Abstract
In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth published a series of books, beginning with Harry and Lucy. Part 1. Being the first part of Early Lessons (1801), and ending with Harry and Lucy concluded (1825). Successive volumes in the series followed her child protagonists as they grew. This essay discusses the series in the context of Edgeworth’s pedagogical principles of ‘gradual instruction’, or the exercise of the child’s faculties by works ‘suited to his capacity’. Edgeworth’s child-centred works represent time in several of its aspects—age, duration, memory. Her didactically motivated apprehension of the child in time enables her representation of the child’s experience of time.
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Notes
- 1.
Augustus J.C. Hare (ed.), The life and letters of Maria Edgeworth (Boston, 1895), vol. 1, p. 75.
- 2.
Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, ‘Address to mothers’ in Continuation of early lessons in two volumes (London, 1814), vol. 1, p. xiii. Richard Lovell Edgeworth co-authored this address, and the ‘Harry and Lucy’ part of this particular volume.
- 3.
References to all of these works occur in Edgeworth’s writings. Berquin’s work was available in many English and Irish editions, in French, and in translation. On the stratification of the market for children’s books at this time, see M.O. Grenby, The child reader: 1700–1840 (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 46–51.
- 4.
See Mitzi Myers, ‘Impeccable governesses, rational dames, and moral mothers: Mary Wollstonecraft and the female tradition in Georgian children’s books’, Children’s literature, 14 (1986), and Norma Clarke, ‘“The cursed Barbauld crew”: women writers and writing for children in the late eighteenth century’ in Mary Hilton, Morag Styles and Victor Watson (eds), Opening the nursery door: reading, writing, and childhood 1600–1900 (London, 1997).
- 5.
Mitzi Myers, ‘Socializing Rosamond: educational ideology and fictional form’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 14: 2 (1989): 52. Myers’s many articles on Edgeworth’s writings for children and young people offer a sustained critical reassessment of these works; see Gillian Adams and Donelle Ruwe, ‘The scholarly legacy of Mitzi Myers’ in Donelle Ruwe (ed.), Culturing the child, 1690–1914: essays in memory of Mitzi Myers (Lanham, MD, 2005), pp. 223–40.
- 6.
Continuation of early lessons, 2 vols (London: J. Johnson, 1814); Harry and Lucy concluded: being the last part of ‘early lessons’, 4 vols (London: R. Hunter et al., 1825).
- 7.
Some indication of the extraordinary longevity of these particular works by Edgeworth can be seen in the extensive holdings of multiple editions in the Pollard Collection at Trinity College Dublin. The collection includes an early edition, in parts, of Early lessons, published by Joseph Johnson in London in 1809, and first editions of the Continuation of early lessons, also published by Johnson, in 1814 as well as Harry and Lucy concluded, published by R. Hunter, in 1825. Hunter’s two-volume edition of Early lessons (1818) is also represented. In 1829, Hunter published Early lessons: in four volumes, and the Pollard Collection includes multiple reprints of the work in this format from the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s, though several sets are imperfect. Other holdings in the Pollard Collection include a one-volume illustrated edition of Early lessons, which appeared from George Routledge in London in 1866. The collectionholds an incomplete first edition of Frank: a sequel alongside later editions of 1844, 1848 and 1854; Rosamond: a sequel is included in its first and later editions of 1830, 1842 and 1850. A number of the above titles are also held in the National Library of Ireland, which possesses a first edition of Frank: a sequel, as does the Children’s Book Collection at Dublin City Library and Archive, Pearse Street. The nature of the holdings in these collections, not exhaustively described here, allows us to grasp how influential a writer of children’s fiction Edgeworth continued to be to the very end of the nineteenth century.
- 8.
Rosamond: a sequel to early lessons, 2 vols (London: R. Hunter, 1821), vol. 1, p.74; Frank: a sequel to Frank in early lessons, 3 vols (London: R. Hunter, 1822).
