.
92.
Ibid., 157.
93.
Edgeworth, Harrington, ed. Manly, 18.
94.
John Toland , Letters to Serena (London: Lintot, 1704), 4.
95.
As Benjamin Braude argues: “This linkage of the old and new enemy, the Jew and the Turk, was in fact to become commonplace from the sixteenth century onward,” “The Myth of the Sefardi Economic Superman,” in Trading Cultures: The Worlds of Western Merchants, eds. Jeremy Alderman and Stephen Aron (Turnhout, Belg.: Brepols, 2001), 168.
96.
Saguaro, “Politics of Commerce,” 157.
97.
Edgeworth, “Murad the Unlucky,” 256.

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Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK
Sonja Lawrenson

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Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK
Daniel Sanjiv Roberts
Maynooth University, Maynooth, Kildare, Ireland
Jonathan Jeffrey Wright

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Lawrenson, S. (2019). Prudence and Prejudice in Maria Edgeworth’s “Murad the Unlucky” (1804). In: Roberts, D., Wright, J. (eds) Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775–1947. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6_7

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6_7
Published: 06 November 2019
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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