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Harrington main 5/14/04 9:49 AM Page 1 This electronic material is under copyright protection and is provided to a single recipient for review purposes only. HARRINGTON Harrington main 5/14/04 9:49 AM Page 2 Review Copy the edgeworth family,watercolour by adam buck,1789 From left to right:Maria Edgeworth,aged about (wearing hat);Emmeline; Henry;Charlotte;Sneyd (just visible beneath the outstretched arm of Lovell); Lovell (bending towards Charlotte);Richard Lovell Edgeworth (seated facing Maria Edgeworth);Anna (standing next to Lovell);Elizabeth Sneyd,RLE’s third wife (seated behind RLE,with baby William on her lap);Bessy (standing at Elizabeth’s knee);Honora (standing,extreme right) Harrington main 5/14/04 9:49 AM Page 3 Review Copy HARRINGTON Maria Edgeworth edited by Susan Manly broadview editions Harrington main 5/14/04 9:49 AM Page 4 Review Copy © Susan Manly All rights reserved.The use of any part of this publication reproduced,transmitted in any form or by any means,electronic,mechanical,photocopying,recording,or otherwise,or stored in a retrieval system,without prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying,a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency),One Yonge Street,Suite , Toronto,ON —is an infringement of the copyright law. National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Edgeworth,Maria,–. Harrington / Maria Edgeworth ;edited by Susan Manly. (Broadview editions) Includes bibliographical references. --- I.Manly,Susan II.Title. III.Series. pr4644.h3 2004 823'.7 c2004-901446-3 Broadview Press Ltd.is an independent,international publishing house,incorporated in . Broadview believes in shared ownership,both with its employees and with the general public;since the year Broadview shares have traded publicly on the Toronto Venture Exchange under the symbol . 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Series editor:Professor L.W.Conolly Advisory editor for this volume:Colleen Franklin PRINTED IN CANADA Harrington main 5/14/04 9:49 AM Page 5 Review Copy Contents Acknowledgements • Introduction • Maria Edgeworth:A Brief Chronology • A Note on the Text • Harrington • Appendix A:Correspondence between Maria Edgeworth and Rachel Mordecai Lazarus • Appendix B:From John Toland’s Letters to Serena () and Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews () • Appendix C:From Isaac D’Israeli’s Monthly Magazine article on Moses Mendelssohn () • Appendix D:Contemporary reviews of Harrington • . From the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine (August ) • . From the Edinburgh Review (August ) • Select Bibliography • Harrington main 5/14/04 9:49 AM Page 6 Review Copy Acknowledgements Thanks to the University of North Carolina Press for permission to use extracts fromThe Education of the Heart:The Correspondence of Rachel Mordecai Lazarus and Maria Edgeworth,edited by Edgar E.MacDonald (c) .Thanks to Michael Butler for permission to reproduce the portrait of the Edgeworth family. Many thanks to Marilyn Butler for introducing me to the work of Maria Edgeworth and for generously sharing her expertise with me.I am grateful for the intellectual and moral support of the following:Zinaida Lewczuk,Rhiannon Purdie,Katya Benjamin, Gill Plain,and Nicholas Roe.Thanks to James Schmidt,for a help- ful correspondence about Moses Mendelssohn.Special thanks to Adrian and Celia Mitchell for their friendship.Thanks to Lilias Fraser for assisting with the preparation of the text.Special thanks to Angus Stewart,for his love and practical support. Harrington main 5/14/04 9:49 AM Page 7 Review Copy Introduction Sources and origins On August th,,a young Jewish-American woman sat down to write a letter to Maria Edgeworth,the celebrated author— together with her father,Richard—of Practical Education (), and sole author of several volumes of stories for children,as well as of several successful novels for adult readers.In the letter, Rachel Mordecai thanked Edgeworth for her ‘benevolent inten- tion’in thus paying attention to ‘the important business of educa- tion’and its significance in the creation of good,wise and happy citizens.But she went on to question how an author ‘who on all other subjects shows such justice and liberality,should on one alone appear biased by prejudice:should even instill that preju- dice into the minds of youth! Can my allusion be mistaken? It is to the species of character which wherever a Jewis introduced is invariably attached to him.Can it be believed that this race of men are by nature mean,avaricious,and unprincipled? … [T]his is more than insinuated by the stigma usually affixed to the name.’ Rachel Mordecai’s allegation was justified.Edgeworth had used stereotypically hostile depictions of Jews in three of her most successful novels for adults,Castle Rackrent(),Belinda() and The Absentee ().In Castle Rackrent,Thady Quirk,the garrulous narrator,describes how his master used to call his bride ‘my pretty Jessica’,recalling for the reader the seduced daughter of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice,and although it is never made clear whether Kit Rackrent’s wife really is Jewish,she behaves with all the avariciousness of anti-Semitic stereotype,clinging to her jewels to the bitter end of her struggle with her unscrupu- lous husband. Belinda features a character named Solomon,a Jewish money-lender who takes advantage of a Christian placed Letter from Rachel Mordecai to Maria Edgeworth, reproduced in Edgar E. MacDonald (ed.),The Education of the Heart:The Correspondence of Rachel Mordecai Lazarus and Maria Edgeworth(Chapel Hill:U of North Carolina P,) ,. Castle Rackrent,ed.Tim McLoughlin,Marilyn Butler and Jane Desmarais,vol.of The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth(London:Pickering & Chatto,) . Harrington main 5/14/04 9:49 AM Page 8 Review Copy at his mercy,Mr Vincent,by driving a hard bargain.Mr Mordicai in The Absentee is equally unsympathetic:a cunning and ruthless London coachmaker who threatens a son with the arrest of his father,who is on his deathbed,if the son does not pay his debts. As Frank Felsenstein comments,Mr Mordicai’s demand—‘the bond or the body,before I quit this house’—is an unmistakable allusion to Shylock’s demand for his ‘pound of flesh’.Because of this coincidence of names,the Edgeworths at first doubted the authenticity of Rachel Mordecai’s letter,since,in an attempt to protect his sister,her brother,who carried the letter across the Atlantic,had erased all indication of her true identity. As a consequence of this detail,it has sometimes been supposed or implied that it was the hostile depictions of Jews in Edgeworth’s novels for adults—especially in The Absentee—for which she felt that she had to atone, her conscience pricked by Rachel Mordecai’s letter.But it is in fact clear that the latter was much more troubled by the anti-Jewish stereotypes deployed in stories meant for children,such as ‘The Prussian Vase’and ‘The Good Aunt’,both in Moral Tales ().Both of these stories feature greedy,dishonest and vengeful Jewish characters.Edgar Rosenberg indeed suggests that the plot of ‘The Good Aunt’is deliberately evoked and revised in Harrington in order to counter the unfavourable depictions that the earlier story had included. See Belinda,ed.Kathryn Kirkpatrick (Oxford:Oxford World’s Classics,) . Frank Felsenstein,Anti-Semitic Stereotypes:A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture,–(Baltimore & London:Johns Hopkins UP,) .The very name of Mordecai would have called up the associations of vengefulness and malice so often linked to stereotypical representations of Jews,of which Shylock is the English epitome.In the Bible,Mordecai was the favourite and chief minister of King Ahasuerus,who succeeded Haman,the would-be extirpator of the Jews.Frank Felsenstein comments of the Biblical Mordecai that ‘[t]he revenge meted out by the Jews under [him] … against Haman and his supporters,whereby “they put to death in two days ,of those they were pleased to call their enemies,without either judge or jury”is evoked as a timely reminder of the resentment and cruelty with which they may treat others when put in a position of power’(Felsenstein ). In her next letter to the Edgeworths,written on September ,Rachel Mordecai tells them that the letter was ‘signed at full length to my letter,but Rachel,as well as Mordecai,formed so striking a coincidence,that,believing it would give an idea of my character being an assumed one,my brother erased both’(MacDonald ). Edgar Rosenberg,From Shylock to Svengali:Jewish Stereotypes in English Fiction (London:Peter Owen,) –. Harrington main 5/14/04 9:49 AM Page 9 Review Copy Written to show the ‘advantages of a judicious early education’ upon children and to suggest that ‘previous domestic instruction’ is the necessary moral foundation on which boys