- 9.
Mitzi Myers, ‘“Servants as they are now educated”: women writers and Georgian pedagogy’, Essays in Literature, 16 (1989): 59. The term ‘series’ is used in this essay to simply mean a group of related books, not in its contemporary sense involving ‘repetition, recognizability, predictability’. Technically, in so far as the Early lessons volumes show progression in temporal and causal relationships, they could each be considered a sequel. See Maria Nikolajeva, ‘Beyond happily after: the aesthetic dilemma of multivolume fiction for children’ in Benjamin Lefebvre (ed.), Textual transformations in children’s literature: adaptations, translations, reconsiderations (New York, 2013), pp. 197–213.
- 10.
Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Practical education, 2 vols (London: J. Johnson, 1798), vol. 1, p. iv.
- 11.
Edgeworth, Practical education, p. vi.
- 12.
Edgeworth, ‘Address to mothers’, Continuation of early lessons, vol. 1, p. vi.
- 13.
Edgeworth, ‘Address to mothers’, Continuation of early lessons, vol. 1, p. viii.
- 14.
Maria Edgeworth, Early lessons. Harry and Lucy. Part 1 (London: J. Johnson, 1809), p. 1. All further references in this essay are to this early ‘part’ edition, in order to convey a sense of the form in which the stories were originally published. Later editions collected the stories in two volumes.
- 15.
Edgeworth, ‘Address to mothers’, Continuation of early lessons, vol. 1, p. x.
- 16.
Edgeworth, ‘Address to mothers’, Continuation of early lessons, vol. 1, p. x.
- 17.
Edgeworth, Rosamond: a sequel, vol. 1, pp. iii–iv.
- 18.
Edgeworth, ‘Address to mothers’, Continuation of early lessons, vol. 1, p. x.
- 19.
Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, ‘Harry and Lucy’ in Continuation of early lessons, vol. 2, p. 165.
- 20.
Edgeworth, Frank: a sequel, vol. 2, p. 107. M.O. Grenby discusses the issue of duration of reading sessions in The child reader, pp. 216–220.
- 21.
Edgeworth, Early lessons. Harry and Lucy. Part II, pp. 1–2.
- 22.
Edgeworth, Early lessons. Rosamond. Part I, p. 65; Continuation, vol. 2, p. 99.
- 23.
Edgeworth, ‘Address to mothers’, Continuation of early lessons, vol. 1, p. viii.
- 24.
Edgeworth, Continuation of early lessons, vol. 1, p. iii.
- 25.
On the time discipline of early nineteenth-century education, see Alan Richardson, Literature, education, and romanticism: reading as social practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 77–93.
- 26.
‘The Purple Jar’ is the most common point of reference for critics who see Edgeworth’s didacticism as constraining her narrative abilities; representative here is F.J. Harvey Darton’s view that readers become ‘fond’ of Rosamond but ‘continue to defeat the author’s end by disliking the parents’ (Children’s books in England (1932), 3rd edn, revised by Brian Alderson (London: British Library, 1999), p. 141). For a sensitive account of the ‘considerable challenge’ the rational mother in Edgeworth’s tales poses for the reader and a discussion of how Rosamond learns that ‘her mother will allow her to suffer pain in order to cultivate her reason’, see Sharon Murphy, Maria Edgeworth and romance (Dublin, 2004), pp. 52–56.
- 27.
Edgeworth, Early lessons. Rosamond. Part II, pp. 7–10.
- 28.
Edgeworth, Early lessons. Rosamond. Part II, p. 55.
- 29.
Edgeworth, Early lessons. Rosamond. Part II, p. 65.
- 30.
Edgeworth, Early lessons. Rosamond. Part III, p. 1.
- 31.
Edgeworth, Practical education, vol. 2, p. 693; for the Berquin story, see L’ami des enfants, 3 vols (Dublin: Luc White, 1784), vol. 1, pp. 12–15.
