Castle Rackrent

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CASTLE RACKRENT


by Maria Edgeworth



With an Introduction by Anne Thackeray Ritchie



[Note: The body of this novel contains a lot of footnotes
and many references to the Glossary at the end. The
footnotes (which are sometimes quite long) have been
inserted in square brackets near to the point where they
were referred to by suffix in the original text. The
entries in the Glossary have been numbered, instead of being
listed with a page number as they were in the printed book;
they are also referenced with a note in square brackets near
the point where there was a suffix in the original.

Italics have been replaced by capitals.

The pound sterling symbol has been replaced by 'L'.

This text and the Introduction were taken from an edition
published by Macmillan and Co. in 1895.]




INTRODUCTION


I

The story of the Edgeworth Family, if it were properly told, should be
as long as the ARABIAN NIGHTS themselves; the thousand and one cheerful
intelligent members of the circle, the amusing friends and relations,
the charming surroundings, the cheerful hospitable home, all go to make
up an almost unique history of a county family of great parts and no
little character. The Edgeworths were people of good means and position,
and their rental, we are told, amounted to nearly L3000 a year. At one
time there was some talk of a peerage for Mr. Edgeworth, but he was
considered too independent for a peerage.

The family tradition seems to have been unconventional and spirited
always. There are records still extant in the present Mr. Edgeworth's
possession,--papers of most wonderful vitality for parchment,--where
you may read passionate remonstrances and adjurations from
great-grandfathers to great-great-grandfathers, and where
great-great-grandmothers rush into the discussion with vehement spelling
and remonstrance, and make matters no better by their interference. I
never read more passionately eloquent letters and appeals. There
are also records of a pleasanter nature; merrymakings, and festive
preparations, and 12s. 6d. for a pair of silk stockings for Miss
Margaret Edgeworth to dance in, carefully entered into the family
budget. All the people whose portraits are hanging up, beruffled,
dignified, calm, and periwigged, on the old walls of Edgeworthstown
certainly had extraordinarily strong impressions, and gave eloquent
expression to them. I don't think people could feel quite so strongly
now about their own affairs as they did then; there are so many printed
emotions, so many public events, that private details cannot seem quite
as important. Edgeworths of those days were farther away from the world
than they are now, dwelling in the plains of Longford, which as yet
were not crossed by iron rails. The family seems to have made little
of distances, and to have ridden and posted to and fro from Dublin to
Edgeworthstown in storm and sunshine.


II

When Messrs. Macmillan asked me to write a preface to this new edition
of Miss Edgeworth's stories I thought I should like to see the place
where she had lived so long and where she had written so much, and so it
happened that being in Ireland early this year, my daughter and I found
ourselves driving up to Broadstone Station one morning in time for the
early train to Edgeworthstown. As we got out of our cab we asked the
driver what the fare should be. 'Sure the fare is half a crown,' said
he, 'and if you wish to give me more, I could keep it for myself!'

The train was starting and we bought our papers to beguile the road.
'Will you have a Home Rule paper or one of them others?' said the
newsboy, with such a droll emphasis that we couldn't help laughing.
'Give me one of each,' said I; then he laughed, as no English newsboy
would have done. . . . We went along in the car with a sad couple of
people out of a hospital, compatriots of our own, who had been settled
ten years in Ireland, and were longing to be away. The poor things
were past consolation, dull, despairing, ingrained English, sick and
suffering and yearning for Brixton, just as other aliens long for their
native hills and moors. We travelled along together all that spring
morning by the blossoming hedges, and triumphal arches of flowering May;
the hills were very far away, but the lovely lights and scents were all
about and made our journey charming. Maynooth was a fragrant vision as
we flew past, of vast gardens wall-enclosed, of stately buildings.
The whole line of railway was sweet with the May flowers, and with the
pungent and refreshing scent of the turf-bogs. The air was so clear and
so limpid that we could see for miles, and short-sighted eyes needed no
glasses to admire with. Here and there a turf cabin, now and then a lake
placidly reflecting the sky. The country seemed given over to silence,
the light sped unheeded across the delicate browns and greens of the
bog-fields; or lay on the sweet wonderful green of the meadows. One
dazzling field we saw full of dancing circles of little fairy pigs
with curly tails. Everything was homelike but NOT England, there was
something of France, something of Italy in the sky; in the fanciful
tints upon the land and sea, in the vastness of the picture, in the
happy sadness and calm content which is so difficult to describe or to
account for. Finally we reached our journey's end. It gave one a real
emotion to see EDGEWORTHSTOWN written up on the board before us, and
to realise that we were following in the steps of those giants who had
passed before us. The master of Edgeworthstown kindly met us and drove
us to his home through the outlying village, shaded with its sycamores,
underneath which pretty cows were browsing the grass. We passed
the Roman Catholic Church, the great iron crucifix standing in the
churchyard. Then the horses turned in at the gate of the park, and there
rose the old home, so exactly like what one expected it, that I felt as
if I had been there before in some other phase of existence.

