Abstract
The question of borders was not only crucial to how Britons understood Britain’s relationship with other nations; it was also a fundamental one when it came to their understanding of Britain itself. In particular, the question arose in the early years of the century in relation to Ireland, now a member of the British polity as a consequence of the 1801 Act of Union. Ireland’s incorporation put pressure on the dominant Burkean conception of nation, and in response, writers on both sides of the Irish Sea turned to alternative models that better represented the new political situation. Pro-union and pro-Catholic emancipation, the Edinburgh Review generally drew on Smith’s political economy to figure Irish-English political relations in terms of international trade, and this model underlies Maria and Robert Lovell Edgeworth’s commentary on Ireland in the journal. Their co-written review ‘Carr’s Stranger in Ireland’ (April 1807) formulates union as the free circulation of citizens and goods between Ireland and England: ‘it is a farce to talk of an incorporating union having taken place between two countries’, they insist, ‘whilst the inhabitants cannot pass or repass from either country, without undergoing a search as rigorous as if they were in an enemy’s territory: whilst the duties and drawbacks of excise operate as checks upon the transfer of property, and even upon locomotion’.1 Such a formulation of union recalls Kant’s ‘union of states’ in that it allows for the free movement across borders but not the elimination of them, and entails a particular understanding of nationness.
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Notes
Maria and Robert Lovell Edgeworth, ‘Carr’s Stranger in Ireland’, Edinburgh Review, 10 (April 1807), 59.
Séamus Deane, ‘Virtue, travel and the Enlightenment’, in Nations and Nation-alisms: France, Britain, Ireland and the Eighteenth-century Context, Michael O’Dea and Kevin Whelan, eds (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1995), 291.
Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, for instance, argues that Maria Edgeworth appropriates peasant life, while Mary Jean Corbett focuses on how she ensures colonial stability. See Kowaleski-Wallace’s Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)
Corbett’s ‘Another Tale to Tell: Postcolonial Theory and the Case of Castle Rackrent’, Criticism, 36 (1994) 383–400, and ‘Public Affections and Familial Politics: Burke, Edgeworth, and the “Common Naturalization” of Great Britain’, English Literary History, 61 (1994) 877–97.
On Maria Edgeworth’s life, see the standard biography by Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972).
Recent years have seen an upsurge of interest in the category of Anglo-Irish. See, for example, Mary Jean Corbett’s Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790–1870: Politics, History, and the Family from Edgeworth to Arnold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
Terry Eagleton’s Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1995)
Julian Moynahan’s Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, vol. 8 of The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Paul Longford, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 82.
W.J. McCormack, Ascendency and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History from 1789–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985)
Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution, 1789–1820 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).
Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent in Castle Rackrent and Ennui, Marilyn Butler, ed. (London: Penguin, 1992), 84.
In The Absentee a similar point is made when O’Halloran points to the advantages of an exchange between Irish and English militia: ‘The two countries have the same interest; and, from the inhabitants discovering more of each other’s good qualities and interchanging little good offices in common life, their esteem and affection for each other would increase, and rest upon the firm basis of mutual utility.’ Maria Edgeworth, The Absentee, W.J. McCormack and Kim Walker, eds (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 117. In both Castle Rackrent and The Absentee the direction of national influence is not from England to Ireland, centre to periphery, as one would be led to expect from descriptions of Edgeworth as colonial writer.
Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, 2vols (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1969), 1: 247–8. Maria lifts the quotation from her father’s speech on education delivered 25 February 1799.
Maria Edgeworth, Ennui in Castle Rackrent and Ennui, Marilyn Butler, ed. (London: Penguin, 1992), 263.
My thanks to Marilyn Butler who noted informally that the Nugents had cousins in County Leitrim named Nugent Reynolds, some of whom had been in the public eye as recently as 1799. On names in The Absentee, see also McCormack’s Introduction and Appendix II. For the ambiguities of Irish or English in relation to Grace Nugent, see Robert Tracy’s influential essay, ‘Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan: Legality versus Legitimacy’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 40 (June 1985) 1–22.
Maria Edgeworth, The Absentee, W.J. McCormack and Kim Walker, eds (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 6.
For an account of R.L. Edgeworth’s connection to Enlightenment thought, see Desmond Clarke’s The Ingenious Mr. Edgeworth (London: Oldbourne, 1965).
Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, Leon S. Roudiez, trans. (Columbia: Colombia University Press, 1991), 148.
Joep Leerssen, ‘Anglo-Irish Patriotism and its European Context: Notes Towards a Reassessment’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 3 (1988), 15.
Bruce Robbins, ‘Comparative Cosmopolitanism’, Social Text, 31–2 (1992), 173.
Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, ‘Essay on Irish Bulls’, in vol. 4 of Tales and Novels (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1969), 90.
[Sydney Smith]. ‘Edgeworth’s Essay on Irish Bulls’, Edinburgh Review, 2 (July 1803), 399
On the centrality of the notion of merit to the Edgeworths, see Gary Kelly, ‘Class, Gender, Nation, and Empire: Money and Merit in the Writing of the Edgeworths’, The Wordsworth Circle, 25 (Spring 1994) 89–93.
Edward Said, ‘secular Criticism’, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983) 1–30.
Bruce Ackerman, ‘Rooted Cosmopolitanism’, Ethics, 104 (April 1994) 516–35
Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Maria Edgeworth, Ormond: A Tale (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1992), 169.
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 5.
Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: the Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 307.
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© 2009 Esther Wohlgemut
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Wohlgemut, E. (2009). Porous Borders: Maria Edgeworth and the Question of National Identity. In: Romantic Cosmopolitanism. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230250994_5
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