Maria Edgeworth broke new narrative ground with her 1800 novel, Castle Rackrent. While her methodology of developing an imaginary hero who writes a memoir “edited” by an author had been popular since Robinson Crusoe (1719), she developed a new approach to setting. Castle Rackrent represents the first regional novel focusing on a definite identifiable place. That place was Ireland, where Edgeworth, an Oxfordshire native, lived for decades with her father.
Sir Walter Scott praised the novel as a springboard into one of his favorite forms, historical fiction, a form representing large societies made up of distinct individuals, rather than stereotypical figures. Scott claimed in 1814 in “A Postscript” to his novel Waverley that he hoped “in some distant degree to emulate the admirable Irish portraits drawn by Miss Edgeworth.” William Makepeace Thackeray declared himself in debt to Edgeworth’s use of a first-person narrator blind to truth for the development of his own narrator in Barry Lyndon (1844).
When Edgeworth arrived in Ireland in 1782, Constitutional Independency had been established by an Irish Parliament determined to work with England to become self-governing. The optimism supporting the wish for independence is obvious in Castle Rackrent, as the aging subject of its memoir, Thady Quirk, represents a past that chooses to make way for a bright new future.
According to Edgeworth, she based Thady on her father’s elderly steward, with whom she had spent much time. She enjoyed listening to him tell stories of the history of the family estate and the surrounding area and credited him with the natural voice she was able to project through Thady when, some time between 1797 and 1799, she composed her novel as a secret gift for her father. Retaining the area’s natural dialect through Thady, Edgeworth created a lively, affectionate, and accurate picture of a happy, although dying, system of aristocratic control of Irish land.
She wrote what she observed and what she heard from an older generation; her novel did not represent ancient history but rather a contemporary report that offered a sociological study of a culture long before academia found that approach of interest. Its focus on the domestic scene, and the importance of individuals as members of defined communities, make it an early version of domestic realism, a form that George Eliot would bring to maturity several decades later.
Thady Quirk is a simple man whose naiveté allows others to victimize him, but which also permits him to report his surroundings without guile. Thady has no reason to lie, and his untainted, compassionate honesty makes him a trustworthy narrator. The reader meets four different masters of the estate that Thady stewards for decades. He appreciates each master in different ways, despite the fact that each suffers from a glaring weakness that causes the eventual dissolution of the estate.
The first lord, Sir Patrick O’Shaughlin, took the title Rackrent through an act of Parliament. Thady’s grandfather drove Sir Patrick’s carriage, and Thady never recognized Sir Patrick as the drunk he was. Instead, he describes how everyone flocked to the funeral of the beloved man, rumored “to be the inventor of raspberry whiskey.”
Thady also remains respectful of Sir Patrick’s successor, Sir Murtaugh, who accumulated 49 lawsuits and enjoyed fighting each of them. He died ostensibly of a stroke while “sparring and jarring” with his wife, and Thady diplomatically declares himself glad to see the wife depart, suggesting she bore the guilt for her husband’s problems.
Murtaugh’s younger brother, Sir Kit, inherits the estate, and Thady loved him as a generous individual, but unfortunately, he accrues gambling debts. Eventually, he marries a wealthy Jewish woman who, despite his hopes, does little to alleviate his debt. Although a victim of circumstances, Sir Kit’s wife does not endear herself to the servants, even when the master takes a mistress and dies in a duel with the mistress’s brother. Again, Thady excuses a master, blaming the wife for his death.
The final master of the estate, Sir Conolly, called Sir Condy and Thady’s favorite, gets much more page space than his predecessors. Like them, Sir Condy dies a sad death following attempts to bear the great costs of a political career, the indignity of having the ownership of his land challenged by others, and a great quantity of drink that set his gut on fire.
Edgeworth shapes Thady’s son, Jason, as a sly attorney whose manipulative personality balances Thady’s forthright one. Jason begins to benefit from Sir Kit’s debts, accumulating titles to the estate where his father works, and later tries unsuccessfully to take the estate from Sir Condy’s wife. Thady, who has excused every weakness in four men undeserving of his respect, cannot excuse the greed exhibited by his son.
He seems to envision their problems as honest ones in which they alone stand victimized, while Jason knowingly uses others to his own benefit. In the end, Thady remains far more loyal to his masters and the estate family than to his own son.
Edgeworth completes the novel with a comment from the “Editor” about the “truth” of the story: “He lays it before the English reader as a specimen of manners and characters, which are perhaps unknown in England.” As for Edgeworth’s contribution to the development of the novel, George Watson writes in his introduction that without Castle Rackrent and the larger novels that followed, each of which told the stories of societies, both living and dying, “the novel of the nineteenth century could not have been made.”
Bibliography
Watson, George. Introduction to Castle Rackrent, by Maria Edgeworth. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.
Weinstein, Mark A., ed. The Prefaces to the Waverley Novels by Sir Walter Scott. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1978.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
Slave Narrative 
Analysis of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier 
Analysis of Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour 
Analysis of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook
You must be logged in to post a comment.