It is certainly a tradition in the family to welcome travellers! I
thought of the various memoirs I had read, of the travellers arriving
from the North and the South and the West; of Scott and Lockhart, of
Pictet, of the Ticknors, of the many visitants who had come up in turn;
whether it is the year 14, or the year 94, the hospitable doors open
kindly to admit them. There were the French windows reaching to the
ground, through which Maria used to pass on her way to gather her roses;
there was the porch where Walter Scott had stood; there grew the quaint
old-fashioned bushes with the great pink peonies in flower, by those
railings which still divide the park from the meadows beyond; there
spread the branches of the century-old trees. Only last winter they told
us the storms came and swept away a grove of Beeches that were known in
all the country round, but how much of shade, of flower, still remain!
The noble Hawthorn of stately growth, the pine-trees (there should be
NAMES for trees, as there are for rocks or ancient strongholds). Mr.
Edgeworth showed us the oak from Jerusalem, the grove of cypress and
sycamore where the beautiful depths of ground ivy are floating upon the
DEBRIS, and soften the gnarled roots, while they flood the rising banks
with green.

Mr. and Mrs. Edgeworth brought us into the house. The ways go upstairs
and downstairs, by winding passages and side gates; a pretty domed
staircase starts from the central hall, where stands that old clock-case
which Maria wound up when she was over eighty years old. To the right
and to the left along the passages were rooms opening from one into
another. I could imagine Sir Walter's kind eyes looking upon the scene,
and Wordsworth coming down the stairs, and their friendly entertainer
making all happy, and all welcome in turn; and their hostess, the
widowed Mrs. Edgeworth, responding and sympathising with each. We saw
the corner by the fire where Maria wrote; we saw her table with
its pretty curves standing in its place in the deep casements. Miss
Edgeworth's own room is a tiny little room above looking out on the back
garden. This little closet opens from a larger one, and then by a narrow
flight of stairs leads to a suite of ground-floor chambers, following
one from another, lined with bookcases and looking on the gardens. What
a strange fellow-feeling with the past it gave one to stand staring at
the old books, with their paper backs and old-fashioned covers, at the
gray boards, which were the liveries of literature in those early
days; at the first editions, with their inscriptions in the author's
handwriting, or in Maria's pretty caligraphy. There was the PIRATE in
its original volumes, and Mackintosh's MEMOIRS, and Mrs. Barbauld's
ESSAYS, and Descartes's ESSAYS, that Arthur Hallam liked to read;
Hallam's CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY, and Rogers's POEMS, were there
all inscribed and dedicated. Not less interesting were the piles of
Magazines that had been sent from America. I never knew before how many
Magazines existed even those early days; we took some down at hazard and
read names, dates, and initials. . . . Storied urn and monumental bust
do not bring back the past as do the books which belong to it. Storied
urns are in churches and stone niches, far removed from the lives of
which they speak; books seem a part of our daily life, and are like the
sound of a voice just outside the door. Here they were, as they had
been read by her, stored away by her hands, and still safely preserved,
bringing back the past with, as it were, a cheerful encouraging greeting
to the present. Other relics there are of course, but, as I say, none
which touch one so vividly. There is her silver ink-stand, the little
table her father left her on which she wrote (it had belonged to his
mother before him). There is also a curious trophy--a table which was
sent to her from Edinburgh, ornamented by promiscuous views of Italy,
curiously inappropriate to her genius; but not so the inscription, which
is quoted from Sir Walter Scott's Preface to his Collected Edition, and
which may as well be quoted here: 'WITHOUT BEING SO PRESUMPTUOUS AS TO
HOPE TO EMULATE THE RICH HUMOUR, THE PATHETIC TENDERNESS, AND ADMIRABLE
TRUTH WHICH PERVADE THE WORKS OF MY ACCOMPLISHED FRIEND,' Sir Walter
wrote, I FELT THAT SOMETHING MIGHT BE ATTEMPTED FOR MY OWN COUNTRY OF
THE SAME KIND AS THAT WHICH MISS EDGEWORTH SO FORTUNATELY ACHIEVED FOR
IRELAND.'