sent to public schools,those ‘large nurseries of youth’,achieve their highest civic and ethical potential,‘The Good Aunt’tells of the adventures of a boy, Charles Howard, who overcomes the temptations of gambling,lying and bullying to become the friend and mentor of a less fortunate schoolmate,all thanks to his early instruction at the knee of the eponymous good aunt.He is finally rewarded for his courage and moral probity,uncovering an attempt to defraud his aunt of her fortune,a plot in which Mr Carat,a stereotypically deceitful and unctuous Jewish jeweller,is heavily implicated.Early moral instruction and good example is thus shown to secure the future of the family and to ensure the moral safety of the young Englishman against the corrupting blandishments of bad influ- ences,particularly those which involve Jews and their supposed preference for gold above all other less material values. That Edgeworth herself felt that she had erred in propagating stereotypes such as these in stories meant for the impressionable minds of children is clear.Her responding letter spoke of her pain at recognising the justice of Rachel Mordecai’s mild but firm reproof,and of her hope that ‘you will sometime see that it has excited me to make all the atonement and reparation in my power for the past [….] the candor and spirit of tolerance and benevolence you shew,you have a right to expect from others.’ The form that this ‘atonement and reparation’ took was Harrington,which was to appear in June ,together with Ormond,in a three-volume edition.Edgeworth wrote Harrington over the autumn of ,finishing her first complete draft by the last week of November.As the text and its footnotes show,she had gathered in a formidable range of material on Jews,their status in Britain and Europe,their struggle for emancipation and their representation in literature,in a very short time. Edgeworth’s determination to expose,explore and apologise Maria Edgeworth,Vol.I.II:Moral Tales,in Tales and Novels(London:Baldwin & Cradock,–)vi. Letter from Maria Edgeworth to Rachel Mordecai,August ,in MacDonald . Harrington main 5/14/04 9:49 AM Page 10 Review Copy for her previous unthinking use of anti-Semitic stereotypes is given a very public expression in the allusions to her own work that appear in the sections of her novel dealing with Harrington’s early life.Michael Ragussis,one of the most acute of the recent critics of Harrington,remarks upon ‘the special self-reflexive qual- ity that informs her novel’.Through what is presented to the reader as Harrington’s own reflections on his noxious early read- ing,Edgeworth comments that ‘even in modern tales of very late years’written by ‘authors professing candour and toleration— books written expressly for the rising generation,called if I mistake not,Moral Tales for Young People’—even here,‘wher- ever the Jews are introduced,I find that they are invariably repre- sented as beings of a mean,avaricious,unprincipled,treacherous character’. Closely echoing Rachel Mordecai’s own words, Harrington remarks that these powerfully influential narratives injure the minds of children,‘confirming … childish prejudice by what I then thought the indisputable authority of printed books’.But,as Ragussis points out,‘[i]n the act of reviewing her role as a reader and a writer of anti-Semitic portraits,[Edgeworth] was able to recognize a tradition of discourse that she had at once inherited and perpetuated’. In the analysis of the rich allusive- ness of the novel which follows,I will argue that Edgeworth further seeks to replace a corrupt inheritance,the anti-Semitism of English culture typified in the identification of Jewish men with Shylock and Jewish women with Jessica,with a vision of a society which,if still not entirely free of such prejudice,is at least more open to influences from beyond the established borders of ‘Englishness’. Before I go on with this,however,I want to look a little more at the circumstances surrounding the composition of Harrington. In a novel that is so preoccupied with the transmission of false knowledge or error,and with the need to detach oneself from the immediate influences of family and friends—the known— in order to replace destructive influences with true knowledge Michael Ragussis,Figures of Conversion:‘The Jewish Question’and English National Identity(Durham & London:Duke UP,) . Harrington,below, Ragussis .
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