- 32.
Edgeworth, Continuation of early lessons, vol. 1, p. 230.
- 33.
John Locke, An essay concerning human understanding (1689), Peter H. Nidditch (ed.) (Oxford, 1975), p. 335.
- 34.
Edgeworth, Rosamond: a sequel, vol. 1, p. 11.
- 35.
Edgeworth, Rosamond: a sequel, vol. 1, p. 44.
- 36.
Edgeworth, Rosamond: a sequel, vol. 1, p. 68.
- 37.
Edgeworth, Continuation, vol. 2, p. 108.
- 38.
A similar, though less complex, example of the effect of the real occurs in the last of all the instalments of the series: ‘Here ends all of the history of Harry and Lucy that is to be published’, a formulation that projects the children beyond the frame of the book; Harry and Lucy concluded: being the last part of ‘early lessons’, vol. 4, p. 336.
- 39.
Rosamond: a sequel, vol. 1, p. iii. For an essay that celebrates the Rosamond stories as ‘a mothered text, a miniaturized psychic autobiography’, see Mitzi Myers, ‘The dilemmas of gender as double-voiced narrative: or, Maria Edgeworth mothers the Bildungsroman’ in Robert W. Uphaus (ed.) The idea of the novel in the eighteenth century, (East Lansing, MI, 1988), p. 77.
- 40.
Sarah Fielding, The governess; or, little female academy (1749), Jill E. Grey (ed.) (Oxford, 1968); Continuation, vol. 1, p. 13.
Selected Bibliography
Adams, Gillian and Donelle Ruwe, ‘The scholarly legacy of Mitzi Myers’ in Donelle Ruwe (ed.), Culturing the child, 1690–1914: Essays in memory of Mitzi Myers (Lanham, MD: Children’s Literature Association and Scarecrow Press, 2005), pp. 223–40.
Clarke, Norma, ‘“The cursed Barbauld crew”: women writers and writing for children in the late eighteenth century’ in Mary Hilton, Morag Styles and Victor Watson (eds), Opening the nursery door: reading, writing, and childhood 1600–1900 (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 91–103.
Darton, F.J.Harvey, Children’s books in England (1932), 3rd edn, revised by Brian Alderson (London: British Library, 1999).
Fielding, Sarah, The governess; or little female academy, Jill E. Grey (ed.) (1749; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968).
Grenby, M.O., The child reader: 1700–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Hare, Augustus J.C. (ed.), The life and letters of Maria Edgeworth (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1895).
Locke, John, An essay concerning human understanding, Peter H. Nidditch (ed.) (1689; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
Murphy, Sharon, Maria Edgeworth and romance (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004).
Myers, Mitzi, ‘Impeccable governesses, rational dames, and moral mothers: Mary Wollstonecraft and the female tradition in Georgian children’s books’, Children’s Literature, 14 (1986): 31–59.
———, ‘The dilemmas of gender as double-voiced narrative: or, Maria Edgeworth mothers the Bildungsroman’ in Robert W. Uphaus (ed.), The idea of the novel in the eighteenth century (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1988), pp. 67–96.
———, ‘Socializing Rosamond: educational ideology and fictional form’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 14:2 (1989a): 52–58.
———, ‘“Servants as they are now educated”: women writers and Georgian pedagogy’, Essays in Literature, 16 (1989b): 51–69.
Nikolajeva, Maria, ‘Beyond happily after: the aesthetic dilemma of multivolume fiction for children’ in Benjamin Lefebvre (ed.), Textual transformations in children’s literature: adaptations, translations, reconsiderations (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 197–213.
Richardson, Alan, Literature, education and romanticism: reading as social practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
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Douglas, A. (2017). Time and the Child: The Case of Maria Edgeworth’s Early Lessons . In: O'Sullivan, K., Whyte, P. (eds) Children's Literature Collections. Critical Approaches to Children's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59757-1_6
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