In the MEMOIRS of Miss Edgeworth there is a pretty account of her sudden
burst of feeling when this passage so unexpected, and so deeply felt by
her, was read out by one of her sisters, at a time when Maria lay weak
and recovering from illness in Edgeworthstown.

Our host took us that day, among other pleasant things, for a marvellous
and delightful flight on a jaunting car, to see something of the
country. We sped through storms and sunshine, by open moors and fields,
and then by villages and little churches, by farms where the pigs were
standing at the doors to be fed, by pretty trim cottages. The lights
came and went; as the mist lifted we could see the exquisite colours,
the green, the dazzling sweet lights on the meadows, playing upon the
meadow-sweet and elder bushes; at last we came to the lovely glades of
Carriglass. It seemed to me that we had reached an enchanted forest amid
this green sweet tangle of ivy, of flowering summer trees, of immemorial
oaks and sycamores.

A squirrel was darting up the branches of a beautiful spreading
beech-tree, a whole army of rabbits were flashing with silver tails into
the brushwood; swallows, blackbirds, peacock-butterflies, dragonflies
on the wing, a mighty sylvan life was roaming in this lovely orderly
wilderness.

The great Irish kitchen garden, belonging to the house, with its seven
miles of wall, was also not unlike a part of a fairy tale. Its owner,
Mr. Lefroy, told me that Miss Edgeworth had been constantly there. She
was a great friend of Judge Lefroy. As a boy he remembered her driving
up to the house and running up through the great drawing-room doors to
greet the Judge.

Miss Edgeworth certainly lived in a fair surrounding, and, with Sophia
Western, must have gone along the way of life heralded by sweetest
things, by the song of birds, by the gold radiance of the buttercups, by
the varied shadows of those beautiful trees under which the cows gently
tread the grass. English does not seem exactly the language in which to
write of Ireland, with its sylvan wonders of natural beauty. Madame de
Sevigne's descriptions of her woods came to my mind. It is not a place
which delights one by its actual sensual beauty, as Italy does; it is
not as in England, where a thousand associations link one to every
scene and aspect--Ireland seems to me to contain some unique and most
impersonal charm, which is quite unwritable.

All that evening we sat talking with our hosts round the fire (for it
was cold enough for a fire), and I remembered that in Miss Edgeworth's
MEMOIRS it was described how the snow lay upon the ground and upon
the land, when the family came home in June to take possession of
Edgeworthstown.

As I put out my candle in the spacious guest-chamber I wondered which of
its past inhabitants I should wish to see standing in the middle of the
room. I must confess that the thought of the beautiful Honora filled
me with alarm, and if Miss Seward had walked in in her pearls and satin
robe I should have fled for my life. As I lay there experimentalising
upon my own emotions I found that after all, natural simple people do
not frighten one whether dead or alive. The thought of them is ever
welcome; it is the artificial people who are sometimes one thing,
sometimes another, and who form themselves on the weaknesses and fancies
of those among whom they live, who are really terrifying.

The shadow of the bird's wing flitted across the window of my bedroom,
and the sun was shining next morning when I awoke. I could see the cows,
foot deep in the grass under the hawthorns. After breakfast we went out
into the grounds and through an arched doorway into the kitchen garden.
It might have been some corner of Italy or the South of France; the
square tower of the granary rose high against the blue, the gray walls
were hung with messy fruit trees, pigeons were darting and flapping
their wings, gardeners were at work, the very vegetables were growing
luxuriant and romantic and edged by thick borders of violet pansy;
crossing the courtyard, we came into the village street, also orderly
and white-washed. The soft limpid air made all things into pictures,
into Turners, into Titians. A Murillo-like boy, with dark eyes, was
leaning against a wall, with his shadow, watching us go by; strange
old women, with draperies round their heads, were coming out of their
houses. We passed the Post-Office, the village shops, with their names,
the Monaghans and Gerahtys, such as we find again in Miss Edgeworth's
novels. We heard the local politics discussed over the counter with a
certain aptness and directness which struck me very much. We passed the
boarding-house, which was not without its history--a long low building
erected by Mr. and Miss Edgeworth for a school, where the Sandfords
and Mertons of those days were to be brought up together: a sort of
foreshadowing of the High Schools of the present. Mr. Edgeworth was,
as we know, the very spirit of progress, though his experiment did not
answer at the time. At the end of the village street, where two roads
divide, we noticed a gap in the decent roadway--a pile of ruins in a
garden. A tumble-down cottage, and beyond the cottage, a falling shed,
on the thatched roof of which a hen was clucking and scraping. These
cottages Mr. Edgeworth had, after long difficulty, bought up and
condemned as unfit for human habitation. The plans had been considered,
the orders given to build new cottages in their place, which were to
be let to the old tenants at the old rent, but the last remaining
inhabitant absolutely refused to leave; we saw an old woman in a hood
slowly crossing the road, and carrying a pail for water; no threats or
inducements would move her, not even the sight of a neat little house,
white-washed and painted, and all ready for her to step into. Her
present rent was 10d. a week, Mr. Edgeworth told me, and she had been
letting the tumble-down shed to a large family for 1s. 4d. This sub-let
was forcibly put an end to, but the landlady still stops there, and
there she will stay until the roof tumbles down upon her head. The old
creature passed on through the sunshine, a decrepit, picturesque figure
carrying her pail to the stream, defying all the laws of progress and
political economy and civilisation in her feebleness and determination.

Most of the women came to their doors to see us go by. They all looked
as old as the hills--some dropt curtseys, others threw up their arms in
benediction. From a cottage farther up the road issued a strange, shy
old creature, looking like a bundle of hay, walking on bare legs. She
came up with a pinch of snuff, and a shake of the hand; she was of the
family of the man who had once saved Edgeworthstown from being destroyed
by the rebels. 'Sure it was not her father,' said old Peggy,' it was her
grandfather did it!' So she explained, but it was hard to believe that
such an old, old creature had ever had a grandfather in the memory of
man.

The glebe lands lie beyond the village. They reach as far as the church
on its high plateau, from which you can see the Wicklow Hills on a fine
day, and the lovely shifting of the lights of the landscape. The remains
of the great pew of the Edgeworth family, with its carved canopy of
wood, is still a feature in the bare church from which so much has been
swept away. The names of the fathers are written on the chancel walls,
and a few medallions of daughters and sisters also. In the churchyard,
among green elder bushes and tall upspringing grasses, is the square
monument erected to Mr. Edgeworth and his family; and as we stood there
the quiet place was crossed and recrossed by swallows with their beating
crescent wings.


III

Whatever one may think of Mr. Edgeworth's literary manipulations and of
his influence upon his daughter's writings, one cannot but respect the
sincere and cordial understanding which bound these two people together,
and realise the added interest in life, in its machinery and evolutions,
which Maria owed to her father's active intelligence. Her own gift, I
think, must have been one for perceiving through the minds of others,
and for realising the value of what they in turn reflected; one is
struck again and again by the odd mixture of intuition, and of absolute
matter of fact which one finds in her writings.

It is difficult to realise, when one reads the memoirs of human beings
who loved and hated, and laughed and scolded, and wanted things and did
without them, very much as we do ourselves, that though they thought as
we do and felt as we do (only, as I have said, with greater vehemence),
they didn't LOOK like us at all; and Mr. Edgeworth, the father of
Maria Edgeworth, the 'gay gallant,' the impetuous, ingenious, energetic
gentleman, sat writing with powdered hair and a queue, with tights and
buckles, bolt upright in a stiff chair, while his family, also bequeued
and becurled and bekerchiefed, were gathered round him in a group,
composedly attentive to his explanations, as he points to the roll
upon the table, or reads from his many MSS. and notebooks, for their
edification.

To have four wives and twenty-two children, to have invented so many
machines, engines, and curricles, steeples and telegraph posts, is more
than commonly falls to the lot of one ordinary man, but such we know was
Mr. Edgeworth's history told by his own lips.

I received by chance an old newspaper the other day, dated the 23rd July
1779. It is called the LONDON PACKET, and its news, told with long s's
and pretty curly italics, thrills one even now as one looks over the
four short pages. The leading article is entitled 'Striking Instance
of the PERFIDY of France.' It is true the grievance goes back to Louis
XIV., but the leader is written with plenty of spirit and present
indignation. Then comes news from America and the lists of New
Councillors elected:

'Artemus Ward, Francis Dana, Oliver Prescott, Samuel Baker, while a very
suitable sermon on the occasion is preached by the Rev. Mr. Stillman
of Boston.' How familiar the names all sound! Then the thanks of the
Members of Congress are given to 'General Lee, Colonel Moultrie, and the
officers and soldiers under their command who on the 28th of June last
Repulsed with so much Valour the attack that was made that day on the
State of South Carolina by the fleet and army of his Britannic Majesty.'

There is an irresistible spirit of old-world pigtail decorum and dash
about it all. We read of our 'grand fleet' waiting at Corunna for the
Spanish; of 80,000 men on the coast of Brittany supposed to be ready for
an invasion of England; of the Prince of Conde playing at cards, with
Northumberland House itself for stakes (Northumberland House which he is
INTENDING to take). We read the list of Lottery Prizes, of the L1000 and
L500 tickets; of the pressing want of seamen for His Majesty's Navy,
and how the gentlemen of Ireland are subscribers to a bounty fund. Then
comes the narrative of James Caton of Bristol, who writes to complain
that while transacting his business on the Bristol Exchange he is
violently seized by a pressgang, with oaths and imprecations. Mr. Farr,
attempting to speak to him, is told by the Lieutenant that if he does
not keep off he will be shot with a pistol. Mr. Caton is violently
carried off, locked up in a horrible stinking room, prevented from
seeing his friends; after a day or two he is forced on board a tender,
where Mr. Tripp, a midshipman, behaves with humanity, but the Captain
and Lieutenant outvie each other in brutality; Captain Hamilton behaving
as an 'enraged partisan.' Poor Mr. Caton is released at last by the
exertions of Mr. Edmund Burke, of Mr. Farr, and another devoted friend,
who travel post-haste to London to obtain a Habeas Corpus, so that he
is able to write indignantly and safe from his own home to the LONDON
PACKET to describe his providential escape. The little sheet gives one
a vivid impression of that daily life in 1779, when Miss Edgeworth
must have been a little girl of twelve years old, at school at Mrs.
Lataffiere's, and learning to write in her beautiful handwriting. It
was a time of great events. The world is fighting, armies marching and
counter-marching, and countries rapidly changing hands. Miss Seward is
inditing her elegant descriptions for the use of her admiring circle.
But already the circle is dwindling! Mr. Day has parted from Sabrina.
The well-known episodes of Lichfield gaieties and love-makings are over.
Poor Major Andre has been exiled from England and rejected by Honora.
The beautiful Honora, whose "blending charms of mind and person"
are celebrated by one adoring lover after another, has married Mr.
Edgeworth. She has known happiness, and the devoted affection of an
adoring husband, and the admiring love of her little step-daughter, all
this had been hers; and now all this is coming to an end, and the poor
lady lying on her death-bed imploring her husband to marry her sister
Elizabeth. Accordingly Mr. Edgeworth married Elizabeth Sneyd in 1780,
which was also the year of poor Andre's death.

There is a little oval picture at the National Gallery in Dublin, the
photograph of a sketch at Edgeworthstown House, which gives one a very
good impression of the family as it must have appeared in the reigns of
King George and the third Mrs. Edgeworth. The father in his powder and
frills sits at the table with intelligent, well-informed finger showing
some place upon a map. He is an agreeable-looking youngish man; Mrs.
Edgeworth, his third wife, is looking over his shoulder; she has marked
features, beautiful eyes, she holds a child upon her knee, and one can
see the likeness in her to her step-daughter Honora, who stands just
behind her and leans against the chair. A large globe appropriately
stands in the background. The grown-up ladies alternate with small
children. Miss Edgeworth herself, sitting opposite to her father, is
the most prominent figure in the group. She wears a broad leghorn hat,
a frizzed coiffure, and folded kerchief; she has a sprightly, somewhat
French appearance, with a marked nose of the RETROUSSE order. I had
so often heard that she was plain that to see this fashionable and
agreeable figure was a pleasant surprise.

Miss Edgeworth seems to be about four-and-twenty in the sketch; she
was born in 1767; she must have been eleven in 1778, when Mr. Edgeworth
finally came over to Ireland to settle on his own estate, and among
his own people. He had been obliged some years before to leave
Edgeworthstown on account of Mrs. Honora Edgeworth's health; he now
returned in patriarchal fashion with Mrs. Elizabeth Edgeworth, his third
wife, with his children by his first, second, and third marriages,
and with two sisters-in-law who had made their home in his family. For
thirty-five years he continued to live on in the pretty old home which
he now adapted to his large family, and which, notwithstanding Miss
Edgeworth's objections, would have seemed so well fitted for its various
requirements. The daughter's description of his life there, of his
work among his tenants, of his paternal and spirited rule, is vivid and
interesting. When the present owner of Edgeworthstown talked to us of
his grandfather, one felt that, with all his eccentricities, he must
have been a man of a far-seeing mind and observation. Mr. Erroles
Edgeworth said that he was himself still reaping the benefit of his
grandfather's admirable organisation and arrangements on the estate,
and that when people all around met with endless difficulties and
complications, he had scarcely known any. Would that there had been more
Mr. Edgeworths in Ireland!